The reality is that cops use the danger hype to justify brutalizing people. The job of cop needs to be couched more along the lines of that of Firefighters. Public servants who take a risk in service to others. The unrealistic inflation of the risks involved in all probability makes the job attractive to people who shouldn't be cops because they are mentally unfit to do so.
[WS:] That is true of virtually any occupation - exaggerate the risk to justify the rewards. It does not strike me as anything unusual. In the same way, lefties tend to hype the hardships suffered by criminals to exonerate them or even justify them brutalizing people. Yet, you do not seem to be concerned over that blatant hyperbole.
As a point of clarification, I am far from defending the hyping up of the occupational risk of police work that you seem to be hinting. I was merely responding to a post frivolously and inaccurately dismissing occupational risk of law enforcement workers in an apparent attempt to exonerate behavior of a prison inmate. I think we should keep things in the proper perspective - far more people were brutalized by criminals than by the police. Therefore, such rhetoric strikes me as cheap flippancy aiming to impress fellow hoodlums rather than a bona fide argument in a rational discussion. Using the same logic one can also justify police brutality by claiming that those who resist arrest or defy law enforcement officers take a known and predictable risk and should not complain when they are brutalized.
Wojtek