Justin Fox, Columnist

How Dangerous Is Police Work?

Misleading statistics have been used to distort the real perils of walking a beat.

June 23, 2020 at 3:30 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

It takes thick skin.
Photographer: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

It was a remarkable statistic that I first saw in a tweet by conservative YouTuber Steven Crowder, tracked to an article in Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire and then found the original version of in a 2016 essay by the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald:

Like a lot of people I have become more familiar with police-violence statistics in recent weeks than I ever really wanted to be, so I knew it was extremely unlikely that 18.5 times more police officers were killed by Black men than unarmed Black men were killed by police. In recent years about 50 U.S. law enforcement officers have been “feloniously killed” annually, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, while police and sheriff’s deputies have killed about 1,000 people a year, according to various sources.