This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, May 30, 2013: Some sort of survival mechanism seems to be built into the human psyche that disposes us to remember the good and to forget — or at least, minimize — the bad. For the new mother, the pangs of labor are soon supplanted by the joy of a child and thus does humanity endure. This tendency, I suspect, helps to explain our often-irrational nostalgia for “the good old days.”
In law enforcement circles, it is axiomatic that people used to revere and respect the police. That attitude, in turn, promoted domestic tranquility and peaceful neighborhoods. Then, the theory goes, some combination of liberal jurisprudence and generalized moral rot led us to our present sorry state. The social revolution of the late '60s and early '70s is usually cited as the culprit for the decline.
I heard this sentiment expressed more than once at the annual Memorial Breakfast for fallen St. Louis police officers last week. Unfortunately for purists, the program that was furnished to each guest at the event rather succinctly refuted that notion. It offered a chronological listing of each of the 164 St. Louis officers who have died in line of duty.
Understand that I attended the breakfast out of respect for these men — and yes, to date all slain city cops have been men. I knew many of them personally, so they were anything but dry statistics to me. But I couldn’t help but be impressed by the dissonance between the facts at hand and the casual conversation they engendered.
Q: Was it safer to be a St. Louis cop in 1900 or in 2000? Before you answer, consult the chart below.
St. Louis Police L.O.D. Deaths (1861 – Present)
Decade Officers Killed
1861 thru 1869 2
1870 thru 1879 3
1880 thru 1889 3
1890 thru 1899 5
1900 thru 1909 20
1910 thru 1919 20
1920 thru 1929 45
1930 thru 1939 17
1940 thru 1949 5 (1 pre-WWII)
1950 thru 1959 6
1960 thru 1969 8
1970 thru 1979 9
1980 thru 1989 3 (4)*
1990 thru 1999 3
2000 thru 2009 8 (6)*
2010 to Present 2
[*Of the eight officers listed for the 2000 decade, one died of gunshot wounds sustained in the late 80s and another suffered a fatal heart attack after a fitness test. While their deaths were no less tragic than others, I revise the figure to six because our present concern is to gauge the hazards of law enforcement within the given period. Concomitantly, the 1980s figure should be adjusted upward to four.]
Interestingly, officer deaths stopped abruptly during the years of American involvement in WW II, then resumed just as abruptly after war’s end. This may suggest that the mass mobilization of able-bodied young men makes domestic policing a safer enterprise, though no similar effect was noted during the WW I era.
The most striking feature of the charted findings is that 108 of 164 officers died in the 42 years between 1900 through 1941. 27.6 percent of the history thus accounted for 65.8 percent of the fallen officers. An average of 2.6 cops died per year during this bloody epoch. For the rest of the sample (1861 – 1899 + 1942 – present) the average was .55 deaths a year.
Just what caused the nearly five-fold increase in officer deaths during the pre-WW II decades of the 20th century is debatable but Prohibition is clearly a prime factor. “The Noble Experiment” was in effect throughout the Roaring 20s and that period recorded an alarming 45 fatalities — an average of 4.5 deaths annually.
Overall, the Prohibition Era (1920 – 1933) saw 52 officer deaths in 14 years—a rate of more than 3.7 per year. For the two decades preceding it, the rate had been 2 deaths annually. After its repeal in December 1933, the rate reverted to 1.7 fatalities a year for the balance of the decade.
The historically elevated rates of the last century’s pre-Prohibition decades are probably due in part to the mass immigration the nation witnessed during that time. Similarly, the higher than usual incidence for the post-Prohibition/pre-WW II interlude was likely a continuing effect of the Great Depression.
In the 67 years since 1946, St. Louis has sustained 43 police fatalities, which is 43 too many. Police work remains a dangerous undertaking but material improvements have improved the officer’s chances.
Modern electronics allow the beat officer ready access to a cop’s greatest asset — other cops. Soft body armor and semi-automatic side arms give today’s officer better odds in combat. SWAT teams bring specialized training and equipment to barricaded suspect and hostage situations, thereby reducing casualties. And basic officer instruction has been expanded to 32 weeks in the academy, followed by 90 days of supervised field training.
Through grim practice, trauma surgeons have gotten better at treating gunshots, enabling many of the wounded to survive injuries that might previously have proved fatal.
Despite whatever liberal instincts the judiciary may harbor, the cop’s chances of being shot by a repeat offender have actually gone down. In 1900, there were 69 inmates confined in state and federal penitentiaries in the U.S. for every 100,000 inhabitants. By 2008, that number had grown to 504 per 100,000.
In the post-WWII era, St. Louis has averaged a police fatality every 1.6 years — a rate of .64 officer deaths annually. For the past complete decade, the stats are identical to those of the supposedly idyllic ’50s. Those numbers are nothing to brag about, but they beat the hell out of the good old days.