Ft Worth police officer shoots woman to death inside her home

I am wondering what they mean by "rare"

Just looking at FBI stats, somewhere between 44 and 66 police officers are feloniously killed in the line of duty each year for the past decade or so.

This puts the number of police officers in the US at under 1 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_number_of_police_officers

The Washington Post is reporting a little under 1,000 people die each yeat by police over the last 4 years. That is estimated to be more like 1200-1300 when including agencies that do not report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_...forcement_officers_in_the_United_States,_2018

So assume 1500 killings - probably a couple hundred more than actually happen, but still.


So out of 1 million police, 40-50 are killed in a year.
Out of 320 million people 1500 are killed a year.


Unless I am missing something it seems like police are exponentially more likely to be killed than police are likely to kill - like 10,000 times more likely.

Of course, police are exponentially more likely to kill than the average person, which sort of makes sense given their job. And it has little to do with the notion of "rare" that I am interested in that this piece is using.

What am I misunderstanding here?

That's a flawed metric, because even though we have 320 million people in this country, police certainly do not come in contact with 320 million people. It would be better to compare both numbers to the number of contacts between civilians and police (whatever that number is). As those are the opportunities where either:

a.) a police officer can be killed by a civilian
b.) a civilian can be killed by a police officer.
c.) neither is killed by the other.