More Cops Died Directing Traffic Than Waging the Drug War Last Year


It turns out that while enforcing drug laws is not exactly safe, statistically it's not especially dangerous either. According to Drug War Chronicle research based on reports at Officer.Com, which compiles a list of all line of duty police deaths nationwide based on press reports and reports from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF), despite making nearly two million drug arrests last year, only four American police officers were killed enforcing the drug laws, and in only two of those cases was drug law enforcement the direct cause of death. One undercover officer was killed making a drug buy, one officer was killed serving a drug arrest warrant, one highway patrolman died in a crash on the way to a drug bust, and one officer was killed when he intervened in a clash between rival drug gangs.

The number of officers killed in the drug war last year, is similar to, although slightly lower, than in recent years. While the NLEOMF has not yet released official figures on drug enforcement-related officer deaths for last year, it has for previous years. Seven officers were killed in drug-related incidents in 2000, 13 in 2001, 2 in 2002, 13 in 2003, 14 in 2004, and 10 in 2005.
According to the NLEOMF, 151 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty last year, but more than half of them died from vehicle accidents (61) or job-related medical events such as heart attacks (18). One officer was stabbed to death, one was beaten to death and 54 were killed by gunfire. According to the Officer.Com compilation, more law enforcement officers were killed directing traffic than enforcing the drug laws.
Given that there are hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers in the US, that's not a high mortality rate for policing as a profession. In fact, being a police officer doesn't even make the US Department of Labor's top-10 list of the most dangerous jobs. (For the curious, the most dangerous occupation is logger, followed in order by aircraft pilot, fisherman, steel worker, garbage man and recycler, farmer, roofer, power line worker, truck driver, and taxi driver.)
Given the low mortality rate for police in the drug war -- 4 deaths in 1.8 million arrests -- critics of heavy-handed drug law enforcement tactics, such as the reliance on paramilitarized SWAT-style teams serving drug search and arrest warrants, have even more reason to wonder if they're really necessary. According to some estimates cited in civil liberties policy analyst Radley Balko's Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, as many as 40,000 SWAT raids, most of them for drugs, take place each year now.
"This suggests that drug offenders aren't the violent criminals police often make them out to be, particularly the low-level people these SWAT tactics are so often directed against," Balko told the Chronicle. "It also backs up studies that say weapons are rarely found, and when they are, they're not the sort of high-power, high-caliber weaponry the SWAT advocates always say they will find."

Posted: Fri - January 12, 2007 at 03:43 PM          

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