Domestic violence plays a grim starring role in a new report about how police officers end up dead.
More than 20 percent of the 132 officers killed on duty while responding to dispatcher calls or initiating investigations of suspicious activity from 2010 to 2014 were murdered during a domestic dispute, according to a new analysis of data from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. Department of Justice researchers zeroed in on those 132 killings from 684 total reports of on-duty deaths at law enforcement agencies around the country in the five-year period.
Domestic disputes get special attention in the report. Out of 91 on-duty fatalities during a response to a dispatcher call, 20 stemmed from a domestic dispute.
Another officer was killed when he approached what seemed to be a traffic accident but turned out to be a domestic dispute, and is counted among the 41 officers killed during self-initiated law enforcement activity rather than in response to a call.
Domestic Violence Poses Special Dangers
Intimate partner violence has long been linked to other modes of fatal violence. For every five mass shootings nationwide from 2009 to 2012, two began with a gunman killing a girlfriend, wife, or ex-wife. In a separate five-year dataset on mass shootings, nearly 60 percent of the gunmen went after a family member or partner. The study released Friday doesn’t show similarly high rates of DV involvement in violence against police, but it does indicate that domestic disputes are a particularly dangerous part of cops’ jobs.
Domestic disturbances “incidents represented the highest number of fatal types of calls for service and were also the underlying cause of law enforcement fatalities for several other calls for service,” the report notes.
The idea that DV calls are particularly dangerous relative to other duties appears to be controversial in police circles. The authors note that a 2011 article in a magazine for police chiefs labeled the claim a myth. A retired criminal justice professor told the Washington Post that the new report’s methodology overstates the role of domestic violence calls, and said it would be more appropriate to lump robberies, burglaries, and shots-fired calls together into a single hypothetical category.
Most Deaths Happen On The Road
The report focused on dispatcher calls and officer investigations because they are the most common day-to-day tasks for cops. But it notes that another 134 officers were killed in other circumstances, including several ambush-style assaults.
The leading single cause of police deaths, however, was car accidents rather than malevolent attacks. Law enforcement officers died in vehicle crashes 272 times in the five-year dataset, while 266 were killed by people they were interacting with while doing their jobs.
Twenty-six police officers were killed during traffic stops by someone in the car they were detaining. Forty-one died in car accidents while rushing to respond to an “Officer Needs Assistance” call. And 194 of the nearly 700 on-duty fatalities from the five-year period came from traffic accidents where the officers were not actively responding to any particular call or threat, including officers being struck by other vehicles while on foot.
More than 28 percent of the total on-duty deaths in the five-year span were caused by traffic accidents that happened while the officers were making normal rounds. Another 11 percent of the officers who died on duty from 2010–2014 were killed in traffic accidents while responding to a specific dispatch call.
Almost 13 percent of on-duty officer deaths are attributed to a “job-related illness.” Another 9 happened because of accidents, training mishaps, storms, or “various unpredictable circumstances” that didn’t constitute attacks on cops.
No ‘War On Cops’
Roughly 39 percent of all law enforcement on-the-job deaths nationwide over a five-year span were killings, nearly all of them at gunpoint. A wide majority of law enforcement deaths happened by accident rather than out of malevolent violence. Data for 2015 is preliminary, but suggests that pattern continues. Traffic accidents, training accidents, and health failures claimed 78 on-duty lives, compared to 39 deaths in attacks by armed civilians.
The numbers poke holes in the idea that growing popular protest movements against police violence have produced a “war on cops,” who die in vehicle accidents just as often as in attacks — and roughly twice as often as in ambush-style murders.
Civilians get killed by police far more often. Law enforcement officers shot and killed some 990 people in 2015 and another 491 in the first half of this year, according to the Washington Post’s award-winning tracking of police shootings.
That’s almost 1,500 police killings in 18 months, compared to 305 law enforcement officers attacked and killed in the line of duty in the six-year span of numbers in the new report. Police officers have shot and killed about 82 people each month nationwide since the start of last year, and have been killed by attackers roughly 4 times per month going back to the start of 2010.
