Denver Post

Better than a Ph.D.

Sunday, August 17, 2003 - Re: "Policing deadly force: Is the job's danger a self-fulfilled prophecy?" Aug. 10 AnnJanette Rosga Perspective article.

While I don't have a Ph.D., and I am not employed by a major university, I can still offer better information than what was provided by AnnJanette Rosga. Common sense would tell you that when you approach armed persons, mentally ill individuals and career criminals on an hourly basis, you are not self-fulfilling any prophecy.

Rosga failed to mention two basic facts: First, police officers are second in the number of workplace homicides - as opposed to just work-related deaths - by occupation. Second, police officers and health-care workers are more likely to be assaulted at work than anyone else. (This is according to the U.S. Department of Labor.)

So, while it is true that being a police officer doesn't expose a person to a high risk of accidental death, it does expose one to a significant risk of intentional acts. With all the "research" that Rosga did for this article, you would think she might have mentioned this point.

ERIC ALLI

Indianapolis

Insulting comparison

I am a retired police officer from New York, and also served as a detention officer in Larimer County for seven years. Police officers consistently have the highest rates of divorce, alcoholism and suicide. The job is very stressful. It is a slap in the face to police officers when a sociologist compares their levels of danger to that of an electrician. God bless the men and women who serve.

RICHARD MILLER

Westminster

Most cops good, but...

My experience in law enforcement leads me to the conclusion that 99 out of 100 law-enforcement officers are more than capable of defusing a situation involving a disturbed teen with a knife, or an emotionally distraught woman with a candlestick, without anyone getting killed. The application of common sense and good negotiating skills - and in extreme cases, non-lethal weapons - resolves countless challenging situations every day. Unfortunately, the remaining 1 percent require a change in written policy.

Any fair and effective lethal-force policy should contain the following provision: Lethal force may be used only if, considering all the circumstances, a reasonable person would conclude that its use is necessary to prevent an imminent danger of serious bodily harm or death to a member of the public or to an officer, and that non-lethal force is not sufficient to prevent such danger.

RICHARD A. STACY

Denver

Prof doesn't get danger

The writer has been a prosecutor at local, state and federal levels and served 13 years as U.S. Attorney for the District of Wyoming.

AnnJannette Rosga asserts that the dangers of police work are overblown to the point of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy among law enforcement officers, causing unjustified police shootings.

To support her assertion, she presents a table showing that the on-the-job death rates for many occupations exceed that of law enforcement. She contends that the police subculture promotes a perception of danger even though roofers, construction workers and commercial fishing industry workers are more likely to die on the job. The foggy view from her ivory tower causes her to miss the point.

The question isn't whether more deaths occur in other occupations. The question is the cause of deaths.

How many times has she been punched in the face by a drunk who is twice her size, or been bitten and scratched by a raving lunatic whose family and even medical doctors can't control, or had someone in a narrow stairway raise a heavy metal object over her head to bash her brains in? Wouldn't self-protection become her first instinct if she faced these risks?

JACK BURNHAM

Pine

Lies, damn lies and statistics

The table "High-risk work" is as misleading as an Enron accountant. What is particularly disturbing to me is that this was written by a Ph.D. sociology professor who should know better. To be meaningful, the table should include the percentage of the population involved. As an example, consider 161 deaths for business services vs. 111 deaths for police. It would appear that business services are more dangerous than policing.

However, if one takes 161 deaths out of 5.2 million business sevices jobs (1990 estimate), we have 31 fatalities per million. And if we take 111 deaths out of 758,000 police and sheriff jobs (1987 estimate), we have 146 fatalities per million. From this, we may conclude that being a cop is almost four times more dangerous than being in business services. Admittedly, I'm mixing years and not using the latest statistics, but I don't think that changes much.

Rosga may have some valid points, but sloppy use of statistics clouds those points.

OTTO R. BUHLER

Boulder

Cops prefer mundane

AnnJanette Rosga's sophomoric misuse of statistics should be an embarrassment to her. She writes that working in a restaurant is more dangerous than policing because more restaurant and bar workers died than police in 1999. This is an absurd skewing of statistical data, considering that there are many, many more food-service workers than police officers. To compare the dangers faced by electricians with those of police officers is also an invalid argument. Occupational deaths of an electrician and construction worker is almost always due that worker's mistake, be it touching live wires or stepping off a beam. Police face criminals who are trying to kill them. This is an entirely different realm of danger than a construction site.

Rosga writes that men are drawn to policing due to the glamour of the danger and are not interested in actual public service. She is wrong. I was a cop for more than eight years and I far preferred changing an elderly person's tire to wrestling with a drunk or getting stabbed.

JEFF LAIRD

Edgewater

Appreciates police

AnnJanette Rosga might as well have titled her essay in the August 10 Perspective, "Cops Are Trained Killers." Instead she used the more innocuous "Is the job's danger a self-fulfilled prophecy?" I'm surprised she did not suggest social workers be trained as police officers. I don't have the imagination to suppose what might happen should these individuals who are trained to deal with society's needy begin to seek other professions, once they realize there are no metal detectors at the sites of crime scenes.

Rosga informs us that electricians, farm workers, roofers and fishermen are much more likely to die on the job than are policemen. I would hazard to say that most of these individuals do not wake up in the morning and go to work thinking they face the end of mortality. Most die because they fail to observe safety regulations relating to their respective occupations. I can assure you that, if any fisherman is ever accosted by a knife-wielding halibut, that fish is not going to appear on your dinner plate intact.

Yes, the vast majority of cops are not killed on the job, thank goodness. But cops face hazards day in and day out, rain or shine. No matter what, they place their lives in jeopardy on a daily basis. I, for one, appreciate the risks they take.

DINAH LAND

Aurora

Washington

Homicidal two-by-four?

Am I missing something in AnnJanette Rosga's statistics? The chart showing that police work ranked sixth in 1999 in occupational deaths had a glaring inconsistency. Not to minimize the danger in these other occupations, but I would assume that all of the other jobs had deaths from accidents, whereas most officers were killed by homicide. Additionally, officers are usually injured on the job by felonious assaults, not accidents. Talk about apples and oranges. Then again, maybe there's some homicidal two-by-four I haven't heard about.

If a roofer went into his job everyday knowing that there was a chance a nail-gun might decide to jump up and use him for target practice, you can bet he'd approach his job a little differently.

I don't intend to minimize the importance of this topic on the use of deadly force, but most citizens appreciate the difference between dangers confronted by police officers and other occupations. Rosga should do some soul-searching. Perhaps her personal biases are affecting her research.

CHUCK HEIDEL

Boulder

Childs

The police never should have been called to the incidents involving Paul Childs of Denver and Denise Michelle Washington of Aurora. Instead, social workers from a community mental-health center should have been called. But of course, we do not have the mental-health centers that can respond, so we call the police and expect them to perform beyond their training.

Years ago, the Chicago Police Department had teams of social workers that would respond first to all domestic calls (with immediate backup if necessary). That might be a less costly solution than expanding our inadequate mental-health system. But policy changes and a few hours of training will not enable the police to respond as professional social workers. And we should not blame them when they cannot.

GERALD KOCH

Centennial

When big band began

Re: "Goodstein digs even deeper for dirt on Denver," Aug. 10 book review.

It must be difficult to write for a newspaper and be expected to be an expert on so many subjects. Unfortunately, book reviewer Sandra Dallas' expertise does not include jazz history. She writes, "The Trocadero ballroom opened in 1917, just as the big-band era was about to begin, and every band from Benny Goodman to Ozzie Nelson and Lawrence Welk played there."

In 1917, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first jazz records ever, but they were only a five-piece group. The big-band era is not generally held to have begun until the famous Palomar Ballroom concert in California by Benny Goodman and his orchestra in August 1935, almost 20 years after Elitch's opened. The irony is that the last place Goodman played on that tour before the Palomar was Elitch Gardens. The band flopped completely. Not being ready yet for swing, all the audience wanted to hear was square stuff like waltzes. This is not a knock on Elitch's, just on the hipness of Denverites outside Five Points at that time. Elitch's did, after all, book Goodman.

RICHARD P. DeTAR

Denver

Re: "Customers reap what enviros sow," Aug. 10 Jim Sims guest commentary.

Jim Sims would like to blame "radical environmentalists" for the current energy situation. As we now know, much of this "crisis" (including the meltdown in California) was caused by price and supply manipulation at the hands of the energy sector itself. Colorado's natural gas prices are going up this year not because of a shortage in supply but because new pipelines are allowing companies to move supplies to the more lucrative market in California at the expense of consumers here.

Second, Sims wants to use this vacuous argument to support the creation of the Rocky Mountain Energy Council. On the face of it, the arguments for this body would seem to make perfect sense: to make the review process for projects more efficient and reduce bureaucracy. However, the reasons for skepticism are equally evident. Recent actions at the state and federal levels of government (often with the advice of the industries that provide campaign contributions and perks to politicians and regulators) merely limit public involvement and environmental review.

The truth is that the fossil fuel industry wants the same cherry deal that the logging industry has enjoyed for years: access to resources on public lands at bargain-basement prices while leaving the taxpayers to foot the bill for infrastructure development and damage. All the "radical environmentalists" I know want to reduce the use of limited energy supplies through greater efficiency to ensure the long-term availability of these resources and develop renewable energy technologies that will help stabilize constantly fluctuating prices. This is the real pro-consumer position. Sims and his fellow "business advocates" who try to act like consumer watchdogs remind me of the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood - the disguise looks pretty good until you get to the teeth.

PAUL ALDRETTI

Denver

Enviro-McCarthyism

Jim Sims' guest commentary about the delay tactics of environmental extremists to kill development was right on target. While there are sufficient technical and regulatory safeguards to adequately protect and improve the environment, these extremists want to take things further by compounding the inefficiencies of governmental overlaps and abusing our democratic process. Their tactics include filing endless nuisance lawsuits, applying enviro-McCarthyism fear tactics, and standing in the way of streamlining the environmental review. Ultimately, consumers and business are the losers in this process - as reflected in higher prices, jobs exported or lost, and increased reliance on foreign sources. While there are several responsible environmental centrist groups that have a balanced sense of the issues, it's the environmental extremists who are to blame for gumming up the process.

JERRY VANINETTI

Arvada