Has policing become more or less dangerous over the past few decades, or the past century? Given all the attention to crime, shootings, gang violence, meth-heads, 'home-invasions', weapons proliferation, trigger-happy cops, militarization of police, etc., what is your guess? Is being a police officer more risky now than it was in the bucolic days of our grandparents, or maybe in the booming 1920s? Have LEO deaths been rising in the past 10-20 years, perhaps justifying the "shoot first and shoot to kill" training that is now indoctrinated in our national police academies and police departments?
This is a short and preliminary diary, just to put some data 'out there', spark discussion, and encourage more data-based analysis.
The numerator, Law Enforcement Officers Deaths by year, is from the National Law Enforcement Officers (LEO) Memorial Fund, http://www.nleomf.org/... (As a group sympathetic to police families, their data would if anything err on the side of over-reporting police on-the-job deaths, but I assume it is 100% accurate. Kudos to Kossack jeremybloom for finding and posting this link!) In short: how many LEOs are killed/year in the US?
The denominator I used for now is the total US population, from the US Census Bureau. How many LEOs are killed per year, per million US residents? (One would expect that as the population grows, the number of LEOs killed would grow in rough proportion, other things being equal.)
Click past the Orange Insignia of Nosy Kossacks to find out the answers, with data for every year from 1900 to 2013...
And the answer is...
Policing has become much safer over the past few decades, with fewer police officers killed on the job per total US population than any time since 1900.
These two graphs help tell the story:
Unprecedented safety of being a US cop, 1900-2013
USA police deaths per year, from 1900 to 2013
(I'd like a third graph that shows LEO deaths/total # LEOs. I'll happily update if anyone has that data.)
The peak danger period for police was in the 1920s, perhaps due to Prohibition, with 297 police deaths (2.41 per million population). There was a smaller peak from 1960-1974, perhaps due to civil upheavals, protest marches, riots, anti-war demonstrations, drugs, etc. (2001 shows a blip because out of 241 total officer deaths in 2001, 72 law-enforcement officers were killed on 9/11, 71 of them at the WTC and one in United Flight 93. Those losses are heartfelt but not germaine to debates over police shooting US citizens. The remaining 170 killed nationwide that year was about average for that period.)
Overall since 1900 and since 1974, there has been a drop in LEO deaths, down to the unprecedented low, last year, of 100 police fatalities (0.32/million population). That's the good news.
For some additional perspective, policing is far from the most dangerous job in the US. Far more fishermen than police are killed on the job. More logging workers are killed. More pilots and flight engineers. More structural iron and steel workers. More farmers and ranchers are killed on the job, than police. Farmers! More roofers are killed. More electrical power-line workers. More truck drivers. More garbage and recycling workers. More construction laborers. (Source: Forbes http://www.forbes.com/...) Yet despite their high death tolls, we don't give these workers a free pass to circumvent any of the Ten Commandments, including killing people. The relatively low level of risks police face do not justify the level of and increase in police violence -- especially against unarmed citizens, kids, and others who do not pose a serious threat. True, no-one is intentionally trying to kill these other professionals, but that's a distinction without a difference: the basic point is that despite all the hoopla about how dangerous it is to be a cop, being a law-enforcement officer is less dangerous than being a farmer, fisherman, garbage worker, pilot, logger, roofer, construction worker, or truck driver, which puts it in some context, as do the historical trends.
Future research: Ideally, we will find good data on the total number of LEO's in the US, by year, from 1900 to the present, and do a third graph showing (police deaths)/(total # of police). Using total US population is a rough proxy for this. From the NLEOMF, we know that "there are more than 900,000 sworn law enforcement officers now serving in the United States, which is the highest figure ever." Given that the number of police deaths has declined to an historical low over the past century, and the total number of police has climbed to an historical high, then we can conclude that the third chart (deaths/total # LEOs) will show even more of a decline than in the two charts shown here. But I haven't yet found comprehensive, reliable, robust, annual data on the total number, for past decades. So if anyone has reliable data on this, please speak up in comments, or messages, or do an updated diary yourself. Thanks!
We need to look forward and look for solutions to current problems. Every society needs police. We need, want, and deserve good police, who have been trained with values Americans share, who are governed well, and who are subject to oversight from responsible citizens boards and other elected officials. Good data, responsibly used, can help.