Remember when Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) President Ron Smith claimed last August that the Obama administration was waging a "war on cops"?
Data released by the FBI on Monday shows that 2015 was one of the safest years for U.S. law enforcement in recorded history, following a sustained trend of low numbers of on-duty deaths in recent decades.
The FBI’s preliminary statistics, part of a larger Uniform Crime Reporting release coming in the fall, indicate that 41 police officers were intentionally killed in the U.S. while in the line of duty in 2015. Every officer death is tragic, of course, but this number marks a decrease of nearly 20 percent compared to the 51 law enforcement officers killed in 2014.
When I texted with Smith about this issue last year, I called him "delusional." Mayor Ed Murray said he "absolutely disagreed" with Smith. Smith quietly deleted the Facebook post that prompted the exchange, but never publicly retracted his statements.
As Daniel Bier wrote last year for Newsweek:
It’s safer to be a cop than it is to live in Baltimore. It’s safer to be a cop than it is to be a fisher, logger, pilot, roofer, miner, trucker or taxi driver. It’s safer to be a cop today than it’s been in years, decades, or even a century, by some measures.
There are real liabilities to inflating the threats to police. If you tell cops over and over that they’re in a war, they’re under siege, they’re under attack, and that citizens are the enemy—instead of the people they’re supposed to protect—you’re going to create an atmosphere of fear, tension, and hostility that can only end badly, as it has for so many people.
