This store ain't in Newark, New Jersey
If you've heard of Newark, New Jersey, or even Detroit, Michigan it's probably in terms of how violent and dangerous these cities are. Failed examples of segregation and poverty. Many conservatives at dinner parties and in conversations you don't hear use places like Newark to explain the abuses of law enforcement. Wouldn't you be scared if you were patrolling Newark or Detroit? It's gotta be the worst beat for a police officer. It turns out that that
isn't the case at all.
Across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, homicides of police officers are linked to the statewide level of gun ownership, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. The study found that police officers serving in states with high private gun ownership are more than three times more likely to be killed on the job than those on the job in states with the lowest gun ownership.
[bold my emphasis]
The researchers decided that if #bluelivesmatter and sentiments like that meant anything we might as well find out what's a public health issue for policemen and women. Public health issues like being killed with guns. David Swedler is the study's lead author:
"We know that 92 percent of police officers killed in the line of duty are killed by guns, three-quarters of which are handguns," Swedler said.
Swedler and his colleagues looked at the homicide rates of police officers by state between 1996 and 2010 using data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation database, which logs every officer killed in the line of duty. Law enforcement homicide rates were calculated as the number of officers killed by guns per number of officers employed in each state.
We might not know how many people are killed by police while on duty but we sure as hell know how many police are killed and exactly how they are killed while on duty. Let's make a wager. I wonder if it turns out places like Newark and Oakland and Detroit are the worst places to be a cop.
Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Mississippi and Montana were in the top quintile both for gun ownership and for law enforcement homicides, while Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island were in the lowest quintile for gun ownership and police officer homicides.
"We found that officers aren't being killed in states with high violent-crime rates. While violent crime rates didn't track closely to officer homicide rates, it was public gun ownership that had the strongest relationship," Swedler said.
Yet another example of how racism and income inequality hurts everybody by dividing us in our perceptions of the world and leading to incorrectly diagnosed violence and the laws and law enforcement we need.