How Cops Die

The purpose of this unique book is to provide police officers and administrators with a simple and effective handbook to improve the safety of police employees. It is research-based and uses the most up-to-date statistics from the Department of Justice, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, and the Uniform Crime Report. The first chapter of this book contains a complete list of actual cases of officer deaths during 2010. This list provides an overview of how officers are dying in the line of duty. After a problem is identified and discussed in one chapter, the next chapter details strategies that can be implemented to reduce injury and death by employees. Additional topics include specific problems including traffic fatalities, assaults on officers, police homicides, physical health, psychological health, moonlighting, shift work, substance abuse, heart disease, nutrition, suicide, and family issues. The importance of comprehensive wellness programs, and the interconnectedness of employee morale with health and safety are examined. This book has detailed the true causes of Job-related police officer injury and death. It has also identified effective strategies that police personnel at all levels can do to prevent these tragedies from continuing to occur. These recommended strategies will prove useful for officers and administrators alike.

This book provides time- and experience-proven advice for responding safely and effectively to threats to a law enforcement officerfs safety. It relies on law enforcementfs bloody history to reveal what has gone wrong for a very long time — and how to fix it so that no more cops die needlessly. This book identifies the cop killers and the fatal errors that cops make, and it explores how these incidents happen and why. Most important of all, the book goes into detail about how to prevent these terminal errors and furnishes to-the-point advice for avoiding them. These tactics and techniques work. It offers the same common sense advice that solid patrol sergeants have been sharing with their briefing room charges for a long while. It has been assembled by a police chief who spent 15 years as a sergeant. WHY COPS DIE can be used in a lot of ways, all of them useful for drastically reducing the number of officers who die on the job every year. It should be issued to every law enforcement academy recruit. It is aimed across the spectrum of the law enforcement organization from the rookie to the first-line supervisor to the command staff. Chiefs and sheriffs will find it of value, as will those directly responsible for the training of law enforcement officers. By applying practical, potentially lifesaving advice to their daily duties law enforcementfs first-line practitioners can sharply reduce the number of peacekeepers who die or are maimed in the future. That effort begins here.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports Section selected and analyzed 51 incidents of police officer killings in order to evaluate the psychology of the offender, the behavior of the police officer, and circumstances in which the police officer lost his or her life. The study was conducted over a 3-year period; the 51 incidents resulted in the death of 54 police officers and involved 50 offenders. Results demonstrated that, while no single offender profile could be established, most killers of police officers had been diagnosed as having some type of personality disorder. Behavioral descriptors of victims were frequently similar in that they were good-natured and more conservative than their fellow officers in the use of physical force. The incidents themselves revealed that killings were often facilitated by some type of procedural miscue (e.g., improper approach to a vehicle). Type of assignment, circumstances at the scene of an encounter, weapons involved, and the environment in which events occurred all played a role in the preponderance of police officer deaths in the South. The report presents extensive information on the victims, offenders, and incidents studied. It identifies personality types of offenders, provides guidance on how individuals of a given personality type interact with authority figures, and offers approaches to interrogation. The report also points out specific areas where law enforcement training and procedures may be improved. Appendixes contain the study methodology and a description of personality types.

In Force Under Pressure, Dr. Lawrence Blum, who has devoted his life's work to the survival and wellness of "those who serve," describes the sources of danger, injuries, and victory to police officers in a down-to-earth, readable style. Blum argues that there are missing "ingredients" in the training and socialization of police officers. These ingredients include techniques and tools to condition the officer's decision-making and concentration during conditions of emergency; internal controls necessary to maintain the will to survive; and aids that will prevent officers being defeated by any threat. Distressing and/or disturbing physical and psychological reactions are common in a police officer's workday, and the officer must be prepared for them. Blum's work has uncovered many of the casues of compromise to officer safety and wellness, and he contends that police officers will be well prepared to cope with unanticipated or rapidly changing encounters if they possess the right tools and the know-how to command and control field encounters and life's pressures. Here Blum provides practical tools for survival in law enforcement, by combining his clinical knowledge with true stories of police officers for an attention-grabbing and informative book.

In August 2000, Liza Balkan witnessed the beating death of a man named Otto Vass during an altercation with the police in the west end of Toronto. Called to the witness stand on a number of occasions over several years, Balkan kept careful track of the aftermath, then turned verbatim court transcripts, audio, video and text derived from multiple interviews with lawyers from both sides of the bench, officers, family members of the deceased, activists and artists, into Out the Window. This is a documentary theatre project that interrogates the subjects of policing and police violence, use of force, mental illness, racism, justice, memory, witnessing and theatre. It was created to be a malleable, inclusive theatrical investigation, one that has evolved over many years, responding to the times and to the layers of the harsh realities around police violence and calls for change. Its storytelling vibrates in the past and in the present. Out The Window is both a highly theatrical play and a public forum; a conversation that aims to continue forward. This book chronicles its process through various iterations and includes the script from The Theatre Centre/ Luminato Festival co-production in Toronto in 2018, directed by Sarah Garton Stanley.

Violent crime has been rising sharply in many American cities after two decades of decline. Homicides jumped nearly 17 percent in 2015 in the largest 50 cities, the biggest one-year increase since 1993. The reason is what Heather Mac Donald first identified nationally as the “Ferguson effect”: Since the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, officers have been backing off of proactive policing, and criminals are becoming emboldened. This book expands on Mac Donald’s groundbreaking and controversial reporting on the Ferguson effect and the criminal-justice system. It deconstructs the central narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement: that racist cops are the greatest threat to young black males. On the contrary, it is criminals and gangbangers who are responsible for the high black homicide death rate. The War on Cops exposes the truth about officer use of force and explodes the conceit of “mass incarceration.” A rigorous analysis of data shows that crime, not race, drives police actions and prison rates. The growth of proactive policing in the 1990s, along with lengthened sentences for violent crime, saved thousands of minority lives. In fact, Mac Donald argues, no government agency is more dedicated to the proposition that “black lives matter” than today’s data-driven, accountable police department. Mac Donald gives voice to the many residents of high-crime neighborhoods who want proactive policing. She warns that race-based attacks on the criminal-justice system, from the White House on down, are eroding the authority of law and putting lives at risk. This book is a call for a more honest and informed debate about policing, crime, and race.

The Ultimate Price details incidents in which Police Officers have lost their lives on duty in Australia. From the first recorded death of Police officer, Constable Joseph LURKER who was murdered in Sydney in 1803, cut down by a criminal wielding a cutlass, the book follows the growing State and Federal Police Forces and the events where the officers have been killed in the execution of their duty. The author recreates the feeling of the incidents by putting the reader there, at the location, be it the sticky heat of the tropical north, the dry winds of Central West NSW or the bone aching cold of Tasmania, the author paints a picture so the reader can see and almost feel what his happening. The incidents vary from stabbings, shootings, vehicle accidents, drownings, suicides along with many more violent, terrifying and in some cases mysterious deaths. The public are grateful for the work their Police Force do, but how many of them are aware of the terrible dangers those officers face every time they show up for work. The Ultimate Price shows the reader the realities faced by their Police every day.