It’s Arguably Never Been Safer to Be a Police Officer Despite Claims to the Contrary
By Brad R. Schlesinger | 07/02/2012 | Issues, Safety, States, Texas | 5 Comments
Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Author: Swatcop92407
Back in April, The New York Times ran an article purporting what they considered to be a disturbing new trend of increases in the number of police officers being killed. The article points out how 72 police were killed in 2011, representing a 25 percent increase from the year before, and a 75 percent increase from 2008. An accompanying chart shows the number of officer deaths per year going back to 2000, and aside from 2001 (which includes those police officers killed during September 11) and 2011, the numbers are fairly consistent over that time.
While the Times even points out that the number of officer deaths declined sharply since the start of this year, the article still contains all sorts of suggestive quotes from law enforcement officials bemoaning how we haven’t seen violence aimed towards police like this in a long time, that each day a cop goes out on duty could be his last, and that every encounter could potentially be deadly.
At the time, I was slightly perplexed by the Times article. Just two days prior I read a post at the police watchdog blog Clark County Criminal Cops, detailing the 56 percent reduction in law enforcement killings so far from the previous year, as well as the lack of any kind of attention being paid to it– despite Attorney General Eric Holder publicly calling the number of cop deaths in 2011 simply unacceptable.
If there were an article being written in the national press regarding the number and trend of police deaths, I assumed it would surely point out this good news. Rather, it was merely mentioned in passing, and in a manner that paints an image of cops ducking whizzing bullets all day every day. To me, the chart provided by the Times and the 56 percent decline in officer deaths in 2012 seems like anything but an alarming trend.
This alleged ‘ugly’ trend becomes even less troubling when considering a larger sample size of statistics available on police fatalities. Over at the Huffington Post, Radley Balko digs through the numbers and finds no real reason to be alarmed:
‘The truth is, the widely reported “war on cops” in 2010 and 2011 was exaggerated. Overall police fatalities did rise in 2010 and then again in 2011, but those figures are compared to 2009, which saw the fewest number of police fatalities since 1959. Generally speaking, police fatalities have been steadily declining since the early 1990s, along with the overall crime rate. And that’s merely the raw number of deaths. Over the same period, the total number of police officers in America has also increased. So the drop in the fatality rate has been even more dramatic.
The spikes in 2010 and 2011 appear to have been driven by a few anomalous months in which there were several incidents involving the deaths of multiple officers. In March 2011, for example, 24 cops died while on-duty, and in January 2010, the figure was 22. But those are the only two months in the last 42 when the number topped 20. The following months, those figures fell back to 11 and 15, respectively.
Moreover, the rate of assaults against police officers also has been dropping since the late 1980s, so the drop in fatalities cannot be attributed only to better police armor, tactics, or weaponry. Criminals aren’t merely killing police less, they’re also attacking them less, which would seem to put the lie to the notion that citizens today respect police less, or that criminals have grown more emboldened.
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, the homicide rate for police officers in 2010 (the last year for which data is available) was about 7.9 per 100,000 officers. That’s about 60 percent higher than the overall homicide rate in America, which is 4.8. But it’s lower than the homicide rates in many large cities, including Atlanta (17.3), Boston (11.3), Dallas (11.3), Kansas City (21.1), Nashville (8.9), Pittsburgh (17.3), St. Louis (40.5), or Tulsa (13.7). In fact, of the 74 U.S. cities with populations of 250,000 or more, 36 have murder rates higher than that of police in America. It’s more likely to be murdered just by living in these cities than the average police officer is to be murdered on the job.
The job of police officer also isn’t anywhere near the most dangerous job in America. If we include traffic fatalities, the job of police officer will in some years rank among the 10 most dangerous in America (PDF). But take away car accidents, and it doesn’t come close.
Blips in 2010 and 2011 aside (and of course, the terror attacks of 2001), the job of police officer has been getting safer for about a generation now — much safer.’
So while officer fatalities are steadily declining– going on twenty years– incidents of police officers killing civilians are curiously on the rise. Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that the number of justifiable homicides committed by police from around 2000 through 2008 increased roughly 30 percent overall– despite crime rates continuing to fall over that time. Moreover, while 72 cops were shot and killed in all 2011, 54 civilians were shot and killed by police in Los Angeles County in 2011 alone, a 70 percent increase from the previous year. Not to mention at least 12 of them were completely unarmed.
Now, I certainly do not mean to imply that cops are shooting and killing civilians with wanton disregard, nor am I intending to minimize those officers killed while on duty. Policing is a profession that certainly exposes those who choose it to legitimate dangers – and I do not want to diminish the perils many cops face on a daily basis. However, choosing statistics from an extremely small sample and making broad generalizations from said numbers isn’t very telling– about the amount of police deaths or civilians killed by law enforcement.
Even more so when such a small sample is being used to conjure up fears about how cop-killing civilians are roaming the streets – thereby painting an inaccurate picture of the relative dangers of police work today. Besides, as Balko notes, sometimes politicians and law enforcement officials have incentives to make police work seem far more dangerous than it actually is. As this dramatized imagery can form the basis of arguments advocating “for more gun-control laws, …increased police departments…, …the increasing militarization of America’s police forces, … against more accountability and oversight…, and…for more leeway for police officers to dispense ‘street justice’ in order to maintain order and to ensure that criminals still fear them.”
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5 Comments
Craig D. Schlesinger
07.02.2012
@craigschlesinger
It has to be “unsafe” to be a cop. If the opposite were ceded, police unions can kiss their leverage goodbye when it comes to securing arbitrary increases in pay and benefits, not to mention how difficult the unions make it to fire a bad cop. The same can be said of police departments that increasingly militarize their operations with tanks, drones, assault weapons, etc. More importantly, police want more power and authority. The war on cops is nothing more than a narrative to blind people into abdicating increased power and deference to law enforcement instead of holding them accountable as public servants.
d.eris
07.02.2012
Good article and well balanced. For anyone who may be interested, a great resource tracking the breadth and depth of police violence against the people of the United States is the National Police Misconduct Reporting Project, which was an independent project that was recently acquired by and incorporated into the Cato Institute. See:
http://www.policemisconduct.net/
Brad R. Schlesinger
07.02.2012
@bradschlesinger
Your absolutely right, I’ve been following the NPMRP very closely for years now and it certainly is an extremely valuable (yet disturbing) resource.
burberry
07.09.2012
This website is really a stroll-by way of for all of the data you needed about this and didn’t know who to ask. Glimpse here, and also you’l undoubtedly discover it.
Mike Meza
07.17.2012
@mikemeza-2
Police Danger?
Brad, you should have called me first, instead of researching to get to your conclusion. I can approximate that I have arrested around 4,000 criminals in my 24 year career as a Police Officer, Investigator and Sergeant (along with a partner). In addition to that approximation I have been involved in search warrant services, undercover operations, “john programs” and various sting operations.
I have discharged a firearm four times while on duty; two accidental discharges two at attack dogs and two at the same suspect at different locations. Sadly only the dogs were hit.
In all my years of service there were only two crooks who I feared were capable of doing me harm; Just two.
Invariably only but a handful actually fought back in trying to retain their freedom. This says alot about the consequence of going toe to toe with a cop. But it also reflects the superior role of the police officer and when played out right the deference criminals give to that superior role. My experience with crooks is that as long as the police officer kept from placing himself as the opponent, crooks would simply see that the “jig was up” and submit to arrest (not necessarily role on themselves).
I was born and raised in the barrios of East Los Angeles, where in the course and scope of living, situational awareness becomes paramount; especially a male beginning around 10 years old. Eventually you can discern the real meanies from the “wanna-bees”, the faint of heart from the heartless.
In the intervening years in my law enforcement career, I could see it coming; a major shift from risk management to risk aversion. In almost auto-erotic fashion I saw far too many incoming and current officers abating what used to be basic police engagement for the sake of “officer safety”. “Officer safety” became sacrosanct. Any critiques (debriefings) were immediately curtailed by the assertion of officer safety. Increasingly officers became technical and tactical but ultimately most failed to transition to “engagement”; that point in time where the rubber meets the road; “mano a mano”.
Less than lethal weapons, the computer, remote control, the mouse and cursor have all aided in the decline of the engaging police officer. It was apparent that most individuals wanted to be and didn’t want to do police work. Coupled with this was a police bureaucracy vastly larger than the cumulative effect of criminals, whose self preservation relied in maintaining conventional police dictum: the uncertainty of an officer going home at night, overwhelmed by service calls, crime as the sole domain of law enforcement, a community at the fringe of anarchy in their absence, the incongruous military comparison.
But this proselytizing also served as self-aggrandizement to those in law enforcement who believed in it despite, the absence of any sustained criminal activity to support it. Many to this day believe that which isn’t. Criminals are not overwhelming and if officers are busy it’s for those ancillary activities created by the police bureaucracy. Even in my time, inactivity was sufficiently abundant.
Brad was right about when criminals were at their peak. I call it “the criminal enterprise era”. In the late 1980s PCP (phenylcyclohexyl piperidine) use was beginning to wane while Crack cocaine (cocaine base) was on the rise. This era created a plethora of entrepreneurs in cocaine sales as well as the attendant violence as a result of control of territory and product. “Hooking and booking” ruled the day. Kids as young as ten ran their business, selling to clients as old as 80. Prostitution rose, robberies rose, crime in general rose. Hooking and booking required long hours of planning, execution, processing, filing and court testimony. It was a great time. Cops were being cops and doing cop work.
In mid 1993 I found myself checking to see if my car radio was working. You see by that time I was working the usually busier shift in any police agency, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. By ten pm the police radio had flat lined. My radio was fine, just nothing was happening. I believe this decline has been steady since 1993 and “spinning” the danger of police work just won’t work.
If officer involved shootings are up it is because the mechanical training of shoot don’t shoot have stifled the intuitive capacity of the officer. Peer pressure and overly rote protocol seriously impair an officer’s capacity to “blink” in the manner outlined by Malcolm Gladwell in his book of the same name.
The old school officers still in service, continue to point out the substantial reduction in criminal activity (“its dead”), the inefficacy of the “new blue” and of a police bureaucracy that fails to self-critique. The Pareto Principle (the law of the vital few) seems to be at play here.
In all my years of running down suspects, kicking in doors and rolling on “shots fired calls” I never once considered my safety; I was too busy thinking about the safety of the unarmed and unprotected living with the neighborhood bullies.