Yes, the figures can show you that the observed death rate is low. But that doesn't 100% capture the intuition of what it means for a job to be safe.
Remember, a big reason it's so safe (in this sense) is that officers go through a lot of training that protects them from the occasional nutjob. If they slip up on those protocols, they can easily become another officer killed in the line of duty.
You'll notice that, by the same token, firebreathers and sword jugglers and trapeze artists don't make the top ten either. Does that mean they're safe jobs?
In a sense, yes, like policing.
But in another sense, no. It means the only people who do them are people who are super deft about doing them safely and can religiously follow the safety protocols. And the job can quickly become unsafe if the average person, like you and me, tried to do them and slipped up in following those protocols.
Either way, it absolutely doesn't follow that if they just "trained the cops not to prepare for any encounter being a nutjob with a gun", that the job would (directly from that) become safer.
I didn't intend to imply that officers shouldn't go through lots of training to protect themselves from people who are trying to harm and/or kill them.
What I was stating was that officers should go through more safety training to reduce the number of accidental deaths.
Yes, the figures can show you that the observed death rate is low. But that doesn't 100% capture the intuition of what it means for a job to be safe.
Remember, a big reason it's so safe (in this sense) is that officers go through a lot of training that protects them from the occasional nutjob. If they slip up on those protocols, they can easily become another officer killed in the line of duty.
You'll notice that, by the same token, firebreathers and sword jugglers and trapeze artists don't make the top ten either. Does that mean they're safe jobs?
In a sense, yes, like policing.
But in another sense, no. It means the only people who do them are people who are super deft about doing them safely and can religiously follow the safety protocols. And the job can quickly become unsafe if the average person, like you and me, tried to do them and slipped up in following those protocols.
Either way, it absolutely doesn't follow that if they just "trained the cops not to prepare for any encounter being a nutjob with a gun", that the job would (directly from that) become safer.