re: #260 Dark_Falcon

I know its silly to ask this after what I just said, but what is your source for that factoid? Not trying to be hostile, but I hadn’t heard that before.

It makes perfect sense if you think about it for a moment; cops are just people, too.

The information comes from research done by David Packman and published as Arguing the Case for Police Accountability. His old site appears to be down, so I can’t give web citation right now. The numbers he compiled simply by doing a sampling of violent crimes (gathered from the federal database) and examining their employment. What he found is that police commit violent crime at about the same rate that ordinary citizens do—and importantly, this rate is very, very low. We live in a very non-violent society, in general, and we’re at a trough in violence of all kinds.

Domestic battery makes up a larger than normal proportion of the violent arrests, which correlates with cops having more unstable marriages than the general population.