I think about this regularly, but I also am in shady ass places riding my bike, at shady ass hours occasionally. I also work in a city with relatively small amount of violent crime and live in a city with even less so it's not like I really have to worry about it. Interesting to note in the last several years about 20% of all homicides in Seattle were in fact police shootings. Yeah that sounds high, but it was 6 out of 30 total for last year.

On one hand I don't have a problem using force, even deadly force to protect myself. But knowing how I typically react to stressful situations I can say I would mostly likely crumple under the stress and just become a regular victim statistic, or if I were to carry a weapon I would escalate the situation unnecessarily to the point were someone would get get hurt due to my own bravado. I have a suspicion that a lot of "self defense" homicides are kinda due to the second situation where the person with a gun actively provokes, or at least doesn't attempt to cool the situation down, to the point where shooting in "self defense" is the only option left. The law of course seems to favor the story of the one left alive, unless of course it's Nick Cage in ConAir.

So also being in a City where I'm almost as likely to get shot by a cop than a criminal is an odd feeling. Doesn't leave me with a whole lot of trust in the police force of Seattle, but of course I don't really threaten anyone with violence so I'm unlikely to ever get myself into a situation where I could be shot by an officer.

So I'm going to apologize for this little diatribe and I hope its even remotely comprehensible. I hear the argument all the time that the police have a right to protect themselves from harm, and deadly force is of course one of the totally justifiable methods of doing so. But that kind of comes down to a value judgement that the life of an officer is somehow inherently more valuable than the life of the victim. That's probably true almost all of the time. Yet these are people who get a whole hell of a lot more training on how to handle dangerous situations than the average person and I feel should be held to an entirely different standard. If a person is threatening you with a knife, and you have a gun, how likely is it that you get sent home in a body bag. Not likely, yet consistently the guy with a knife does (particularly here in Seattle). Or a better example some dipshit throws a punch at an officer, more often than not that dipshit gets the fuck beat out of them. Ok yes an officer could get injured, but I just don't buy the argument that the amount of force that typically makes the news was justified. Shit even if it doesn't make the news. The simple fact is that an officer has far greater effects on the outcome than the other guy, they are more armed, better trained, and have the responsibility to actually make sure the best outcome is achieved even if it means accepting some bodily injury or harm in the end.

At the end of the day being an officer is still just a job that you chose to take. Just like being a nurse in an Ebola hospital is a job a person chooses to take. Is it fair to judge your own life higher than those you are meant to serve because your job is unsafe? You might have more value to your life than that person in cuffs or in the jail cell, but you are not really a qualified person to make that judgement call either, 'cause you're biased.

Sorry Aaron, I'd way rather get beers and fuck around talking about this kind shit than trying to write an essay on it.