Toll of Officers Slain in Line of Duty Rises

The number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty rose from 51 in 2000 to 142 last year, with 72 of those officers killed in the Sept. 11 attacks alone, an FBI report released Monday said.

“The year 2001 will always be remembered as the year terrorists turned commercial airliners into murder weapons and used them to kill 3,047 innocent people,” the report said. “Counted within that number are 72 local, state and federal enforcement officers, the most officers ever lost in a single day.”

The annual report by the bureau’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program investigates trends and circumstances surrounding the killing of law enforcement officers across the country.

In the Sept. 11 attacks, 69 police, fire and port officers from New York and New Jersey, one agent with the U.S. Secret Service and one FBI agent were killed. An officer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also died aboard Flight 93, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania.

The report notes, however, that excluding those slain in the terrorist attacks, the number of officers killed still increased from 51 in 2000 to 70 in 2001.

But James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University, said that may be misleading because the number of officers killed on the job was uncharacteristically low in the previous two years.

In 1999, 42 officers were killed, and the number was 51 in 2000, according to Department of Justice statistics.

“If you look at the long-term trends, this bounce-back to 70 puts it at a much more typical level,” he said. “It’s not that 70 is so bad, it’s that 51 was so good.”

In fact, the report found that in the last five years, the number of officers killed has decreased 1.4%. “If you look at the statistics, you see that there’s been a general downward trend,” Fox said.

The report also examines the number of killings based on geographic region. The largest concentration was in the southern states, where 29 officers were killed in 2001.

In California, the number of slain officers rose from two in 2000 to six in 2001. Of the 133 officers killed in the western U.S. since 1992, almost half -- 63 -- were killed in California. The most recent killing of a law enforcement officer in the region took place last weekend when a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy was fatally shot in Norwalk while investigating reports of gunfire.

The report also examines the circumstances involving the killings, noting that there is often a tendency to assume that officers are slain only in situations that pit them against antagonistic individuals. While the majority of officers were killed either investigating suspicious people or making arrests, the report notes that in 2001, some officers were slain while coming to the aid of people perceived to be in danger.

“Ten officers were the victims of violent attacks that were as unsuspected as they were unprovoked,” the report says.

“In three of these instances, the officer walked into an ambush situation; in seven others, the officer was gunned down for no apparent reason, perhaps just for being a law officer.”

The remaining officers were killed while transporting prisoners, following traffic pursuits or by mentally deranged people.

City police departments employed a total of 105 of the officers who died, county police and sheriff’s offices employed 24 and three were employed by state agencies. Four of the officers were employed by federal agencies, and six were working as police officers in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.

“Law enforcement is a high-risk occupation,” the report concludes.

“The men and women who serve the public in this way put themselves in danger as a matter of routine.”