LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS INJURED AND SLAIN IN THE LINE OF DUTY
Officers who work for law enforcement, probation, parole, or corrections agencies at local, state, and federal levels face special challenges. They must seek out and interact with known criminals on a daily basis—just the opposite of what risk reduction strategies would recommend. The police have the most perilous tasks of all: As people scatter at the sound of gunfire, officers must race toward the dis- turbance to subdue troublemakers who are armed and dangerous. They patrol the meanest streets of the toughest neighborhoods, break up crimes in progress, search suspicious people, track down fugitives, and guard prisoners. Because badges and uniforms are symbols of governmental authority, officers face the additional risk of being ambushed by those who oppose what agents of officialdom represent. As the first line of defense for a social order, law enforcement agents serve as lightning rods, attracting and absorbing the bolts of discon- tent from alienated individuals and hostile groups within society.
Killing a police officer is one of the most hei- nous of crimes. In most states, it is punishable by death. The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund keeps track of those who made the ultimate sacrifice to protect the public, as does the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Division in its annual analysis, Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA). Fortunately, deadly attacks on officers have been declining, according to records kept by these two sources. Over the decades, polic- ing has become a safer occupation, as the graph of trends in line-of-duty deaths shows (see Figure 11.3). Murders peaked in 1973, dropped during the early 1980s, and since then have been fairly stable, even though many more people now are engaged in law enforcement duties. Smaller num- bers of deadly assaults took place during 1999 and 2008 (note that the 72 law enforcement officers killed in New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, were not included by the FBI in its
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LEOKA statistics). Disturbingly, deadly felonious assaults crept back up in 2009 and 2010. But then the number of officers who perished from injuries inflicted by criminals tumbled to an all-time low in 2013. Only four of the slain officers in 2013 worked for large urban departments serving populations of more than 250,000. Apparently, being a big city cop suddenly became a much safer occupation in 2013, which was a much-welcomed development (see Figure 11.3). Adding together murders, acci- dental deaths, and losses of life from acts of heroism, the 2013 combined body count for line- of-duty-deaths was the lowest since 1944 (Stockton, 2014). However, that brief respite in the number of officers cut down was short lived: Preliminary unof- ficial figures for 2014 indicated that about 50 were murdered by gunfire and another 5 were inten- tionally run over by attackers (about 5 more were accidentally rammed by drunk drivers; these killings
were not counted as fatal felonious assaults) (Groeninger, 2014; and Officer Down Memorial Page, 2015), which was a little above the annual average of around 50 slayings per year that prevailed during the 10 years from 2004 to 2013.
Who, Where, What, When, How, and Why?
The FBI closely monitors line-of-duty deaths and assaults to determine the profile of a typical officer who suffered fatal wounds. In order to develop insights that can improve training and tactics that will reduce casualties, it is necessary to discover how, when, and where the attacks took place; and what the most dangerous situations were dur- ing their daily routines. To derive answers to these questions, the FBI carefully analyzes the murders and assaults over a 10-year period to discern pat- terns and trends.
YeYeY ar
N u m b er
Sl ai n in
th e Li n e o f D u ty
F I G U R E 11.3 Trends in the Murders of Law Enforcement Officers, United States, 1973–2013 NOTE: The 72 deaths resulting from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks are excluded. SOURCES: Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA), 2013 (FBI, 2014e).
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In 2013, the FBI gathered data from over 11,000 local, county, state, and federal (including public campus and tribal reservation) law enforce- ment agencies that employed over 625,000 officers. That year, 27 were slain (a little more than 4 out of every 100,000) and almost 50,000 were assaulted (a rate of about 9 percent of every 100 sworn officers). However, only about 30 percent of the assaulted offi- cers sustained physical injuries. Over a 10-year period from 2004 to 2013, 511 officers died from the injuries felons inflicted upon them (FBI, 2014e).
As for what the 511 officers were doing at the time they were murdered, the most perilous assign- ments were making arrests, responding to distur- bances (mostly family quarrels and bar fights), and carrying out traffic stops and pursuits. Some officers were slain while investigating suspicious people and situations. The assignments that were less likely to result in loss of life were handling prisoners and emotionally disturbed persons. No officers were killed during civil disturbances and riots. Over 20 percent of the slayings from 2004 to 2014 were ambushes (FBI, 2014e).
As for where the 511 officers were slain, almost half were working on the streets and highways in the southern states. About one-fifth were employed by departments in big cities of over 250,000 inhabitants. As for when the killings took place, the most danger- ous time to be on patrol was between 6 P.M. and 2 A.M. Thursdays, but also Fridays and Saturdays were the most violent days of the week, while Sundays had the lowest body counts. Augusts and Decembers were the months with the most line- of-duty deaths, and Octobers had the fewest. About 40 percent of the officers were working alone when they were slain. Roughly 10 percent were off duty when they intervened to stop a crime-in-progress and were murdered (FBI, 2014e).
A profile of the 511 fallen officers showed that 95 percent were males; about 85 percent were white and 12 percent were black (FBI records don’t provide breakdowns for Hispanics as a sepa- rate category). During the 10-year period from 2004 to 2013, most were between 25 and 40 years old (38 was the average age) and had been on the job for about 11 years. Practically all (93
percent) were killed with firearms, mostly hand- guns. Being intentionally run over or rammed by a vehicle ranked a distant second as a cause of fatal- ities. Hardly any officers were stabbed to death over those 10 years. Only about 25 percent fired their own weapons in self-defense in the final confronta- tions that ended their lives.
As for the nearly 565 cop killers, 98 percent were males, a little over 50 percent were white, and a disproportionately high 43 percent were black. Over 60 percent were between 18 and 30 years old, and 31 was their average age. More than 80 percent had a criminal record of prior arrests, and about 25 percent were under some sort of judicial supervision (on probation or parole, out on bail, or escapees) at the time of the deadly confrontation. Hardly any of the cop killers got away with murder, according to an analysis of the fates of 607 murderers during the 10 years from 2002 to 2011. Nearly 70 percent (420) were arrested, only 4 remained at large as fugitives, and about 30 percent (185) were not arrested because they perished. Of those 185 alleged killers, about 65 percent (120) were “justifiably killed,” either by the dying officer (40) or by other officers or civilians (80). Around 30 percent (55) committed suicide rather than being captured, and 7 died under other circumstances. Of the 420 who were arrested, over 60 percent (260) were found guilty of murder, of which nearly 70 were sentenced to die and almost 150 received a sentence of life imprisonment. Most of the remaining cases led to convictions for lesser crimes with lower penalties. But only about 8 percent were acquitted or had their charges dismissed (FBI, 2014e).
Only 2 percent (11) of the law enforcement agents murdered during the first decade of the twenty-first century worked for federal agencies. Since these line-of-duty deaths were so infrequent, it is not possible to determine the homicide victim- ization rates faced by officers of different federal agencies. But an earlier comparative study yielded some surprising findings: Agents for the Internal Revenue Service, an unpopular branch of govern- ment, enjoyed the lowest risks of being attacked on the job. And contrary to widespread impressions and media images, the federal law enforcement
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officers who faced the greatest statistical risks of inju- ries from assaults did not work for the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), U.S. Marshals, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), or branches of what is now part of the Department of Homeland Security. They worked for the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Park Service (Reaves and Hart, 2001). Although the 1,000 rangers stationed across the country suffered a high assault rate, only 9 have died in the line of duty since the national park system was established in 1916 (see Yardley and Raftery, 2012).
Media images of gun fights as a frequent aspect of police work are misleading. The average officer goes through a 20-year career without ever firing a shot except for target practice. However, undercover officers face a much greater chance than their uni- formed colleagues of shooting at suspects and of being shot. African-American officers in undercover and plainclothes assignments run an additional risk of being hit by “friendly fire”—officers who mistake them for armed criminals (Geller, 1992). Friendly fire in all kinds of situations—mistaken identity, training exercises, and accidental discharges—during more than a century of policing from 1893 through 2006 has claimed the lives of nearly 200 officers (O’Connor and Pacifici, 2007).
Tragically, officers die by suicide more often than at the hands of assailants (Cowan, 2008; and Clark et al., 2012). Unfortunately, accidents also claim more lives than felonious assaults. For example, during 2013, 49 law enforcement officers died from on-the-job accidents (such as car crashes) while 27 were murdered by criminals. Over the 10-year span ending in 2013, 636 officers died accidentally while 511 were killed intentionally (FBI, 2014b). However, statistically speaking, policing is not the most danger- ous job of all in terms of intentional plus accidental injuries and deaths—taxi driving is.
Making the Job Safer The leading reasons for the decline in line-of-duty deaths noted in Figure 11.3 include regulations requiring officers to wear bullet- resistant vests, better training, improved weaponry, the availability of stun guns that can substitute for hand-to-hand combat, the use of specially-trained
SWAT teams to handle extremely dangerous situa- tions, restrictions on the private ownership of deadly weapons, and a diminishing amount of interpersonal violence across the country (Butterfield, 1999; and Lee, 2015). To improve the chances that officers will complete each tour of duty without getting hurt, the Department of Justice has fostered a num- ber of initiatives, including the establishment of an Officer Safety and Wellness Working Group to develop “best practices,” a Preventing Violence Against Law Enforcement and Ensuring Officer Resilience and Survivability (VALOR) program that provides training and technical assistance, and the creation of an “Officer Safety Toolkit” that fur- nishes advice about how to anticipate and survive violent encounters. The federal government also gives financial assistance to local departments to pur- chase the latest bulletproof and stab-resistant vests (Holder, 2011; and Stephens and Matarese, 2013).
Other peace officers also face grave risks of bodily harm. To reduce probation and parole offi- cers’ vulnerability to assault, robbery, and car theft when carrying out supervisory tasks and home vis- its, a growing number of agencies are providing them with firearms, bulletproof vests, alarms, armed escorts, and training in self-defense tactics and crisis management techniques (Lindner and Koehler, 1992; Del Castillo and Lindner, 1994).