While it’s rare to be killed as a cop, it’s infinitely more rare to be killed “out of the blue” by a cop. I don’t consider this an issue worth catastrophizing. You could probably save more life-hours by never talking about it in the media and thereby reducing America’s anxiety and stress
If proponents of the 'policing deaths catastrophizing' were optimizing for saving life hours, one imagines they would also allow their aggressive, omnipresent social engineering campaigns to bring focus to the simple and obvious concept that one should never flee or resist arrest. With most of the high profile instances given huge exposure due to activist media (e.g. Jacob Blake, Rayshard Brooks, Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, George Floyd, etc.) the decedents clearly created deadly altercations by forcefully refusing to cooperate with law enforcement, despite being universally guilty of the offenses that led to their attempted lawful arrests by local authorities. If activists were truly concerned with lowering the fatality rates of such incidents, surely they would at least nominally boost social messaging and public awareness that fleeing and/or resisting arrest is very dangerous and unacceptable - but in practice they do exactly the opposite, i.e. downplaying the resistance aspect completely, waging edit wars to get such components removed from Wikipedia entries, and even pushing wild counter-factual narratives like "Hands up, don't shoot" - a rallying cry of the #BLM movement based on the entirely false premise that Michael Brown was shot even while cooperating, in perpetuation of the corrosive popular narrative that cooperation with police is futile
Moreover, if these catastrophizers were optimizing for saving lives / life hours, one imagines they would be sensitive to massive fluctuations in violent crime rates in which the mere variance from previous years represents many times more deaths than are lost to police violence in toto - and let's be extremely clear that the latter are statistically overwhelmingly justified - and one would especially think that given these deaths are concentrated to a significant degree in the exact same inner city populations of color that they are purportedly agitating on behalf of. Insofar as an outsized share of homicides are intra-criminal, it is in many cases literally the exact same people. But LeBron, AOC, and CNN - used here as synecdoches for progressive celebrities, politicians, and media - are indifferent if not dismissive toward a historically unprecedented surge in inner city violence that just last year, just in terms of excess(!) deaths, accounted for an incredible ~250x(!!!) the total number of unarmed black men killed by police each year. Again, it does not track with observable reality that #BLM activists are interested in saving lives, or black lives, or even poor black inner city lives
However, there are fairly transparent political, psychological, and sociological reasons that succinctly explain why one would catastrophize police shootings. Politically, it's useful to the progressive agenda to overstate racial grievances, foster a narrative of systemic racial oppression, and otherwise gin up CRT-adjacent sentiments. Psychologically, it’s flattering to view one’s self as a righteous crusader against injustice - even when the supposed injustice is plainly fabricated and the crusade is demonstrably leading to massive negative consequences even for those it’s supposedly on behalf of. Sociologically, this activism is a way to accrue validation (social media likes / clout), elite advancement, and group networking benefits. But nowhere does it plausibly tie into a coherent desire to minimize the loss of lives - even / especially ‘Black Lives’ - when taken in tandem with the dismissiveness the modal proponent of #BLM demonstrates towards the largest homicide surge in American history or their lack of interest in dissuading the exact sort of criminal behavior that makes such sporadic police violence inevitable
