The state game commission is notified and the ball is on their court. When I had a doe with a broken back in my parking lot at work, I called the police. The state police responded (no local police) and the officer who responded explained he was not permitted to discharge his firearm in this type of situation. He told me to call the game commission.
The game commission told me they could have someone come out in a couple days. I drove home, came back with a gin, and killed it.
Something doesn’t seem right with this. Why would a peace officer not be allowed to destroy a suffering animal?
Apparently it’s a known problem in the law.
Cite.
ETA: and I guess I broke the law by shooting it. The police in general are permitted, the state police are not allowed as a part of their policy.
So it’s a policy issue, not the law.
From your cite:
e first thing that one should always do is call the regional Office of the Game Commission for the part of the state in which you are currently. The problem is that Pennsylvania is an extremely large state, and the number of Wildlife Conservation Officers who can be dispatched are limited both by numbers and geography. **A second option (if a Wildlife Conservation Officer cannot be sent out soon or at all) is to contact the local Police Department or State Police. They are legally allowed to dispatch the animal, but they may choose to defer to the Game Commission and decline to take action.
The general public is ignorant about how LEO’s are bound by their SOP as much as they are by the law.
Yes, I think when there’s a wildlife problem - injured deer, bear in a tree or (as happened once in Ottawa) moose in a swimming pool, call the government game and wildlife people. They have the necessary tools to handle this. If it’s dead, call the Highways department for cleanup.
Yes a typo. Oops.
I’m thinking it was not Pew’s intent. Evidence:
So the thesis of the article is that shootings are rare, far less common than popularly believed.
Before examining these and other results in more detail, two important cautions must be raised. First, the fact that an officer has fired their service weapon while on duty should not be interpreted to mean that the officer shot someone. (The question asked: “Other than on a gun range or while training, have you ever discharged your service firearm while on duty, or have you not done this?”) Nor were officers asked how many times they have fired their service weapon in their careers or whether they currently work for the same agency where they fired their service weapons. The study is a snapshot of officers who are employed currently, and it describes their past experiences.
That’s not a footnote. That’s part of the article itself. They were trying to be careful. The paragraph after that disavowed causality (appropriately).
I am not a police officer, criminologist, or gun owner. Based solely on the discussion so far, I tend to agree with pkbites that Pew and the National Police Research Platform screwed up. I don’t think that Pew had an axe to grind however, since the thrust of their piece presented the view that police firing their weapons is rare.
There was no discussion of animal control in the article. Another flub. The article reads like a solid piece of data analysis by a team who lacked area experience. But again, the PI of the survey was a criminologist from the University of Illinois. Yikes.
ETA: I’m wondering about the question wording in the quote, notwithstanding my take upthread. Could “Discharge your service arm while on duty”, been misunderstood during this internet survey? Might some of the cops included time on the gun range? Real question: I’m not sure. It’s improbable, but we have a smell check problem.
Is it a math thing?
I am not good at math so I may be very wrong here (and I am sure others will let me know).
Let’s say there is a 0.1% chance a given police officer will fire their weapon in a given month. Some may be more, some may be less, this is on average. That means 99.9% a given cop does not shoot their gun in a given month.
Now, extend that to a career of 25 years (300 months).
1 - (0.999)^300 = 0.259 = 26%
I made-up the 99.9% don’t shoot in a given month (I have no idea). Just showing some math that gets us in the ballpark that there is a 27% chance (from Pew) a cop will fire their gun once in a 25 year career. A rare occurrence can become not so rare over time.
Again…I admit I just made the 99.9%/month number up as well as a 25 year career average…and I may have my math wrong on the probability. For illustration/discussion purposes only.
I would guess a caveat to this is one cop being trigger happy…pulling the trigger is not evenly spread out among all police which can skew the result of how many police shoot their gun in a career. The Pew research showed some are more likely than others to shoot.
Averages need to be looked at closely.
Is there anyone who might see the study who would think that 27% fired their weapon during their career is rare? That’s not rare. At times my department got to almost 100 cops. It 25 of them had used their weapon it certainly wouldn’t feel rare.
The only meaningful circumstance would be “at a person.” That’s what people want to know. That’s what people just reading the headline and skimming would assume it means.
I think it was Slashdot that had a post on how frequently cops shoot dogs, whether threatening or not. Unlike killing people, there’s not a lot of blowback beyond the owner. In fact there’s the case of the cop who aimed at the little dog coming towards him, a “small Pomeranian mix”, hit the woman on the porch instead.
Right up there with the Rochester cop who shot the guy in the back point blank 7 times and still didn’t kill him. (just paralyzed for life).
Perhaps some departments need to emphasize target practice.
25% per year wouldn’t be rare. 2% per year might be considered rare, or at least uncommon. Before I came to this thread, I knew that, “Some cops get through their entire career without ever firing their weapon. Even in NYC.” For me 5% isn’t too far from 25% over the course of a career and both were lower than I thought, to the extent that I thought about the issue at all (not much).
Math aside: This is a survey of existing officers. So if careers last 30 years, we should divide 26% by 15 (or less) rather than 30 to get the per year weight. Similarly, the Pew data implies that the 30 year career average is something closer to 50% - the 26% figure has to be inflated. Smell check fail.
The article emphasized that halfway through. But I think your comment is fair. As the authors of the piece may have implied, the survey designers at the National Police Research Platform, should have either asked about this issue in greater depth, or perhaps Pew should have only used the variable (gingerly) as a scientific control. Without better reweighting, I can’t trust any of the data-based conclusions in their article.
So, let’s do the math (I got the equation here):
Let’s assume a 30 year career and a shooting rate of 0.1% per month (a good bit less than your 2%/year). So, 1 in 1000 officers shoot their weapon in the course of duty (not target practice) once per month. Seems reasonable to me…even a bit low at a guess.
1 - (0.999)^360 = 0.302 = 30%
We’re still in that 27% ballpark and not working too hard to get there.
I need to back-peddle a little. The advisory board of the National Police Research Platform is staffed by Police Chiefs: I don’t see any members from Pew. Survey design involves tradeoffs and interpretation is the responsibility of the data analyst, which is Pew in this case.
Pew took a pre-existing dataset and wrote a couple of papers about it. One of them is dubious for reasons discussed. They should have had them reviewed more carefully by someone with area expertise, or such is my tentative conclusion. I might have greater faith in their work if any of the 5 Pew authors I came across had any background in criminology or law enforcement. That said, if the dataset suffers from pronounced self-selection bias, it will be difficult to analyze properly.
Whack-a-Mole: Ok, but I suspect a cop would have a sense of how many of their peers discharged their weapon while on duty over the past 15 years. Or at least whether the number is something like 5% or 25%. Me, not so much: I picked 2%/yr because I thought it roughly consistent with the Pew study, not because it was a best estimate.
You chose 2%. I chose a much more conservative number (smaller…40% smaller) and still got similar results to Pew.
There are over 660,000 police in the US. How well does a given cop know all their 660,000 peers?
You don’t need to know any of them personally to know that 170,000 of them didn’t fire their weapon at anyone.
There is the mistake.
It is not a snapshot of one moment in time.
This is a count of numbers over 30 years.
There may be 660,000+ police today but how many are there over 30 years? I have NO idea how to do that math but I am willing to bet we are over a million and probably more as police come and go in the job.
This data says roughly 1000 people per year are shot to death by police. That’s 0.15% of 660,000 police. Over 30 years, that is 4.5%.
Ran out of edit time.
That is just deaths. Most shootings do not result in death (look at any war statistic on this…waaay more wounded than dead). It seems to be about a 1:4 ratio in war. I’d like to think there are less dead to wounded when it comes to police. But now we are at 4x the 4.5 number…18%
And pulling a trigger may not even result in a wounding (they can miss…very likely they miss a lot more than they hit).
Over and over the numbers kinda point to that 27%.
The study and the language, like the paragraph is not too bad. Just the conclusion that 27% of police fired their gun in some sort of gun fight or something.
Exactly.
The way I heard the question stated was how many police officers fired their gun in anger during their careers. But at another human is even better.
Nothing against police, but from way back in college PolSci courses, I remember them discussing the “police locker room effect” to describe how people acquire false/unreliable memories/perceptions. The idea was if on cop gets shot at, it gets talked about in the locker room (and elsewhere) with the result that more than just that cop develop a sense of being in danger and even false memories of having been shot.
Police and shootings were just examples for a phenomena that purportedly occurs in any group. But it is possible this sort of thing might have contributed to skew the survey results.