(UnitedVoice.com) – The level of violence waged against the police has steadily increased in the last few years. At the same time, Liberal lawmakers have done their best to defund the police, aided and abetted by several Democratic-led municipal governments. In several instances, cities quickly reversed those efforts after crime spiraled out of control without proper funding for local law enforcement officials and agencies.
The FBI recently released some frightening data showing the level of harm being perpetrated against America’s law enforcement officers.
FBI Releases Alarming New Data
On May 14, the FBI issued a press release announcing the publication of data from the agency’s Law Enforcement Employee Counts compiled on the Federal Bureau of Investigation Crime Data Explorer. The notice also unveiled a comprehensive special report detailing line-of-duty deaths and assaults in 2023.
The “Officers Killed and Assaulted in the Line of Duty, 2023 Special Report” detailed preliminary statistics regarding attacks on law enforcement officials resulting in injury or death. The 18-page document noted that the nation’s various policing agencies documented 79,091 assaults on officers in 2023, a 10-year high.
Nearly 6,800 of those assaults occurred when law enforcement officials were dispatched to incidents involving “simple assaults” against civilians. An additional 4,879 happened when officials were responding to “drug/narcotic violations.”
Likewise, about 466 law enforcement officials were “assaulted and injured by firearms,” the highest rate recorded in the last decade.
The report noted that 60 law enforcement officers were “feloniously killed in 2023,” less than the 73 recorded in 2021, the highest rate recorded in the past two decades. However, the number of fatal incidents from 2021 to 2023 exceeded any other consecutive three-year period recorded during the last 20 years.
Recent Events Shed Light on the Problem
Several incidents involving assaults on law enforcement officials have occurred this year, showing the human cost of the figures detailed in the FBI’s special report.
For instance, four law enforcement officials were killed on April 29 during a Carolinas Regional Fugitive Task Force operation. A Deputy US Marshall and three police officers died after a suspected fugitive opened fire on them in Charlotte, North Carolina. One of the other slain officers worked for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, and the North Carolina Department of Corrections employed the other two.
Likewise, the Officer Down Memorial Page (ODMP) listed several line-of-duty deaths of law enforcement officers in 2024 as of May 16. They included 21 incidents involving gunfire, two vehicular assaults, one stabbing, and one assault.
The website’s homepage includes a quote from ODMP founder Chris Cosgiff, noting that “When a police officer is killed, it’s not an agency that loses an officer, it’s an entire nation.”
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