It’s drilled into police that traffic stop ambushes are routine. They aren’t. They happen, but they’re vanishingly rare. And the federal courts’ view that stops are inherently dangerous is based on an unscientific survey from 1964.

Background here:

https://michiganlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/117MichLRev635_Woods.pdf

Lots of variables to consider, but the article above found a FL cop was killed in one out of every 3.6 million stops on the low end, and one in every 20.1 million stops on the high end. Nationally it happens 5-10 times per year, out of about 30 million annual stops.

Those cases are of course tragic and awful. But drumming it into cops to see every stop as his or her potential last has real world consequences. As we’ve seen.

An officer is orders of magnitude more likely to die of a lightning strike or insect sting. https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/