I've thought about this a fair amount. I think a big difference is psychological. I've done logging (just family gather firewood for winter stuff, not commercially). It can be scary, but the trees and machinery bare no malice towards you, and you can minimize risks just by being alert and understanding the risks. That is, a lot of injuries are 'your fault'.
In contrast, in policing people really do shoot at you, they run to evade capture, etc. Even if the total risks of logging are higher I can imagine it is very hard to treat the risks in police work in the same dispassionate way the logger does. Tree leaning while cutting it vs suspect's hands maybe going towards their pocket. Even if the stats in those two situations are identical (I suspect they are not), I think very different emotions are going to be triggered, and without a lot of training those emotions are going to make situations go sideways either at the time or later (treating every person you meet as dangerous scum, etc). You don't hate the trees, you don't fear walking amongst them when not cutting them, you don't want to cut them a bit harder next time to teach them a lesson, and so on.
Anyway, I think all of that results in the 'feel' of police work in regards to danger to be quite different than logging or fishing, and ignoring that will lead to the police acting in ways we really don't want.
> In contrast, in policing people really do shoot at you
Definitely, some people do. Some don't. Some are trying to commit suicide-by-cop. Some are unarmed and not even a threat. Your post makes it sound like anytime an officer decides force is necessary, that it necessarily must be. Let alone, lethal force. Sometimes police get that determination wrong, whether by accident or intent. Sometimes police abuse qualified immunity. This stuff almost never goes before a jury, and on the occasions it does, if there's no bodycam and no other narrative (i.e. the other person's dead), unlikely to result in a conviction.
Angelo Quinto [0] was an unarmed, non-violent, non-criminal, 30-yo mentally-ill Filipino-American veteran killed in his own home by Antioch PD, by kneeling on his neck, while handcuffed. His mother was the person who called 911, and noone asked for the police, she only asked for medical. He apparently wasn't even committing any crime, just having a psychiatric emergency. But the police killed him.
Antioch PD didn’t disclose Quinto’s death to the public for nearly a month, then only after public requests. And there's no bodycam of his death. None of them were fired or charged, and there's no public mention of disciplinary actions. In response Gov Newsom signed eight police reform bills.
The level and frequency of police use-of-force in the US is also too high. It needs to be reduced.
> 'feel' of police work in regards to danger to be quite different than logging or fishing, and ignoring that will lead to the police acting in ways we really don't want.
Equally, ignoring all the above also leads to bad consequences too.
I'm sure the psychological factor is huge. That said, I did come across a few relevant stats [1]:
>>> 2,744 officers were assaulted with firearms; 6.1% of these officers were injured.
1,180 officers were assaulted with knives or other cutting instruments; 9.7% of these officers were injured.
The remaining 11,760 officers were assaulted with other types of dangerous weapons; 16.8% of these officers were injured.
That same year (2021) US police killed 1048 people - less then half the number of cops that were attacked with guns, and less than 1/10th of the number attacked with other dangerous weapons.
I wonder how this compares with European countries, i.e. the ratio of people killed by police to how often they police are attacked in a serious way.
In contrast, in policing people really do shoot at you, they run to evade capture, etc. Even if the total risks of logging are higher I can imagine it is very hard to treat the risks in police work in the same dispassionate way the logger does. Tree leaning while cutting it vs suspect's hands maybe going towards their pocket. Even if the stats in those two situations are identical (I suspect they are not), I think very different emotions are going to be triggered, and without a lot of training those emotions are going to make situations go sideways either at the time or later (treating every person you meet as dangerous scum, etc). You don't hate the trees, you don't fear walking amongst them when not cutting them, you don't want to cut them a bit harder next time to teach them a lesson, and so on.
Anyway, I think all of that results in the 'feel' of police work in regards to danger to be quite different than logging or fishing, and ignoring that will lead to the police acting in ways we really don't want.