Brant Ward/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis
Counting America’s population is a thankless, painful job.
According to a report from AFP, Census workers have been assaulted more than 400 times as they go door to door to follow up on homeowners and apartment dwellers who didn’t return their mandated census forms. A total of 409 incidents have been reported in just two months, including 132 threats that included a weapon and a dozen workers being “held against their will.”
In the aggregate, the odds of getting attacked are still pretty small — there are some 635,000 census workers out trying to track down those who didn’t bother to return the forms. In a statement, a census rep downplayed the threat: “In every census there are incidents where enumerators are threatened by respondents in various ways, and this census is no different; we are seeing a moderate increase in the number of reported incidents against census takers.” (via AFP)