It's "war on cops" season again, in which politicians and pundits toss around the political football of officer safety. So now is an opportune time to look at the dangers of police work.
First, the big headline numbers: fatalities and homicides.
The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF) keeps track of all the officers who have died on the job, from any cause, going back to the 19th Century.
Looking at officer fatalities per million residents since 1900, the broad sweep of history shows that police work has been getting a lot safer since Prohibition ended (with a temporary reversal during the 1960s and 1970s).
But, of course, not all fatalities are homicides. In fact, in recent years, only about a third of work-related police deaths have been from murder.
NLEOMF doesn't separately track homicides, but the FBI has its own database for felony killings of police in the past few decades. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has also conducted a national police census every four years since 1992, giving us some reliable estimates for the total number of sworn officers up through 2008.
And no matter how you slice it, police work has been getting a lot safer. Fatalities and murders of police have been falling for decades - per resident, per officer, and even in absolute terms.
