Thin Blue Line: America's Police Under Assualt

A 38-year old police officer was viciously gunned down last year during a bank robbery in Mississippi.  A nine year veteran of the Tupelo Police Department, Kevin Stauffer left behind a young wife and two children. There were no national headlines about his death.

As the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, demonstrates, the news media are more interested in covering racially charged events.  The death of a police officer hardly rates national mention.  In the last ten years, more than 1,500 police and detectives have died in the line of duty, including 568 by gunfire.

Crime fighting has taken its toll on America's police.  Since the first recorded police death in 1791, there have been more than 20,000 officers killed in the line of duty.  Violent crime, although down in recent years, still exceeds 1 million incidents nationwide every year.

Police not only are gunshot victims.  Others die in motor vehicle accidents while chasing suspects, drownings, vehicle assaults, accidental shootings, stabbings and illnesses related to their duties. It is a hazardous profession with very little room for error.  

The deadliest year since the dawn of the new century was 2001, when 71 officers were killed during the September 11 terrorist attacks alone.  For that year, 140 officers were slain, including three who were ambushed by criminals.

Despite those numbers, the 1920's were far worse for law enforcement officers.  That decade ended with with 2,390 police officers losing their lives in deadly shootings. The deadliest year, however, was 1930, when 297 officers were killed.      

Thousands more police officers are assaulted every year in the line of duty.  During the last decade, there were more than 519,000 assaults, resulting in injuries to 154,836 police officers, according to FBI statistics.  The average over that period was 57,892 assaults each year.

Although shooting deaths of police are on the decline, even one fatality is too many for the thin blue line that maintains the peace in communities throughout America.  The most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate there are 780,000 police and detectives keeping the country safe each day.

As a result of police deaths, many departments have purchased body armor to help protect the men and women in blue.  However, body armor is not a panacea.  In 2012, a total of 51 police officers died while wearing body armor.  But the gear has been credited with the reduction in gun deaths.

The number one killer of police officers is not gunfire.  More than twice as many law enforcement officers every year die from suicide than are killed in traffic accidents or assaults, according to a 2012 national study underwritten by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP).

Astonishingly, for every one suicide, the study's authors estimate there are 25 attempts.  Those sobering numbers are testimony to a high risk occupation where law enforcement officers are exposed to the worst human atrocities while dealing with often potentially life threatening confrontations.

Unfortunately, the media seldom paint a fair and unbiased picture of police.  Good police work goes unreported, but there is nothing like the scent of scandal or wrongdoing to get the media digging for details to expose the dirty blue laundry.

This does not mean police should not be scrutinized and held to high standards.  Those officers who break the law they are sworn to uphold deserve swift and vigorous justice.  What is lacking is balance in the reporting of incidents involving police.

That equilibrium has been missing in most news media coverage, particularly in reports that involve use of police force.  That fact has not gone unnoticed by the chiefs of police.

"In large part, the public perception of police use of force is framed and influenced by media depictions which present unrealistic and often outlandish representations of law enforcement and the policing profession," the IACP group said in a 2012 report.

What was true then is still true today.  Just look at the one-sided, incendiary media coverage coming out of Ferguson, Missouri.