The "WAR ON COPS" that isn't

Despite what you may have read, it's safer to be a police officer today than it has been in 35 years.
Radley Balko, Reason Magazine

Between January 20 and January 25, 13 police officers were shot in the U.S., five of them fatally. Two officers in St. Petersburg, Florida, were killed while trying to arrest a suspect accused of aggravated battery. Two more were killed in Miami while trying to arrest a suspected murderer. An officer in Oregon was seriously wounded and another in Indiana was killed after they were shot during routine traffic stops. In another incident, four officers were injured in Detroit when a man about to be charged in a murder investigation walked into a police station and opened fire.

Some police advocates drew unsupported conclusions from this rash of attacks, claiming they were tied to rising anti-police sentiment, anti-government protest, or a lack of adequate gun control laws.

In a January interview with NPR, Jon Shane, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the shootings "follow some bit of a larger trend in the United States," which he described as an "overriding sense of entitlement and ‘don't tread on me." Craig W. Floyd, chairman of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, told UPI, "It's a very troubling trend where officers are being put at greater risk than ever before." UPI reported that several police leaders thought the shootings "reflected a broader lack of respect for authority."
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Dig into these articles, and you'll find no real evidence of an increase in anti-police violence, let alone one that can be traced to anti-police rhetoric, gun sales, disrespect for authority, or "don't tread on me" sentiment.
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In fact, the number of on-the-job police fatalities has dropped nearly 50 percent in the last two decades, even as the total number of cops has doubled.
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