This is long, these are my feelings – probably shared by 99+% of law enforcement, but I felt it had to be said as more and more people are ganging up on the Police, just want to place things in perspective:

Shortly after I made a person my designated Marine Deputy I heard some grumblings from sergeants that he wasn’t on the Deschutes River.  We had a Jet boat (a flatter than normal boat with a water propelled system rather than a propeller) specifically designed for rivers like the Deschutes.

This river has type 1-4 rapids, it can be dangerous.  In addition to other jet boaters, there are changing water patterns, hidden rocks, on shore anglers and coming down river, rafters – it is one of the heavier rafting rivers in Oregon due to its easy access.

I asked the deputy why he wasn’t on the river and he said he was making arrangements with a guide to help him learn the river and how to read it.  Made sense to me, and I supported him.  Safety was our primary concern and we didn’t need our boat causing unnecessary hazards out there.

Back in the 80’s very few people had video cameras, but they were out there.  In my mind I could just picture a person videotaping their friends coming down the river and our Marine Boat with highly visible markings coming up over the top of the rapids and down on the raft – it made sense to make sure we were being as safe as possible and gave him more time in training; safety first, but also better public relations.

Today almost everyone has a video camera – built into their cell phones – and they use it all the time for taking photos and taping things that interest them; to the point that now when they see someone injured or in danger instead of helping them, they video the situation.  AND they rarely get it all, since they didn’t start at the very beginning, just when they realize something is happening, the tapes are often not a clear ‘picture’ of what happened.

This, of course, is becoming a nightmare for Police Officers, who are being taped all the time and comments and decisions of others are made based on the short taping and not the totality of the contact.

I am not saying that in every incident the Police Officer is being portrayed as a villain nor in every case he acted correctly, but there is always more than what the camera showed, and even if an incident a day that is taped shows Police Officers acting inappropriately it is a disproportionate number and doesn’t reflect the professionalism of hundreds of thousands of officers within the USA.

Watching, yet, another partial video of an officer supposedly doing something wrong, I got to thinking.

How many sworn officers are there in the USA?  I don’t know.  I read estimates of just over 600,000 to over 900,000 sworn officers – full-time officers with the authority to make arrests.

But how accurate is that?  For the purposes I am writing it doesn’t matter just how accurate it is, many factors enter into national statistics that create a problem for exact numbers.

Shortly after I was Sheriff I hired a clerk.  The Civil Service Director listed her as a sworn deputy with full-police powers.  Not only was that inaccurate it was actually illegal since she received benefits that only fire and police were able to receive at the time. 

It wasn’t intentional, it was just a misunderstanding by the Director, she said her department had always thought that all Sheriff’s Office personnel were law enforcement; it was a system she inherited and didn’t have reason to question. 

It is not a big deal, but it costs the county extra in retirement benefits, it can cause problems for the county AND it skews the number of sworn personnel.  I had 7 clerks that were, statistically speaking, sworn deputies.  We corrected that mistake, but how many other departments have made similar errors in listing personnel?

At the time, 30 years ago, we didn’t separate Corrections from Road in the number of deputies.  Corrections officers didn’t have contact with offenders outside the jail, they didn’t make arrests; they processed and controlled the prisoners once they were arrested.  This isn’t to demean their position, they are professionals and do their job well, however, they are not making citizen contacts out in the field; it is just showing the difference.

We were but one agency among thousands, were others making (or currently still making) the same errors in designations?

Again, it just shows that it is difficult to actually get a truly accurate number of Sworn Law Enforcement personnel.

I believe the estimate of 600,000 sworn is too low and that 900,000 is probably closer to the actual number of sworn police officers in the USA – city, county and state. 

That number would not include the FBI, DEA or other Federal enforcement agencies.  Nor does it include the Corrections Officers, Parole and Probation Officers or the code enforcement personnel attached to other agencies who have only limited authority.

I cannot back up any of these statistics, but I believe they are reasonable assumptions and from what I have been able to read on the numbers, probably just as accurate.

So I have arbitrarily chosen 900,000 as the number of sworn personnel in law enforcement.  These are full-time members of a public funded police agency with the powers of arrest.

If we say that for every fifteen of those numbers (which depends on the size and structure of an agency – and I am probably too low on numbers, but it is my assumptions) is an Administrative person, a Sheriff, Chief or high level rank such as UnderSheriff, Colonel, Captain or Lieutenant, we take them out of the numbers on the road.  They rarely have contact on the street with suspects.

So Administrative personnel will be counted at 60,000.

Most departments have detectives, let us say that for every ten of the 840,000 sworn officers left on the list, one is a detective.  Detectives rarely have contact with suspects on the street.

So Detective Personnel will be counted at 84,000.

That leaves us 756,000 sworn officers not in the above categories.

There are many other specialties and it is difficult to separate them from the road positions as they are sworn officers in special assignments and are accounted for differently by different departments.

Some of those would be in-house trainers in academies, undercover work, specially trained units, etc., all of which do not have the same kind of contacts street officers have.  We will arbitrarily say that 1 in 20 of the remaining sworn officers come under some kind of specialty where they are not on the street.

That number would make their number 37,800 leaving approximately 718,200 street officers, including Sergeants.

I have not seen very many departments that are always 100% staffed, someone is always leaving and it takes time to fill the position – a lot of time.  Between testings and background checks it could be several months.

We will say that roughly 5% of the available street officer positions are not staffed, that would be 35,910. 

That leaves approximately 682,290 on the road Police officers working the streets in the USA.  These would be the officers most likely to be videotaped.

We could work this down further, officers have days off, vacation, sick leave, etc. but we will work with these numbers.

What are the street contacts of these officers?  That of course will vary greatly with the type of department, where they are assigned and more importantly with the shifts they work, Day and Swing shifts are going to have a lot more contacts than Graveyard officers where most people are in bed sleeping. 

Then, of course not all contacts are enforcement in nature and that can be difficult to ascertain. 

For the purposes of my assumption I am going to say that over the course of the country on the average an officer has 10 contacts with citizens during his shift (that doesn’t mean 10 citizens as often times there are multiple citizens with the contact) and we will say half of those are enforcement in nature.

682,290 officers 10 contacts per day; 6,822,900 contacts a day half, or 3,411,450, of which are enforcement related.  Enforcement related can range from a traffic stop (not necessarily a ticket) to domestic violence, neighbor disagreements to murder and everything in between.  There are many such contacts where arrest or enforcement action is not taken.

Also, as an aside, it must be understood that ANY one of those contacts, law enforcement related or not, can turn into a deadly conflict for the officer – and many officers have been killed in the most innocuous of contacts where no danger was perceived.

365 days a year:  1,245,179,250 (One BILLION, 245 million, 179 thousand, two hundred fifty enforcement related contacts a year.)

These, over one and a quarter BILLION, contacts a year by road officers are highly visible.  Even in the wee dark hours the chances of an encounter with a police officer being seen by other people is high. Of course not all are videotaped and not all are actually seen, but it gives a clearer picture and places things in a more realistic proportion than what is being portrayed by the media.

Of those contacts that are taped seldom is the entire contact taped and doesn’t give a clear picture from beginning to end as to what happened. 

But for the sake of argument, let us say that 10 videos a day (right now I would estimate it is between one and three IF that many) are taken that rightly show that an officer has violated his sworn duties in one way or another.  I might point out that we don’t see anywhere near that number – at least on the different social media and commercial media outlets.  But we will say 10 a day.

That is 3,650 videos a year that, for the sake of argument, might be legitimate. 

Is every violation by an officer videoed, no, of course not.  But the fact remains that with more and more cameras out there we are not seeing the numbers, of videos depicting police officer abuse, that society is trying to use against all officers, claiming they (in totality) are abusive and breaking the law.

In my scenario of over the 1.25 BILLION contacts, of an ENFORCEMENT NATURE by Police throughout the USA in a given year, only 3,650 are taped showing an officer who may be in the wrong.

Neither I nor my calculator can compute that small of a percentage of abusive acts.

I was once told that for every letter a congressman receive they feel there is a certain number of people who have the same feelings but do not write.  I have heard the number is as high as 100 per letter.  So, knowing that not all abuses are recorded what if we used that same thought process in this scenario:

That would mean that while 3,650 abusive acts are taped that there are another 365,000 not filmed or recorded – a year.

Let’s try to put that into percentages; my computer can – it is: 0.0002931305%.

Those are my numbers with my assumptions, but you can do your own and they won’t differ all that much.

Compare that with the number of contacts with citizens in other professions, (including medical personnel) I would venture to say that the percentage of those failing in their duties to the citizen in one way or another will be higher than most of us realize and actually we may be in more danger from that failure to due diligence or abuse.

I am not excusing abuse by a Police Officer.  When it comes to any abuse by a person who has the authority and power to take away freedom and kill another person one abuse is too many.  However, to paint an entire profession by the actions of a very few is abhorrent – and undermines the well-being of every citizen in our country as well as putting officers in extreme danger. 

No one is perfect, there are, unfortunately abusive officers, and even the best officer may have a bad day.  Most departments weed out the bad officers as quickly as possible.  But the number of times, period, not to mention the percentage, of abuse of authority by Police in America is far less that what is being graphically depicted today.

FAR LESS!

From the ColumbiaRiverGorgeous
May Our Good Lord Bless and Keep YOU....’til we meet again