Awhile ago, I was talking about BLM with a friend online. He insisted that I should shut up until I’d done what he’d done and spent a day riding along with a cop on patrol, so I could see what their job was like.
So that got me wondering about some statistics:
What percentage of police in the US ever fire their gun at a person while on duty?
What’s the average career length of an officer in the US?
If you do some division of these, what are the chances on a single day of ride-along that you’d see a gun fired by a police officer?
I do not believe there is reliable national data on police firearm discharge.
Like most things police, many retrograde departments do not like keeping stats.
But the number is almost certainly very low, given the observed rate of police killings. Even if the rate of firing is two factors of ten bigger, on a per ride-along basis it is still very low (though obviously also varies a lot depending on where you are). Plus, they don’t usually send you with the units most likely to see serious trouble.
Though it was a patrol with an unarmed officer in the Cayman Islands (which uses British style policing) one point of emphasis was that while I was with this officer her would not be dispatched to high risk calls. Period.
I was advised that the officer would pull to the side of the road and drop me off if push came to shove. But there was at least some chance that we would happen upon an event in progress with no safe place to ditch me so the chance was not zero that we could have ended up in a serious event. To that point, in the years prior to my ride along, another 9-1-1 dispatcher on a ride along ended up being on scene of a homicide.
So if other departments use a similar philosophy of not taking a ride along on a higher risk call then someone on a ride along might have a lower chance than average of being in the middle of a shooting or other high risk event.
Is a “ride-along” a thing you can actually do, for an ordinary everyday mook with no particular police connections?
Seems like it would be nothing but an annoyance for the police involved, and the sort of thing which would only happen if you had police as personal friends.
I would imagine they don’t offer many civilian ride-alongs, either.
Ages ago, when Adam-12 was on the air, an LAPD sergeant was asked in an article how authentic the program was. He answered it was pretty authentic, except for packing about eight years’ worth of incidents into an eight-hour shift. I would doubt any particular ride-along is likely to involve any shootings.
What got me interested in a career in law enforcement way back when was doing ride-alongs with the Austin PD. I made friends with several of the officers by doing so. I became a co-pilot for a couple of them, handling the radio, writing dispatch notes, etc. and being trusted enough that they would unlock the shotgun mount at the beginning of the shift so I could get to it if I needed to.
I probably had a couple of hundred rides all told. No shootings, but I did get called to testify in court several times about things I had seen.
Statistics being what they are most officers go their entire careers without firing their guns or being fired at, but then something like this happens:
Which if it happened in a movie would have the audience rolling their eyes.
So the vast majority of times you could go on a ride-along without incident, but it may be the rare time something happens.
btw as someone from Northern Ireland the thought of members of the public doing ride-alongs with police officers is just incomprehensible, I’m not sure there is a lawyer in the world that could write that waiver.
My brother got bitten by an unruly dog while on a ride-along. Didn’t break the skin, but it shows that there are a lot of possible hazards smaller in scope than a gun battle to consider. Just your luck you’d get the amped-up escape artist who wiggles out of cuffs and takes off in the cruiser with you in it.
Tragic,. Though a movie would have the officer on their last day of work before retirement be killed. It’s not a totally safe job, though apparently it’s only slightly more dangerousthan being an athlete…
I think the way to determine those odds is better derived from number of dispatches (riding or walking) divided by number of firearm discharges.
On that basis, let’s look at New York City, since they publish stats for both (tables on pages 14 & 15). In 2014 there were 34, 857 uniformed officers who took 4.8MM radio assignments resulting in 79 firearms discharges (for all reasons), meaning for any given radio assignment there is a 1 in 60,759 chance (.00165%) of a police weapon being discharged.
Breaking it down further, every day averaged 13,150 radio assignments (4.8MM/365). Now, making an assumption based on every officer getting 2 days off per week and that some are also out sick or on PTO on any given day, only about 2/3rds of the force are on duty any given day, or 22,657 officers. Further assuming that they each work with a partner, that leaves 11,329 officer teams on any given day. Each team, then, would average about 1.2 radio assignments per day.
Ergo, your (rough) odds of seeing a police weapon discharged on any given ride along day is 1.2 in 60,759, or .00198%.
My ride-along was the final activity of a Citizen’s Police Academy that my city’s police dept hold’s twice a year. It also included an evening at the station’s shooting range. The office I rode along with said that if we received a high risk call or did a traffic stop, I was to stay in the patrol car. For regular calls, I was welcome to get out with him. The evening was mostly traffic stops and general complaints, with one suspected burglary in progress call and one prisoner transport.
The plot of about 10 different cop and spy movies and tv shows. Naturally, once that officer gets into a shootout with 10 drug dealers armed with automatic weapons, you’re all ready to take the wheel and rescue him with some stunt driving, right?
