Citation

Stone MH. Violence Gend. 2015; 2(1): 87-97.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Mary Ann Liebert Publishers)

DOI

10.1089/vio.2015.0005

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The present study concerns policemen in the United States who had been killed in the line of duty during the years 2013-2014. The study is limited to cases in which a policeman was killed intentionally, as opposed to accidentally or from a work-related illness. In almost all the 66 cases, the perpetrators (all of whom were male) used a gun. In a few cases, a policeman was killed by strangulation or by being run over by a car. Approximately half the men who had killed one or more policemen were then killed by other officers, or else committed suicide with their own weapons. Half the killers were men actively involved in a crime, often of domestic violence, who then killed an officer as he responded to the emergency. The remainder of the killers belonged to a dozen small categories: cop-hating "white supremacists," those who hated police as representatives of government authority, men who grabbed an officer's gun, men of a paranoid personality who were reacting to being fired or evicted, men who were mentally ill or intoxicated, and a few others motivated by other factors. There was an overrepresentation of men from minority communities, chiefly blacks and Hispanics, but the "excess" murder rate was not as great as what exists for these groups in the general population. Also discussed are a number of societal factors that contribute to these disparities in the comparative rates of policemen killing within different social groups. There are fluctuations over time in the yearly frequency of policemen killed by intention: the rate for 2014 was nearly one-and-a-half times that of 2013.