Title: How Often Are Police Shot in the Line of Duty?
Headings: How Often Are Police Shot in the Line of Duty?
Law Enforcement
How Often Are Police Shot in the Line of Duty?
How often are police shot in the line of duty?
Is policing more dangerous in certain states?
How do officer shootings affect the mindset of police?

Content: But the “war on cops” that some news reports and police advocates describe isn’t backed up by evidence. A new study from criminologists Justin Nix from the University of Nebraska Omaha and Michael Sierra-Arévalo from the University of Texas at Austin adds more data to the debate, while rejecting the notion that the profession has become increasingly unsafe. Here are the facts about officer-targeted violence. How often are police shot in the line of duty? In a study published in Criminology & Public Policy on July 20, Nix and Sierra-Arévalo analyzed fatal and non-fatal shootings of police officers between 2014 and 2019. The analysis relies on data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks shootings through media and police reports. During the study period, 1,467 local and state law enforcement officers were shot in 1,185 incidents, 249 of which were fatal. That works out to, on average, 245 officers shot per year, 42 of them fatally. The study excludes federal officers, corrections officers, and shootings of officers by colleagues. Nix and Sierra-Arévalo observed a spike in firearm assaults against officers in 2016, but did not find a sustained increase over the six-year period of their survey.