So I think it is a fair societal goal to minimize deaths in police/civilian interactions. Within most moral traditions, each life is equally valued. Some may argue that a law enforcement officer LEO's life is worth more than someone they may be looking to arrest, but under the concept of innocent until proven guilty, I am not sure how I feel about that.
Since police departments do not need to report death by cop incidents, data is not easy to come by, but the Washington Post has been collecting a database of certified deaths where the shooter was a LEO. In 2020, there were 1,021 such deaths (and these do not count deaths like George Floyd and Ronald Greene). Certainly, if these are all self-defense and the trade off is one civilian life for one LEO life, I think we may be ok with this. But according to the Officer Down Memorial webpage, in 2020 there were 59 LEOs that died by assault, vehicular assault, or gunshot while on duty. It is really hard for me to believe that there would have been 1,021 more police deaths had cops not taken those 1,021 lives. So what trade off are we ok with? Is it acceptable for cops to be risk averse enough that 10 civilians are killed in order to prevent the death of one LEO? The 59:1,021 ratio is not definitive, but it tells me cops are way too willing to pull the trigger when they sense some risk.
I know it makes us uneasy to think about whether policies that would result in only 600 civilian deaths (421 fewer), but with a loss of 100 LEO deaths (41 more) might be an improvement (a net reduction of 380 deaths). Even at that, it says that a LEO life is worth 10 civilians. This is really the normative discussion we should be having as the end result is the type of training and use of force policies we implement.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/
https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2020
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