Don’t Worry—There’s No Epidemic of Cop Killers on the Horizon

A police-training exercise in Kentucky. Photo via Flickr user Maximillian Curry

On June 8, Jerad and Amanda Miller targeted and killed Las Vegas police officers Igor Soldo and Alyn Beck. The Millers apparently harbored a lot of anti-government sentiment and could arguably be called creatures of the far right. The violent right-wing movement that the couple’s attack has been said to represent has made a lot of people nervous, for all kinds of reasons. Those on the left of the spectrum are worried about a rise in patriot militias and don’t look forward to even more white men with guns roaming around the country, while anti-authoritarian outlets like Cop Block and LewRockwell.com made sure to stress that, regardless of how much their readers man hate the Man, mowing down people the way the Millers did is not OK and should not be tolerated.

As usual, before we get caught up in the hype—a bunch of people who get their “news” from Alex Jones are going to go on a cop-killing rampage!—we should look at some cold hard statistics: For one thing, though gun violence and homicide in general has slowed its decline since the 1990s, it was halved between 1993 and 2010. For another, the US is safer than it has been in decades for cops as well as civilians. The number of police officers who die every year is so small that any increase at all can easily be touted as an alarming uptick in violence, but 2009 saw the fewest officer killings in 60 years, and in 2012 there were only 47 cops killed feloniously in the line of duty. (There were 130 officers killed on duty in 1973.) And yet, Jim Pasco, executive head of the Fraternal Order of Police, told the Washington Times that “Over the last 25 years or so there’s been a gradual erosion toward authority figures and of respect for police officers. It’s highly visible.” He went to say that most people just talk big—an important distinction—but that he gets “two to four emails a month” that contain hopes for more dead cops.

It’s hard to quantify a generalized erosion of respect for authority, but there’s no question that the last 25 years have given us a more militarized police force and an explosion in the prison population thanks to the war on drugs. Maybe those bad policies have given some people good reasons to distrust, fear, and hate the institutions behind those trends. Though there is a lot of talk about police misconduct and brutality these days, it was more dangerous to wear a badge 50 years ago—when there was almost unanimous respect for cops—than it is today.

The Miller shooting was a tragic anomaly, but it shouldn’t be allowed to have a chilling effect on criticism of the cops. The lives of police officers matter, but so do those of the people who have suffered at their hands.

Check out the rest of this week’s bad cops:

–To go back to last week’s discussion of terrible taxi laws: A married New York City couple filed a suit earlier this month against the Taxi Limousine Commission, alleging that, in May 2013, TLC investigators pulled the man over on suspicion of driving an illegal cab, mainly because 66-year-old Dan Keys, who is black, had been spotted dropping his caucasian wife, Symone Palermo, off at work. Keys says that even though he and his wife explained to the authorities what had happened, the couple’s car remained impounded for eight days.

–The family of a man who died after being Tasered is suing the cops in Forth Worth, Texas, over officers’ actions during a May 2013 raid. The police busted down Jermaine Darden’s door because cocaine was allegedly being sold out of the house, and when the man (who had synthetic marijuana in his blood) resisted, the cops repeatedly Tasered him. He passed out and died shortly afterward, but officially, his cause of death was “natural” and had nothing to do with the electric shocks the 300-pound asthma sufferer received. The helmet-cam video of the incident, released last week by a local news station, shows Darden being pinned to the ground and zapped during a raid that, if nothing else, should remind everyone of how violent the war on drugs is on a daily basis.

–Remember when New York City mayor Bill de Blasio was a crusading reformer set to right the wrongs of the Bloomberg era? Me neither. According to a report released last week by the Drug Policy Alliance, hizzoner is on track to preside over just as many weed arrests as Michael Bloomberg did in his last two years in office. Unsurprisingly, because this is the NYPD, the majority of those arrested for marijuana offenses are also minorities.

–Campbell, Wisconsin, police chief Tim Kelemen is under investigation for allegedly harassing a local Tea Party activist by signing him up for a bunch of websites. The activist, Greg Luce, had been butting heads with the authorities since he was threatened with a ticket over an anti-Obama demonstration held on a freeway overpass and the frustrated right winger filed a lawsuit against the town over the incident. Keleman admits to escalating the beef by signing Luce up with Match.com, HealthCare.gov, and some porn sites, but he doesn’t think such conduct is illegal—even so, dude, it’s pretty petty behavior for a town’s top cop to be engaging in.

–Jim Ardis, the Peoria, Illinois, mayor who ordered to police to raid a man’s house over a parody Twitter account, is now getting sued by the ACLU. Jon Daniel, the target of the raid, claims that his First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated, and he’s probably right. If an anonymous source is to be believed, the whole thing started because the mayor thought Justin Glawe, who reported on this whole sordid joke for VICE, was behind the silly Twitter feed, which portrayed the mayor as a party-crazed drug fiend. Ardis is not on drugs, but he does seem to hate the free press a lot.

–On Thursday, a Chesterfield County, Virginia, cop carefully carried a bus full of of toddlers—two at a time—from their vehicle to their day-care center so they didn't have to wade through a parking lot flooded with water that went up to the officer’s knees. A passerby recorded Offer Brad Watkins doing his good deed, giving the station an unintentional but deserved PR coup. Watkins’s next act confirmed his Good Cop of the Week status: He caught a loose poodle who had been running on around the flooded roadways, then returned it to its owner after the dog bit his hands repeatedly during the rescue. May child-assisting, mean-dog-saving Officer Watkins keep up his good work.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter.