As someone who on occasion has taught criminal justice classes, one of the more difficult problems you deal with teaching is the misconceptions about police work. Everyone knows all police work. They think. After all it’s on television, dozens of movies. You could even add in a few mystery novels.

Police work is the most dangerous work you can do. There are shoot outs and constant danger.

No, there aren’t. Half of all sworn officers never pull their gun on the job for any reason whatever.

The numbers are straightforward.

Read below.

James Pilant

From MSNBC –

Miners and police officers face many dangers. In 2009, the most recent year for which we have statistics, 101 miners and 97 police officers and security guards died on the job, making for a roughly similar fatality rate of around 13 deaths per 100,000 workers.

From further down in the article.

Still, it does matter what career path you choose. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) database, the 10 most dangerous industries to work in are anywhere from six to 60 times as dangerous as the average workplace.

First on the list is fishing, as anyone who’s seen Deadliest Catch on Discovery might guess. In the last year on record, 56 fishermen died, a colossal fatality rate of 200 per 100,000 workers, or 0.2 percent. Loggers and pilots are the only other jobs that come close to being that dangerous, each with 0.006 percent annual death rates. Construction (800 deaths) and transportation and warehousing (586 deaths) registered the largest number of deaths per sector, though their occupational fatality rates hovered around 0.002 percent.