How Officers Are Dying: Trends in Felonious Officer Deaths
by GunRights4USAugust 12, 2010
By Benjamin Kurata - Action Target Newsletter
I recently received an alarming e-mail from one of Law Enforcement websites that I am a member of:
“Officer Deaths up 42% This Year” from this time last year.
I have to admit that every time I receive an “Officer Down” e-mail I experience a knot in my guts, and hesitate to open the e-mail for a second, knowing that it details another death of a Law Enforcement Officer in the US.
Observation 1: Multiple Officer Deaths / injuries per Incident
We are losing more officers per incident than in the past:
March 21, 2009: Oakland, CA, 4 Officers killed
April 4, 2009: Pittsburgh, PA, 3 Officers killed
April 25, 2009: Okaloosa County, FL, 2 Officers killed
July 26, 2009, Seminole County, OK, 2 Officers killed
November 29, 2009: Lakewood, WA, 4 Officers killed
May 20, 2010, West Memphis, AR, 2 Officers killed, 2 Officers severely wounded
Observation 2: More Officers are Being Ambushed
Whether pre-planned (Oakland, Spokane) or hasty (Arkansas), violent criminals are pre-planning aggressive, violent attacks on Officers. They have already made up their minds, mentally planned, rehearsed, and equipped their next encounter with Law Enforcement. They know what they are going to do the next time they are stopped on the street or a uniform knocks on the front door. They have an incredible tactical advantage when they initiate the attack as the Officer is on the wrong side of the action versus reaction curve. In a later article I intend to touch upon the psychological and perceptual aspects of ambush avoidance, but the important thing to keep in mind for now is that THEY ARE BRINGING THE FIGHT TO US!
Observation 3: More Officers are Being Killed by Rifles
The most popular rifle caliber used against LEOs is the 7.62 X 39 mm COMBLOC round. In most variants, the projectile is steel jacketed and is an armor piercing round that will defeat all soft body armor and most parts of a patrol vehicle. I have also personally seen the same projectile defeat cinder block and brick walls easily. The point is, when facing an assailant armed with a rifle, there is very little material that can be considered hard cover. Rather than being pinned down behind something that will not stop the incoming projectiles, we might consider borrowing a page from the military and consider an aggressive counter attack with accurate, aimed gunfire as cover.
Learning points from the 2006 FBI Publication, “Violent Encounters”:
Please keep in mind that we are talking about officer deaths. The 2006 publication, “Violent Encounters” compares felonious officer deaths with similar studies conducted in 1992 and 1997. I will be comparing stats from the 1992 and 2006 studies.
Observation 1: Deaths at Disturbance Calls / Arrest Situations / Crimes in Progress Dropped from 52% to 38% of Officer Deaths between 1992 to 2006.
Observation 2: Deaths at Traffic Pursuits / Stops went up from 22% to 30%. Keep in mind that a lot of officer fatalities may start as a traffic stop, escalate into a foot pursuit, and conclude as a hasty ambush set up by the attacker against the officer.
So What? Deaths at Disturbance Calls / Arrest Situations / Crimes in Progress and Traffic Pursuits / Stops accounted for 68% in 2006. These types of situations remain the most dangerous activities LEOs engage in.
Observation 3: Cop Killers Practice with Their Weapons More Often than most Police Officers. In 2006, 81% of violent offenders practiced an average on 23 times a year. I know of very few departments that do in-service or qualification courses of fire 23 times a year.
So what? There’s a pervasive belief that “bad guys can’t shoot”. The truth is they practice just as much, if not more, than the average LEO. According to the 2006 study, with the handgun, the Officers were successful in putting rounds on their attacker(s) 39% of the time, but the violent attackers were successful in putting rounds on the Officer 68% of the time. The average distance for the officer delivering rounds was 25 feet, the average distance for the violent offender was 15 feet. Hence the saying I learned many years ago, “Proximity negates skill.” When the shotgun was the weapon of choice, the officers were successful 100% of the time with the average distance of engagement 23 feet. In this study, violent attackers were not able to put any rounds on LEOs with a shotgun. When the rifle was the weapon of choice, in this study (keep in mind that this study was prior to most of the recent Officer fatalities where Officers were killed with rifles), neither LEOs nor violent attackers were successful in putting rounds on each other, but note that the average distance of engagement was 188 feet, so operator ability may have been a factor.
In closing, there are several trends in Law Enforcement Officer deaths, some are familiar to us (most dangerous types of contacts) some may be new (the fact that violent offenders practice as often as they do). Whether confirming what we know already or giving us new information, the goal is to save officer’s lives when the talking stops and the shooting starts.
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GR4U - Speaking now as someone who no longer grants AUTOMATIC support to the law enforcement community, I have an observation of my own to share: Is it possible that more people are coming to realize the typical LEO is not your friend? I challenge you for ONE WEEK to check out the daily news feed from Injustice Everywhere. Just ONE WEEK - that's all I ask.
Lessons best learned
by GunRights4USAugust 4, 2010
Mike over at Sipsey Street Irregulars uses this report to expound on the lessons we should all have learned when we look back over the 20th century and examine the actions of Hiter, Stalin, Pol Pot, and various tyrants that butchered so many of their own people.
Mike's Lesson Number 1 should be etched into our hearts and minds:
If a bureaucrat, or a soldier sent by a bureaucrat, comes to knock down your door and take you someplace you do not want to go because of who you are or what you think -- kill him. If you can, kill the politician who sent him. You will likely die anyway, and you will be saving someone else the same fate. For it is a universal truth that the intended victims always far outnumber the tyrant's executioners.If you read absolutely nothing today, please go read these two blog posts, and then give some thought to those whom you love and what their future is likely to be in this new America.
By the way, you DO know that War is not the 20th century's biggest killer don't you?
I leave you with the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."
Introducing another blog to the daily fare…
by GunRights4USJuly 30, 2010
My sincere apologies to MikeH for having missed his excellent blog. One look and I knew it was a new addition to my list of places I must regularly peruse.
Go have a look at BEHIND THE PARAPET and get motivated!
Pink Floyd – Another Brick in the Wall
by Greg FarberJuly 14, 2010
The Demokratic party of haters, infiltrators, anti-capitalists, anti hunting, the party that is anti-freedom and anti-individual rights are attempting to bring us to their version of dictatorship and destruction through any means they can invent.. dictatorship and destruction. It’s only a matter of time, only a matter of time. Their upbringing is going to bring us down.. It’s only a matter of time.
” a statist system — whether of a communist, fascist, Nazi, socialist or ‘welfare’ type — is based on the … government’s unlimited power, which means: on the rule of brute force. … Under statism, the government is not a policeman, but a legalized criminal that holds the power to use physical force in any manner and for any purpose it pleases against legally disarmed, defenseless victims. ” —Ayn Rand
It’s only a matter of time..
Thick as bricks.
Quote of the day
by GunRights4USJune 17, 2010
Poster EightSeven's post #8
Lessons learned
by GunRights4USMay 26, 2010
Here's just ONE of the points that really resonated with me.
3) The Bad People will have lots of help from your neighbors: The most disturbing moment for me in the KGB museum was not in the execution or interrogation/torture cells. It was realizing, while moving through the excellent exhibits on the mass deportations of Lithuanians after "liberation" by the Soviets in 1944, that most of the deportees (many of whom were subsequently executed or starved or died of exposure and disease) had been betrayed to the NKVD/KGB by their neighbors.
Go read it all, and in the process, work to expunge the false notion from your mind that it can't happen here!
From a good friend and fellow patriot…
by GunRights4USApril 23, 2010
These days he's pursuing his law degree and continually chaffs at being surrounded every day by leftist ideologues who, for the most part are a pack of educated idiots.
In his own words, here's a confrontation he just had with a fellow law student:
Well, I decided to record a transcript of the "che shirt conversation" for antiquity.
These are the words to the best of my knowledge. Things get a bit hazy when I start mentally preparing for a fistfight... my blood starts pumping, my neck swells up, and my brain goes on auto pilot.
I was riding the elevator down a couple of floors. It's packed. There's this guy who is the antithesis of me: black, fancy baseball cap with a perfectly flat brim canted to one side, and the stickers still on it. He was also wearing a brand new "Che shirt" with che in blazing bright red. He also had a matching shiny new Che necklace.
So here I am, the opposite: scruffy, dirty ol combat boots, and a hat with a don't tread on me gadsden flag that I sewed on myself.
It was so crowded in there I couldn't really say anything. I gave him the death stare usually only reserved for terrorists or serial child molester types. It was enough to where he "felt it" and eventually made eye contact with me before exiting.
So I sat there in all my classes mulling about it all day, how had I not been a pussy, I should have confronted him about it even crammed in there amongst all those people packed in the elevator.
Well, I had finally forgotten about it, and was walking out the doors into the parking lot.....he was walking in. I almost didn't notice, but when it registered... I saw RED.
I did an about-face and chased him down...
"Hey man, what's up with that shirt?"
"Oh, you like it?"
"No, I F*cking Hate it!"
[his face soured as if I were the vet and I just told him that his puppy had cancer]
"Oh, well, man, [backpeddling] he's just a cultural icon. You got to get over that Cuban revolution thing."
"It's hard for me to get over a dirty socialist mass murderer."
"What?"
"You heard me."
[silence]
"Well...See you on the battlefield..."
******************
With my closing line I gave an upward head nod, implying "you may leave now". Tail between his legs, he quickly rounded the corner.
There was no fistfight, but I got dibbs on that one if someday ever comes.
Ya gotta love The Peoples Cube
by GunRights4USApril 18, 2010
After the "progressive" spokespersons at MSNBC and elsewhere labeled the Tea Party movement "Teabaggers," dismissing their opposition to socialism as deviant sexual practice, many began to wonder what equally deviant term could be applied in retaliation to the "progressives." Suggestions made at the People's Cube later turned up on Breitbart's Big Hollywood. But the "culinary" term didn't catch on, apparently because proponents of individual liberties are largely ignorant of collectivist sexual practices.
That may change with the latest Fistgate scandal, which exposed Obama's Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jenning's proclivity to teach young children such non-conventional sexual techniques as fisting.
~
It's obvious, isn't it, that the progressives' other name is and always has been FISTERS! The science is settled. The debate is over.
As an added bonus, it explains what all the fists on the progressive posters really mean. Every time you raise a fist at a rally for this or that burning issue, remember that the issue is not the issue: FISTING is the issue!
What do we want? Fisting! When do we want it? Now!
It's for the children!
The recommended way to complete your census form
by GunRights4USApril 17, 2010
National Center Staff to Address Tax Day Tea Party
by Tom RemingtonApril 15, 2010
National Center Staff Members Deneen Borelli and Tom Borelli to Speak at Washington, D.C. Tax Day Tea Party
Book on Government-Run Health Care to Be Distributed at Rally
Washington, DC: Two members of the National Center for Public Policy Research staff – Project 21 black leadership network fellow Deneen Borelli and Free Enterprise Project director Tom Borelli – are scheduled to speak at approximately 6:00 PM and 7:15 PM, respectively, at the FreedomWorks Foundation’s April 15 “2010 Tax Day Tea Party” on the grounds of the Washington Monument.
National Center Executive Director David Almasi and other staff members also will be on hand to distribute free copies of the National Center book “Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care” by Amy Ridenour and Ryan Balis.
In her prepared remarks, Deneen Borelli addresses the criticism of the Tea Party movement as being “monochromatic” and implicitly racist. She says: “President Obama’s progressive agenda is driving our economy and liberties over a cliff… They expect us to keep quiet, sit down and just pay those taxes. That’s why progressives hate the Tea Party movement – we make too much noise! That’s why they are trying to discredit us by calling us names: If you’re white you’re called a racist and a redneck, and if you’re black you’re a token, ‘Uncle Tom’ or a traitor… Playing the race card is a losing game. It’s old. It’s tired. What else you got?”
Tom Borelli, in his prepared remarks, makes a call to action based on how some corporate chiefs are complicit in promoting a progressive agenda, including ObamaCare and cap-and-trade legislation. He says: “It’s time for us to hold CEOs accountable… It’s time ‘We the People’ let CEOs know that there will be a price to pay for promoting laws that will loot us of our the liberty. Every day, we can vote with our wallets by avoiding products from companies that are selling us out. It makes no sense for us to buy products from companies who will use our money against us!”
The Borellis have spoken at Tea Party rallies in Pennsylvania and New York at the FreedomWorks Foundation’s 9.12 rally in Washington last year. Earlier this week, they spoke about the Tea Party movement at a series of events held at Marlboro College in Marlboro, Vermont.
The National Center For Public Policy Research is a conservative, free-market non-profit think-tank established in 1982. It is supported by the voluntary gifts of over 100,000 individual recent supporters, and receives less than one percent of its revenue from corporate sources.
FreedomWorks and the National Center for Public Policy Research can be visited online at www.freedomworks.org and www.nationalcenter.org respectively.
