• darkseer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Police officers have the highest suicide rate after Doctors and Dentists. Not sure if it’s because of poor stress management or being constantly in contact with some of the shittiest people to live.

    • Coreidan@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      “being constantly in contact with some of the shittiest people to live.”

      So other cops then. I’d probably kill myself too if I were a cop.

      • hglman@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Lets be honest, plenty non cops are really shitty in ways different from the shitty that drives you to be a cop. Cops do deal with these other people as well. So a cop has shitty people on all sides.

        Its an impossible tasks and society must construct itself as to not have police bc they cannot do the job asked even regardless of the value of the work (which is none as well)

        • abraxas
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          1 year ago

          I’d say plenty of societies found the right balance for police. Just that some of us have utterly failed the same.

          I’d guess the ones with the most success are the ones who hold police to a higher standard than non-police, and not the other way around. In the US, police appear not only to be the profession with the highest occurence of domestic violence reports, but it’s an absurd number like 40% of all households.

    • abraxas
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      1 year ago

      More likely PTSD. It’s common among all emergency workers. It doesn’t speak for or against a police officer, but when you go through shit, shit happens to you. Of the people I’ve known with PTSD, the ones holding on by their fingernails have all been cops (the medics seem to have a weird coping mechanism, because they get the worst of it). There’s only so many times you can breach a door for medics to a suicide, or be the guy who has to cuff a mother because they’re trying to run into a burning house to save their own kid who the firefighters said they couldn’t save.

      None of that justifies much of what police do, however. And we usually use the “deadliest job” metric when discussing the need for deadly force; that is, that there really isn’t a need for them to walk everywhere hand-on-gun (or possibly even armed). That their suicide rate is so high actually works for reducing their weapon access (both due to suicide risk AND as evidence their life really isn’t in as much danger as we like to think).