General Discussion

ericson00

(2,707 posts) Sun Jul 10, 2016, 04:03 PM Jul 2016

Police are safer under Obama than they have been in decades

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-analysis-police-safer-under-obama-20160709-story.html

In the aftermath of the mass shooting of a dozen police officers in Dallas this week, some conservatives rushed to lay blame for the incident at the feet of the Obama administration.

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These statements are part of a broader narrative of a so-called "war on cops" carried out by the Obama administration and/or the Black Lives Matter movement, depending on who you ask. It's certainly true that some shooters of police, like the Dallas attacker, appear to be motivated by a hatred of white police officers or a twisted urge to seek revenge for police shootings of black Americans. But the simplistic and inflammatory notion of a "war on cops" is completely undercut by one fundamental datapoint: intentional attacks on police officers are at historically low levels under President Barack Obama.

Data from the Officers Down Memorial Page, which tracks law enforcement officer fatalities in real time, illustrates the point. During the Reagan years, for instance, an average of 101 police officers were intentionally killed each year. Under George H.W. Bush that number fell to 90. It fell further, to 81 deaths per year, under Clinton, and to 72 deaths per year under George W. Bush.

Under Obama, the average number of police intentionally killed each year has fallen to its lowest level yet -- an average of 62 deaths annually through 2015. If you include the 2016 police officer shootings year-to-date and project it out to a full year, that average of 62 deaths doesn't change.