Donald Trump's Claim That There's A 'War On Police' Is Still Bunk
Last year was one of the safest years on record for U.S. police, FBI data released Tuesday confirmed. The numbers follow a sustained downward trend in police deaths over recent decades, despite mounting concerns from police union bosses and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who maintain that violence against law enforcement is on the rise.
Forty-one U.S. law enforcement officers were intentionally killed in the line of duty in 2015, according to the FBI’s statistics, published annually as part of the agency’s Uniform Crime Report. Although annual figures tend to fluctuate, the past four years have seen historic lows in police fatalities. There were 20 percent fewer line-of-duty deaths last year than in 2014, but the totals marked about a 50 percent increase from an all-time low in 2013, when 27 officers were killed.
Of course police work comes with inherent hazards and every fatal incident is tragic, but widening the historical scope shows that policing is safer in the U.S. today than it has ever been before. In the 1970s, intentional police deaths were regularly six times higher than at present. And in the alcohol prohibition era, police deaths rocketed to as high as 17 times what we see today.
The FBI also reports that 50,212 officers were assaulted in the line of duty 2015, with 28 percent of them sustaining injuries as a result. These numbers are consistent with totals over the previous decade, though assaults have also been falling in recent years.
In other words, the data does not support claims from conservative media outlets, police union bosses and Trump, who claim that increased scrutiny of police and demand for reform has encouraged a so-called “war on cops.” Although there is some debate about whether widespread criticism of police brutality has made policing more difficult, some on the right have worked to portray this not as an ideological war, but a literal one.
Arguments like this may be convincing to the public, but are not grounded in reality, say researchers.
“I do not believe that there is a ‘war on cops,’” Philip Stinson, a former police officer who is now a criminologist at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, told The Huffington Post. “It is business as usual in policing.”
Still, the conversation around policing has changed in recent years. The controversial 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, catapulted issues of race and law enforcement into the national limelight. The seemingly constant stream of incidents, often captured by smartphones or police body cameras, has kept them there. This has led to more aggressive criticism of police by the Black Lives Matter movement and other civil rights organizations. Their opponents argue that these groups have fomented a hostile environment for police. But there’s no evidence to suggest that this climate is actually causing officers to be killed at higher rates.
“While we mourn even one death of a police officer, what we see in the data is very consistent with prior years and even a noticeable drop from 2014,” David Harris, a professor of law at University of Pittsburgh School of Law who studies policing, told HuffPost.
“2015 was a year with a lot of criticism of police, let’s face it,” Harris added. “And no matter how you stand on that, what we can say for sure is that does not seem to have resulted in more police officer deaths.”
The conversation around policing has only gotten more passionate in 2016. Questionable police shootings of civilians have continued with disturbing regularity this year, while July’s fatal attacks on police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, helped propel the war on cops narrative into the presidential campaign.
“The war on our police must end and it must end now,” Trump said in August.
Trump also appeared to blame President Barack Obama for the killings of three Baton Rouge police officers in July.
But again, there is no evidence to suggest that these examples of violence are any more prominent in 2016 than they have in the modern policing era, under presidential administrations stretching back to Jimmy Carter. In the first 10 months of the year, 45 officers have been killed by gunfire, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, a website that independently tracks a broad range of data on law enforcement deaths stretching back over 100 years. An additional 10 officers have been killed by vehicular assault, two have died due to general “assault” and one has been stabbed to death.
It’s not clear if the FBI will define these deaths as “felonious killings,” or in other words intentional killings, but the data does suggest there will be a slight uptick in line-of-duty deaths over last year. But again, it’s important to look at long-term trends. An average of 64 law enforcement officers have been feloniously killed each year since 1980, according to FBI data. The last three years have seen fatal attacks on police that are well below that number. This year has already outpaced those historic lows, but it remains to be seen how they will compare to a year like 2011, for example, in which 72 officers were killed in the line of duty.
“When all is said and done, it won’t be outside the recent statistical trend, it will be well within it,” predicted Harris.
Of course, Trump’s rhetoric goes far beyond his supposed desire to keep cops safe. He’s since framed the “law and order” issue as a matter of warfare, saying police need to be “tougher” and that they should be allowed to go on the “counter-attack” against those who might attack them. He’s also called for police in the nation’s cities to return to using controversial “stop-and-frisk” programs, a source of intense criticism against law enforcement in recent years. This is the exact kind of “demeaning and humiliating” policy of “indirect racial profiling” that led a federal judge to ban the practice in New York City. All of this has played out against a backdrop of racial division at the core of Trump’s campaign, which has left him winking at white supremacists, while denigrating people of color, immigrants and Muslims.
Cherry-picking data to push an agenda may be politically expedient, but it’s also disingenuous.
“Any suggestion in the political arena that there is a ‘war on cops,’ Stinson said, “is symbolic political crime control rhetoric exaggerated by the fact that it is an election year.”
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
Also on HuffPost
Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.
Vaccines Cause Autism
"We had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day ... a beautiful child went to have the vaccine and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic," Trump said at a Republican presidential primary debate last fall.
It was only one of many times the candidate has claimed that vaccines are toxic and can cause autism in children.
'Thousands And Thousands' In New Jersey Celebrated 9/11
"I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down," Trump said at a rally in November. "And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering."
He also defended his comments in an interview the next day: "There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down."
No such footage exists. In fact, a Sept. 18, 2001 article by the New Jersey Star-Ledger pointed out, “Rumors of rooftop celebrations of the attack by Muslims here proved unfounded.”
Antonin Scalia May Have Been Murdered
“Well I just heard today, just a little while ago, actually,” Trump said. “You know I just landed, and I’m hearing it’s a big topic, and it’s a horrible topic. But they say they found the pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow. I can’t tell you what, I can’t give you an answer.”
Scalia was found dead in his bedroom at a hunting resort in west Texas on Feb. 13, 2016. A judge pronounced Scalia dead of natural causes by phone, and law enforcement officers on the scene said there were no signs of foul play. He was 79.
The IRS Audits Trump Because He’s A Christian
“I’m always audited by the IRS, which I think is very unfair. I don’t know, maybe because of religion, maybe because of something else,” Trump said.
When CNN host Chris Cuomo asked what he meant by religion, Trump replied, “Well, maybe because of the fact that I’m a strong Christian, and I feel strongly about it and maybe there’s a bias.”
The GOP presidential nominee is currently being audited by the IRS, something he's cited as a reason for not releasing his personal income tax returns.
The IRS has already said that Trump is free to release the documents. The real estate mogul admitted earlier this month that he could release his tax returns “immediately” if he wanted to. Trump's son, Donald Trump, Jr., suggested it would be a problem to have people "asking questions” about the returns if they became public.
Barack Obama Didn’t Actually Attend Columbia University
"Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere," Trump said. "In fact, I'll go a step further: The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don't know who he is. It's crazy.”
Obama began his college career at Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1979 before transferring to Columbia University two years later. In fact, several of Obama’s classmates at Columbia have publicly spoken about his time at the university.
But that didn’t stop Trump from pursuing the theory. In 2012, he offered to give $5 million to charities if the president released his college transcripts and passport records. Nothing came of that stunt.
Ted Cruz’s Father Was Involved In The Assassination Of JFK
Trump did the opposite when the National Enquirer published a story implying that Ted Cruz’s father played a role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News. “What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don't even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it.”
Trump struck a nerve, and Cruz responded by calling Trump a “pathological liar,” a “narcissist...straight out of a psychology textbook.” The Texas senator dropped out of the Republican presidential race shortly after the incident.
Trump revived the conspiracy at the Republican National Convention after Cruz refused to endorse him, and has given no indication that he intends to apologize.
On Friday, Cruz announced he was endorsing Trump anyway.
Does Madonna know something we all don't about Barack? At a concert she said "we have a black Muslim in the White House."
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2012
Drought In California Is A Government Conspiracy
"It's so ridiculous, where they're taking the water and shoving it out to sea," Trump said at a San Diego rally. "Nobody understands it. There is no drought. They turn the water into the ocean."
By “they,” Trump was referring to state officials. In California, water is diverted from farms to rivers so wildlife can survive.
Trump promised he would stop permitting the use of water for environmental purposes, although that would violate the state’s laws.
At the end of the day, California just doesn’t have enough water -- and there are plenty of studies to show what parts of the state are too dry.
Huma Abedin Has Ties To Terrorism
“You know, by the way, look at where she worked, by the way, and look at where her mother works and worked,” Trump said. “Huma Abedin has access to classified information. How Hillary got away with that one, nobody will ever know.”
Abedin was born in the United States but raised in Saudi Arabia. She served as assistant editor of an academic journal called the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, which was founded by her late father and edited by her mother. According to experts on Islam, it’s far from radical.
Climate Change Is A Hoax
At one point, he called the phenomenon a hoax “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
Trump walked back that claim in an interview on Fox News in January, but he still called climate change “a very, very expensive form of tax.”
Scientists overwhelmingly agree that human activity is significantly affecting the environment, causing rising sea levels, global warming and heightened CO2 levels.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
