By TIM MCDONALD
Local Columnist
April 29, 2008 04:58 pm
—
“There’s still crime in the city,
Said the cop on the beat,
I don’t know if I can stop it
I feel like meat on the street
They paint my car like a target.”
— From Neil Young “Crime in the City”
•••
It is happening far too often and not only in the city. Calls from law enforcement officers of “officer down” elicit rapid response of all available brother and sister officers to assistance. In the Louisville metropolitan area alone, the names of Grignon, Denzinger and White were three too many to become targets.
It happened again last week, but this time in a rural area and for one of the most dangerous calls an officer must respond to; domestic disturbance. Officer Mark Meyer, along with Officer Scott Maples, and Sgt. David Tenney, were “ambushed” by a possibly drunken man while responding to a domestic situation in New Washington. The suspect allegedly fired multiple shots with a 20-gauge shotgun toward the officers at about 11:25 p.m., with several pellets hitting Meyer in the cheek, head and shoulder.
In California, law enforcement officers deal with gang ambushes. I can’t ever forget the scene in one California city when two bank robbers had better equipment than the police sent to stop them. The suspects seemed indestructible, firing repeatedly and taking fire from the police without falling.
I seriously believe the world has gone crazy. In the last month, several incidents have been reported of elementary school and middle school students plotting murder against a teacher in Florida and in Louisville a classmate. They even went to the point of planning what to do with the bodies and concocting detailed alibis. Students lure other students into a situation in which they are brutally beaten then film the event and place it on You Tube. In one case, several adults knew of the plan to beat up a girl but not one acted to intervene or stop it from happening.
Are the deliberate killings of police officers a part of this wider sense of craziness? “There just seems to be a greater willingness on the part of these bad guys to take out a police officer,” Miami Police Chief John Timoney told Time Magazine in 2007,. “I see that locally here. Then you look at it nationally, there’s [also] been a huge increase.” For the year 2007, shooting deaths of law enforcement officers increased from 52 to 69, a rise of about 33 percent according to the data released jointly by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund and Concerns of Police Survivors.
The report counted six times in which multiple officers were shot and killed in the same incident, such as a shooting in Odessa, Texas, that left three officers dead while responding to a domestic violence call. Domestic violence and traffic stops were the circumstances that most commonly led to fatal police shootings this year, the report found. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, Inc., thirty officers have been killed nationwide to date in 2008. Seventy three percent of those officers killed were wearing body armor.
A total of 1,671 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty during the past 10 years, an average of one death every 53 hours or 167 per year. There were 181 law enforcement officers killed in 2007. On average, more than 56,000 law enforcement officers are assaulted each year, resulting in over 16,000 injuries. During the past ten years, more officers were killed feloniously on Friday than any other day of the week. The fewest number of felonious fatalities occurred on Sunday. Over the past decade, more officers were killed between 8:01 p.m. and 10 p.m. than during any other two-hour period.
Law enforcement officers are sworn to serve and protect but who is protecting them? Each time an officer stops a car for a traffic violation, they potentially risk their life. When they do subdue an individual that is in the wrong or are involved in a shooting, there are many individuals and organizations ready to question and crucify the officer.
Officers have but a split second to make a life and death decision. While they have training on how to approach suspects in traffic stops, planned raids and arrests, an assailant lying in wait is another matter entirely.
I am not a police officer but have friends in the law enforcement brotherhood. I don’t know how we can make an officer safer in situations that took the life of Deputy Frank Denzinger in the summer of 2007, and nearly claimed the life of Clark County Deputy Mark Meyer in April 2008. Are there situations that may require training in a different technique when arriving on a scene that is potentially volatile? If an individual is hell bent on suicide-by-cop can we effectively train to protect an officer?
I am not suggesting that we necessarily allocate funds to study the situation but it is worth re-evaluating current training techniques to look for opportunities for improvement.
I believe that all law abiding citizens respect law enforcement and the courtesy shown when we are stopped for a traffic violation. We also want their protection as well, but we also need to look at ways we can protect our officers.
Tim McDonald is a local educator, lecturer and doctoral student in organizational leadership. He can be reached at timothy.mcdonald@agsfaculty.indwes.edu.
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Tim McDonald, local columnist