Good news, STF?

[Guns Guns Guns]

72 officers were killed by perpetrators in 2011, a 25 percent increase from the previous year and a 75 percent increase from 2008.


The 2011 deaths were the first time that more officers were killed by suspects than car accidents...


The F.B.I., which has tracked officer deaths since 1937, paid for a study conducted by John Jay College that found that in many cases the officers were trying to arrest or stop a suspect who had previously been arrested for a violent crime.






http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/u...-the-rise.html?_r=1&google_editors_picks=true

 

[SmarterthanYou]

http://www.theagitator.com/2012/04/07/the-war-on-cops-that-wasnt-and-still-isnt/

On-the-job cop deaths had been falling for 20 years. Those numbers couldn’t keep dropping forever. And the claims of some sort of surge in violent anti-cop, anti-government anger were belied by the fact that non-fatal assaults on police officers were also dropping.

In retrospect, those of us who were skeptical of the hysterical headlines look to have been correct. While January and February of last year saw a few unusual mass shootings of multiple police officers, those months appear to have been anomalies. Police deaths in the remaining months of 2011 were mostly on par with prior years.

So what about this year? Police officer deaths are down 48 percent from last year. Firearms deaths specifically are down 58 percent. And as the watchdog blog Clark County Criminal Cops points out, a significant number of the firearms deaths were actually cops who were shot by other cops.

The police watchdog websites are still out there. The Tea Party and “Don’t Tread on Me” patriot movements are still going strong. You also now have the Occupy movements, which foment a lot of anti-police sentiment (in many cases, justifiably). Gun owners certainly haven’t been melting down their weapons en masse. And yet officer fatalities and violence against police officers have nosedived. In fact, if the current pace keeps up, we’ll actually hit an all-time low in police fatalities this year. And these are just the raw numbers. They aren’t percentages of the total police force (which has been growing), or police deaths in comparison to deaths in the larger population.

All worth keeping in mind should the numbers slightly tick up again—as any statistics pulled from a large population of people are bound to do from time to time—and the media and police groups again start placing blame, and calling for us to grant the police more powers, less oversight, and bigger guns.