Michelle Malkin’s “Cop Killed Every 58 Hours” Claim Not Truthful

In a desperately apologist
piece about police at National Review Online, Michelle
Malkin
writes that 1,501 cops died in the line of duty in the last
decade, concluding, as the headline stated, that a cop was killed
in the U.S. every 58 hours.

Here is a link to the break
down of those 1,500 deaths by year and cause, from the National
Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, which Malkin cited but
didn’t link. And below is the numbers for the 100 cops Malkin said
were “killed” last year:

Aircraft accident – 1

Auto Crashes – 28

Bomb-Related Incident – 1

Drowned – 2

Electrocuted – 1

Fall – 6

Job-Related Illness – 13

Motorcycle Crashes – 4

Poisoned – 1

Shot – 31

Stabbed – 2

Struck by Vehicle – 11

You can use your judgment about which of the types of death
above should be included when considering the threat cops face of
someone killing them, and search through individual cases here.
Only two of those categories (shot and stabbed) can be assumed to
include only cops killed by someone trying to kill them. Some of
them, like job-related illness and aircraft accident, have little
if anything to do with the people cops interact with and aren’t
part of the “war zone” Malkin claims cops operate in every day.

As Anthony Fisher explained yesterday, accurate data on police
use of force is
hard to come by. An impartial list of people killed by cops
last year (in all kinds of situations, justified or otherwise) on
Wikipedia includes
316 “civilians”.

For even more context, the job of “police officer”
doesn’t show up on lists of America’s ten most dangerous jobs
based on federal statistics.