ORLANDO, Fla. — Despite a strong pro-law enforcement culture, the southern United States – including Florida – is once again poised to be the deadliest region of the country to work as a law enforcement officer, according to FBI statistics.
From January thru the end of August, there were 89 line of duty deaths of police officers across the country, including 50 killed intentionally and 39 accidentally. Experts believe 2021 is on track to be the deadliest year for police since 2011.
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The agency’s data breakdown shows almost all accidental deaths were car related, including crashes and officers being hit by cars. The three non-vehicle accidental deaths were drownings.
On the intentional side, the most common form of death was from unprovoked attacks by the public, similar to the assault of Orlando Police Department officers by a man wielding a brick over the weekend.
Thankfully, the officers survived that attack and are expected to recover.
“I think the violence that we’re seeing here is also the same level that you see… all across the country,” Bethune-Cookman Criminal Justice professor Randy Nelson said.
Nelson, who trains law enforcement officers all across the state, said he never considers attacks and deaths “part of the job.”
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However, he said Americans have taken more hostile views of others with different opinions. The trend stretches from political – Democrats and Republicans thinking of each other as the devil – to the professional categories like police.
“Either you live together as brothers or you perish as fools,” he said. “I think that this divisive tendency, whether it’s politically, culturally, socially… I don’t see where it’s where it would benefit us.”
Despite the police-public tensions being centered around liberal urban cities, particularly ones along the west coast like Portland, Nelson took note of the FBI’s own statistics: it’s safer to be an officer in Portland or Chicago than Orlando, Atlanta or Miami.
So far, there have been 51 confirmed police killings in the United States in 2021. 28 of them have occurred between Texas and Maryland, including the shooting death of a Nassau County Deputy on Friday.
That’s almost as many total deaths of officers on the west coast, which was the next highest region at 12 accidental and 12 intentional deaths.
Nelson said the trend was typical and attributed it to a topic southerners are usually dead set against addressing: the high number of guns in the region.
“Folks don’t want to have that conversation about guns, but when there are more guns, there’s more killing,” he said.
Short of that, he said toning down the rhetoric and accepting opinions other than your own would be a good way to start reversing the trend.
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