“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
That quote is often attributed to Albert Einstein, and I am no genius or even a physicist. I’m just a writer, more like Dr. Seuss’s Lorax, but for rural cops instead of trees: speaking for people who can’t speak for themselves. In this case, they may be muzzled by bosses and taxpayers who find their grievances politically inconvenient, or it may be they are so few and so scattered that no one can hear.
Either way, I’m here writing the same thing I’ve said every Police Week since 2020: rural cops get shot a lot and way too many of them die.
The project
In 2019 I began tracking the numbers of officers shot with the intent to discover where every single one of them was attacked. I believed there was a pattern of violence impacting officers from rural and remote places that no one else was talking about or quantifying.
Was I being oversensitive because rural officers are family to me? Was I assigning too much weight to the headlines I read in small local papers? The only way to sort out reality from my personal bias was to dig for data.
I created my own parameters for the data set. I track shootings because they are reliably reported (unlike simple assaults) and because it’s hard to argue intent when someone points a gun at a cop and pulls the trigger. Sworn officers shot feloniously count, or a blue-on-blue that would not have happened but for a suspect’s violent actions. I include local, tribal, state and federal officers together because I’m looking at where the violence happens rather than who signs paychecks. Off-duty officers are counted if they were acting in their sworn capacity when the attack took place.
I document the number of officers shot in each incident, the number of fatalities and armor saves, the agencies involved and the dates, so each incident can be cross-checked. I search maps to find the geographic location and population for each incident to discern between truly rural and remote places, and suburbs bordering urban areas.
There is no single definition for “rural” so I track officers from places with populations of 30,000 or fewer residents, and also break out a smaller category of fewer than 11,000 residents.
Each search starts by checking Gun Violence Archive’s (GVA) Officers Shot or Killed page, and cross-referencing incidents carefully; sometimes they turn out to be accidental or a suicide, or not actually a gunshot wound. I follow up with a news search to catch incidents that pass unnoticed. Game wardens, park rangers, constables and tribal officers are sometimes overlooked. As years passed, I’ve added fields with basic suspect demographics, and assaults classified as ambushes using data provided by the National Fraternal Order of Police.
You can see the past years’ sheets and fact-check them here, here, here, here, here and here. This year’s sheet is in progress here. Please let me know if a field needs correction.
What kinds of incidents happen in rural and remote places?
Crime happens in waves that ripple to touch even the smallest places.
The first officer to die by felonious gunfire last year, and the only one killed in a shooting in January, is an example: Deputy Jeremy Malone died in a gun battle on a traffic stop in a Mississippi town of just about 3,000 people.
Always remember: Deputy Sheriff Jeremy Malone, George County Sheriff's Office, Mississippi https://t.co/oqPyQtLKSn pic.twitter.com/2rqS0sPj2r
— National Fallen Officer Foundation (@nationalfof) January 6, 2024
Incidents came and went at a steady pace for months. July was marked by a gray rhino: an active shooter — a disgruntled concessionaire working at Yellowstone National Park — threatened fellow workers and park visitors by opening fire with a rifle on the 4th of July. NPS law enforcement rangers responded and one ranger was shot in the confrontation before the gunman died by return fire.
Then there was late summer and early fall.
In August, a total of 27 officers were shot. Nineteen of them, 70%, were in rural or remote places. Six of those officers died, five of them in the places I write about.
One incident was an ambush in a Florida town of about 23,000 residents, where Lake County deputies were lured to a trailer by a fake 911 call from a woman obsessed with conspiracy theories and religious delusions. One deputy was killed; two more were wounded trying to rescue him.
Our hearts ache over the shooting of three deputies from the Lake County Sheriff's Office Friday night in Eustis. Two of the deputies were injured, and one was killed.
— Polk County Sheriff 🚔 Grady Judd (@PolkCoSheriff) August 3, 2024
The fallen deputy was identified as Master Deputy Sheriff Bradley Michael Link who formerly served with the… pic.twitter.com/iq4R1QAP6A
Less than a week later, an officer and new grandfather working a traffic checkpoint in a tiny Mississippi town was killed by a driver with an arrest warrant. The driver fled, then wounded two officers responding to the chase from another town, before dying in a final gun battle. So August 2024 went on, with officers shot at a traffic stop in rural Virginia, in an ambush on a domestic in a small Georgia town and another Georgia deputy killed during a warrant service in the next county to the south.
Always remember: Investigator Taylor Jaimeson Bristow, Carroll County Sheriff's Office, Georgia https://t.co/zRK1pfjExl pic.twitter.com/QirbEsutKO
— Texas FOF (@texas_fof) August 28, 2024
From mid-September to mid-October, 28 more officers were shot. Eleven were places with populations as small as 134 people, including the only officer killed: a Kentucky deputy in a town of fewer than 3,000 residents, helping in the search for a suspect who had shot at a trooper and fled.
1/3. RIP. Kentucky Deputy Sheriff Josh Phipps was murdered when he was shot and killed while assisting Kentucky State Police with a suspect that had fled on foot. Deputy Phipps had served with the Russell County Sheriff’s Office for three years. pic.twitter.com/CV9WzQr4os
— Protecting the Blue (@protectingblue) September 17, 2024
What does the six-year trend show?
I was right. A disproportionate number of officers from small, rural and remote places do get shot each year and an even more disproportionate number of those die of their wounds. I wasn’t overreacting and I’ve got six years’ worth of numbers to prove it.
“Things like that don’t happen here. And because they never have, they never will,” is a comforting lie that citizens, decision-makers and bean counters tell themselves about the pretty little towns and wild places where they live. I call it the Myth of Mayberry, used to avoid providing rural officers and officers in small departments things that can help keep them safe- training, modern equipment, working communications, adequate staffing — in the name of complacent self-deception and fiscal restraint. Risk-benefit analyses break issues down to numbers, but the numbers I count represent lives lost and bodies broken, not dollars or widgets. They’re people, not amortizable assets.
Let’s look at those numbers for 2024.
Total officers shot: 311
Fatalities: 43 = 14% of the total
Armor save: 26 = 8% of the total
Ambush: 67 = 21% of the total
The overall number of officers shot nationwide fell from 358 in 2023, but fatalities rose from 39 to 43, a slightly higher percentage; armor saves fell from 36 to only 26. (Did that affect the number of fatalities? Possibly.) Ambush incidents fell significantly, from 104 in 2023 to 67 in 2024.
Now we’ll look at a smaller population set.
| Officers Shot Population >11,000 to < 30,000 in 2024 |
| 28 officers were shot (9% of the national total) |
| 4 died of their wounds (9% of the national total) |
| 1 was saved by ballistic armor (4% of the national total) |
| 6 were shot in ambush attacks (9% of the national total) |
It’s a predictable figure: smaller town, small number of officers shot overall, fatalities lower than the national percentage. Compared to 2023, however, it’s a significant increase.
In the same category of towns in 2023, only 19 officers were shot all year compared to 28 in 2024. Fatalities rose slightly and ambushes and armor saves did not vary significantly.
Now let’s look at the smallest places. Logic would seem to dictate that if the numbers of officers shot in smaller towns was, well, small, then the numbers should go down even more here.
(Movie narrator voice: They do not.)
| Officers Shot Population <11,000 2024 |
| 61 officers were shot (20% of the national total) |
| 12 died of their wounds (28% of the national total) |
| 6 were saved by ballistic armor (23% of the national total) |
| 13 were shot in ambush attacks (19% of the national total) |
The trend holds again, as it has every year since I began this project. The number of officers shot dips in smaller towns and then rises in the very smallest places instead of falling again. It’s counterintuitive, but very consistent.
The number of officers shot in the least-populated places and the number of ambush attacks doubled as the population fell. The number of fatalities tripled. Armor saves increased from just one to six.
While the numbers of officers shot trended down overall, correlating to a nationwide decline in violent crime, the percentage of rural/small town officers shot and killed as a percentage of the national number remains above pre-pandemic levels (which were higher than I believe they should be anyway).
Taken together, the number of officers shot in the places I write about represents 29% of all officers shot in 2024, but 37% of the fatalities. That is an improvement from 2023, when rural officers spiked to 56% of shooting fatalities, but considering how few officers actually work in these sparsely populated places, I believe they remain disproportionately at risk from violent attacks.
But why so many year after year? And why don’t things change?
There are several possibilities for the disparity. Maybe it’s because rural officers rarely have backup, and that makes bad guys bold. Maybe there are gaps in training that small departments aren’t addressing because of staffing shortages, or budget constraints, or complacency. Distance from sophisticated trauma care almost certainly plays into the high fatality rate, although I can’t prove that without help from other researchers with more information for each case. There are likely more rifles in the country, and armor isn’t very good at stopping high-velocity rounds, especially basic soft armor that isn’t properly fitted.
I think things don’t change because too many decision-makers either don’t have access to the kind of information I track, or because they don’t think it applies to their officers.
Maybe somewhere along the line they decided that change was just too hard and too expensive, and they’d rather gamble on a workers’ compensation case or a fancy funeral than expend the effort to prevent them. That’s harsh. But I don’t have other ideas at this point.
Until these facts are acknowledged, nothing will change and that is unacceptable in the richest nation in the world, full of people who say they value the service and sacrifice of the officers who are paid (far too little far too often) to keep the rest of society safe.
Here’s to another year, another data set, another stab at making people look at tough realities.
I’ve been trying on my own for a long time and I believe these officers’ lives matter. I do believe change is possible and I want you to help.
Here is my ask for you. Share this article. Cross-check my numbers. Challenge a police chief, a sheriff, a city council member, a county commissioner, to read it and refute it — or own it. Get your FOP lodge or guild, or professional publication to reprint it. Send it to a local reporter and ask them to look into your department’s situation.
I can keep counting and I can keep writing. But in the words of the Lorax, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
