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Despite what you may have heard, cops have a relatively safe job. Cops are injured and killed with less frequency than roofers, truckers, fishermen, and pizza-delivery people. Cops are basically armed bureaucrats and their primary role is to file reports about crimes, not intervene in dangerous situations.
Now, you may have heard that cop deaths are way, way, *way* up over the past two years.
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That is actually true - cops have been slain in unprecedented numbers since the pandemic began. Nearly all those deaths are the result of catching covid. Naturally, police unions (which are not actually unions) are fighting tooth-and-nail against vaccine and mask requirements for cops.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/us/police-covid-vaccines.html
(You've heard of "suicide by cop?" This is "suicide by cop union.")
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The rhetoric about the dangerous life of a cop doesn't merely serve to make cops feel romantic about their form-filling and rule-enforcing. It's the foundation of the narrative that makes it okay for police officers to murder people suspected of minor crimes using overwhelming, unjustifiable force: that force is hand-waved away as the inevitable result of the daily terror of being a cop on the mean, mean streets.
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The latest mutation of this mean-streets story is the nonsensical claims that police officers are in daily risk of dying because they might be touched by someone experiencing a fentanyl overdose, and, in so doing, absorb a fatal dose of fentanyl through their fingertips.
This isn't a thing. There's a reason fentanyl users snort it and inject it, rather than rubbing it between their fingers.
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It's not a thing when the Sacramento Bee reports it:
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article253325223.html
It's not a thing when CNN reports it:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/16/health/police-fentanyl-overdose-trnd/index.html
Now, looking at these reports, it seems that some cops actually believe they have been poisoned (either that or they're putting on quite a show). That doesn't make it real. History is full of extraordinary popular delusions, imaginary diseases spread by social contagion.
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The delusional belief in fentanyl overdose by contact high doesn't just hurt impressionable cops who scare themselves into flopping around on the ground, moaning. That's because those same cops then go on to charge people who experience fentanyl overdose with *assaulting an officer* by means of their imaginary Opiod Death-Touch.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/police-overdosing-touching-fentanyl-experts-152505198.html
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These additional charges are adding *years* to the sentences of people experiencing addiction or just those guilty of simple possession. This despite the fact that the DEA has revised its guidance and now admits that there's no serious risk of fentanyl skin absorbtion:
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The myth is all-pervasive in cop circles and has spread to other first responders, with many now hesitating to resuscitate people in overdose. 80% of NYC first responders now believe in skin-penetrating fentanyl:
As Tim Cushing writes for Techdirt, this delusion is so strong because "courts and lawmakers cut cops all sorts of slack under the assumption that cops should be given every opportunity to be wrong."
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It's true that cops experience some danger on the job - just not as much as the pizza-delivery person who dropped off your pepperoni pie yesterday.
Image:
Zack Middleton (modified)
CC BY-SA 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
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