Violence Against Police (and Other Safety Issues More Broadly)
Law enforcement is a dangerous profession. Police officers experience the second highest rate of workplace homicide (behind taxi drivers), and the highest occupational rate of non-fatal victimization. Approximately 10% of officers are assaulted in a given year; however, most are either not injured or experience minor injuries as the result of the assault. While research on violence against police dates back to the 1970s, the topic of police officer victimization has been propelled back into the national spotlight in recent years due to a number of high-profile felonious homicides: two New York Police Department officers shot and killed in Brooklyn, NY in December 2014, five officers killed in Dallas, TX and another three in Baton Rouge, LA in July 2016. In fact, “Officer Wellness & Safety” was one of the six pillars discussed at length in the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
Most of the research on officer risk/safety has tended to focus narrowly on felonious assaults/killings. While critically important and certainly worthy of study, these tragic cases represent only a subset of the larger universe of police officer line-of-duty deaths (LODDs). They include accidental and non-felonious injures and/or death from car or motorcycle crashes, duty-related illnesses, falls, heart attacks, etc. The lack of research on non-felonious injuries/deaths is troubling given that data suggest LODDs from accidents may outnumber felonious killings.
There are 3 primary, publicly available data sources on police officer LODDs (*click on the links to be directed to each data source):
1) The FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed & Assaulted” (LEOKA) reports
The above figure shows the standardized rates of total, felonious, and non-felonious LODDs from 1970 to 2016. It comes from a forthcoming article in Criminology & Public Policy (co-authored with Mike White and Lisa Dario). These rates are calculated by using counts of the total number of full-time sworn law enforcement officers per year from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and counts of LODDs from the Officer Down Memorial Page (ODMP).
Overall, the law enforcement profession has become increasingly safer, particularly regarding felonious homicides, over the past few decades. The slight uptick in total and felonious homicide deaths in 2011 can be attributed to the officers killed in the September 11th terrorist attacks.
During the 1970s, there was a notable gap between felonious and non-felonious LODDs, with felonious deaths occurring more frequently. By the mid-1990s, this gap disappeared, and during the last 20 years, the annual rates of felonious and non-felonious deaths have been equivalent.
The second figure comes from the final report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which was published in 2015. It displays raw counts of the total number of LODDs as well as the breakdown by firearms, traffic, and other fatalities from 1964-2014. While this figure shows a decline in LODDs over time, it is a bit deceiving since it presents counts/totals and not standardized rates. The number of sworn, full-time police officers drastically increased since the 1960s/70s. The first figure takes such a growth in the number of U.S. officers into account.