I don’t think I ever posted about the tragic shooting of a police recruit while in training. Sometimes if you have nothing nice to say, it’s best to say nothing at all.
But it was just brought to my attention that the BPD is now on their seventh head of E&T [academy director] in the last 19 months. You think that might be a clue?
Remember that fear mongering from last year?
“Which one?” you might say.
The one about more police officer getting killed? Forty officers were shot and killed in 2008. In 2011 that number increased to 67! Even the New York Times go in the act: “72 officers were killed by perpetrators in 2011, a 25 percent increase from the previous year and a 75 percent increase from 2008.” There was lots of talk about a new environment in which criminals felt more “emboldened” to assault law enforcement officers.
I was asked about this a few times last year and said bullshit (I wasn’t quoted). It was probably just a statistical spike (albeit one with a lot of dead police officers on the end of it). Part of the reason I didn’t think this was a trend was that in 2007, 66 officers were shot and killed. Maybe 2008 was the aberration.
Well the good news is that the number of officers shot and killed went down from 67 in 2011 to 47 in 2012. Sometimes it’s best to just be lucky.
Update: Three offices were shotand injured last night in NYC.
Who left the hospital today after being shot in the head. He too, was just doing his job.
From the New York Times:
Officer Figoski, a father of four daughters and the brother of a retired city police officer, was shot with an illegal semiautomatic weapon, Mr. Bloomberg said. He had made over 200 arrests, nearly half of them felony arrests, Mr. Kelly said. He worked out of the 75th Precinct, one of the city’s most crime-ridden, where has has spent most of his career.
…
[The murderer] has five prior arrests and was wanted in North Carolina on a warrant for aggravated assault.
Oh, jeeze, I wish it didn’t have to end this way.
San Diego Police Officer Jeremy Henwood’s last act before being ambushed and killed by a suicidal gunman was to buy a 13-year-old boy cookies.
Detective Rice, the officer shot last week on Harford Road, evidently has had some medical setbacks. I wish him the best.
What is it about the 2300 block of Harford?
Here’s a picture from March, 2001, I took on the 2300 block of Harford. It’s the street memorial to Agent Cowdery.
On Harford road by armed guy on a bike. The suspect was also shot. The story in the Sun.
“He listens to scanners and races to locations where police are called, a source told the New York Post.”
The death of a Nassau County police officer got me thinking about cases of police officers shot by other cops. There’s the belief out there that black officers are much more at risk of being mistaken for suspects than are white officers. It’s also been said (by me?) that such accidental mistaken-identity shootings almost never happen to white officers. Officer Breitkopf is white.
So this afternoon I went to the Officer Down Memorial Page. I’ve found the data at Officer Down to be quite reliable and comprehensive. I looked at all deaths involving accidental police shooting of police officers. This does not include officers who were shot and lived. Or officers who didn’t meet Officer Down’s criteria for being killed on duty. But generally when officers get in any such situation, they’re considered on duty. And I wouldn’t expect including those data to change the basic findings.
I went back as far as 1960 and looked at the descriptions to determine which officers were killed after being mistaken for suspects (ie: not “friendly fire” or accidents–though I should point out that training grounds seem particularly prone to accidental lethal shooting). At least 47 officers have been killed in such split-second cases of mistaken identity. I then looked at the pictures of the deceased officer to judge race (they were all pretty clear cut). I then coded for the circumstances of the killings based on the description given. (So, what did you do this afternoon?) I ended up selected only those killed since 1976 because half of those between 1960-1976 didn’t have pictures. That brought the total number of officers number down to 28 (which was lower than I expected).
Here are the basic facts:
Since 1976, at least 28 officers have been shot and killed by other police who thought the police officer was a bad guy with a gun. (Or bad girl. Two officers killed were women, which surprised me.)
15 of these officers were white; 11 were black; 2 were hispanic. (I was surprised to find that so many white officers have been killed in such circumstances. Before yesterday, I knew of exactly two cases, and one of those was from 1972.)
3 officers were in uniform (all 3 of whom were white); 22 were in plainclothes. (And there were a few unknowns.)
19 were off duty before the incident started; 9 were on duty.
Racially, the only thing that jumps out is that 8 of 11 black officers were off dutyand 14 in 15 white officers who were on duty.
39% of officer shot and killed in cases of mistaken identity were African-American. But what does that mean? What’s the denominator? Should it be the percentage of black officers? Do we even know what percentage of police nationwide are black? I asked the kind people at the National Black Police Association if they could tell me. I got a quick reply saying they didn’t have such a number handy, but would guess around 10 percent (or 80,000 out of 800,000) of police nationwide are African-American.
Or perhaps the denominator should be the race of those working plainclothes? Or narcotics (about one-third of cases I could determine involved drug enforement)?
Or maybe we should look at the race of officers living in higher-crime districts? That seems to be the biggest contributing factor with regards to black officers getting involved in off-duty incidents.
Perhaps it’s more important to look at the demographics of the area in which the shooting took place? Or the race of the suspects in the incident? Or the race of the police officer who fired the lethal shot?
Of course most police officers officers are not black, so compared to white officers, black officers are disproportionately killed (about four times more likely) by other police mistaking them for suspects. Is this because police are much more likely to perceive any black man as a threat? Or are there simply more cases in which minority police officers end up in a situations where they’re out of uniform and holding a gun? I, for one, was surprised to see the issue isn’t so, well, black and white.
Nassau County Officer Geoffrey Breitkopf was killed in case of mistaken identity.
In Brooklyn, NYPD Officer Alain Schaberger was killed trying to arrest a violent man, who pushed him over a stoop railing. “Mr. Villanueva had been arrested at least three times on charges of domestic violence against the same woman he was accused of threatening Sunday.”