OPINION:
President Donald Trump’s first year in office has coincided with a near 50-year low in a very grim statistic: The number of police officers killed in the line of duty.
A report from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, shows that 128 officers died in 2017. That number is a 10 percent decrease from 2016, when 141 officers were killed while wearing the badge.
In fact, the number of officers killed in the line of duty had been on the rise for the past three consecutive years. The steady rise in police deaths coincided with the Black Lives Matter movement that arose after several high-profile incidents between law enforcement and African-American suspects.
President Obama sympathized with the Black Lives Matter movement and even honored the leaders of the controversial group with invitations to the White House.
President Trump, on the other hand, focused much of his 2016 presidential campaign on the topic and promised to “restore law and order for all Americans” and criticized Obama and Hillary Clinton’s embrace of Black Lives Matter.
Randy Sutton, a spokesman for Blue Lives Matter, a group advocating for officers’ rights, told UPI that he believes the decrease may be attributed to cops’ reluctance to engage with suspects.
“There’s a saying in law enforcement: You can’t get in trouble for the car stop you don’t make,” Sutton said. “They don’t want to be the next Ferguson, the next officer burned on the stake.”
The 2017 death toll is the lowest in 50 years except for 2013 when 113 cops were killed. The Black Lives Matter movement began the next year.
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