Officer safety issues we must address today
Current threats dictate evolving response strategies
At the end of 2016, I penned a short article predicting better times for LE officers in the US. I called 2016 the “year of the ambush” because of the many violent attacks against officers. Surely, I wrote, with a new pro-police president taking over, our lives should get better. And things did improve under the first years of the Trump administration. Then the long, hot summer of 2020 blew up my 2016 prediction.
My second “law” of law enforcement explains what we have seen since the death of George Floyd: “It is never so bad it can’t get worse.”
As we begin what promises to be an even longer and hotter summer in 2021, there are three areas we must address with policies and training: