While this is far from the only factor, I think one factor is that LEO's are more frequently placed in situations which present the opportunity to commit a crime (accidentally, even!).RSX11 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 18, 2018 9:28 amYou hear a statistic like this pretty often, and I don't doubt that it's true. But today, it occurred to me to wonder, why it is the case? It's easy to understand that permit holders are going to be a pretty law abiding bunch - they get screened pretty carefully. But, the police are screened pretty carefully as well before being hired - so why do they wind up 6 times worse than permit holders?permit holders are convicted of misdemeanor and felonies at one-sixth the rate at which police officers are convicted."
For example, how many LTC holders actually draw their weapon at any point in self defense? Very few, from what we can see. So if a person never defends himself with his firearm, he can never be taken to court for manslaughter with that weapon. Now look at an LEO. How many times might the average LEO have to shoot a bad guy? Each and every time opens the possibility of a lapse in judgement (or a really skilled prosecutor, or a media lynch mob, or, or...) that leads to a manslaughter or murder charge.
I disagree. Every time I've seen these statistics, they are "per capita," meaning that the actual figures are proportionally expanded or reduced to reflect what they would be if the population samples were the same size. While these figures are not exact and can be thrown off by extremely small sample sizes, there are enough LTC's and LEO's to make an accurate per capita comparison.G.A. Heath wrote: ↑Sat Aug 18, 2018 11:40 am I suspect the main factor in the statistics for police committing more crimes than license holders is due to a number of factors. First is the fact that there are far fewer officers, so each time an officer is convicted of a crime it has far more weight from a statistical point of view. All other factors combined probably are not half as significant as this one reason alone. Consider a situation where 'group A' which has 1,000,000 members and 6 commit a crime. 'group B' has 1,000 members and 1 commits a crime. Group A has a rate of 6/1,000,000 or 0.0006% while group B has a rate of 1/1000 or 0.1%. Group B is roughly 167 times more likely to commit a crime than group A based on statistics but Group A committed 6 times as many crimes in actuality.