Since I write primarily about rural policing, a headline like “The Rapid Rise of Killings by Police in Rural America” means lots of inbox traffic. The July Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article stirred negative emotions all around. Some consumers were horrified by the stories of citizens killed by police because it disrupted their fantasies of peaceful little towns. The police and police-adjacent were horrified because the story implied police malfeasance or at least incompetence.
Some were surprised I told them I agree with the premise of the article: there really are a lot of harsh interactions between law enforcement and the public in rural places. I’ve been trying to draw attention to the risks of rural policing for years in this column. Where the WSJ writer and I disagree is in the conclusion he draws (that rural cops kill people because they are poorly trained or trained to overreact), the sources for his statistics, and his slant.
Why rural police shootings are rising — and why it’s not new
Rural places have high rates of shootings by law enforcement and also of law enforcement officers who get shot; that’s not new information or a new trend. In general, rural officers (the WSJ article concentrates on sheriff’s offices) encounter a lot more violence than the general public expects, and they do it with minimal staffing, minimal budgets, and equipment that’s often outdated or faulty. Those same deficits are obstacles to the kind of training the public expects now for officers everywhere.
Falling crime rates in urban areas are a distraction from violent crime in rural settings. Rural citizens have sparse access to medical care and mental health practitioners, and they’re more likely to be poor, addicted to alcohol and illegal substances, and to attempt or complete suicide than their urban neighbors. That’s a recipe for hazardous interactions with officers called to fix problems that often aren’t considered police issues in urban settings. The writer is also correct that rural agencies frequently lack the ability to use the tools of time, distance and backup to defuse volatile situations.
Furthermore, rural officers are often poorly paid, and departments do struggle with recruiting, retention and churn that can result in bad hiring choices. I’ve written about this myself more than once, and it would be disingenuous to pretend it doesn’t matter.
The article’s premise that “rural sheriff’s departments are killing more civilians” implies that the deputies themselves are the problem. That’s not just inflammatory, it’s shallow.
Why national media gets rural police violence wrong
Now let’s talk about the problematic sources, examples and quotes in the WSJ story.
The article is about rural police killings, yet the first several quotes are from urban sheriffs about their resources, their experiences and cultural changes they made. Urban sheriff’s departments have more in common with urban police than they do with rural law enforcement. Sheriffs are mostly elected and police chiefs are mostly appointed. Other than that, urban and rural remain parallel universes with the same crime but vastly different resources and experiences.
The quoted urban sheriffs tout different (implied: better) attitudes toward call responses and different styles of training, while they benefit from relatively robust budgets, superior staffing, access to social workers and mental health practitioners for backup, and declining violence against their officers. Violence against rural officers is actually rising, and however effective urban solutions may be, they are rarely available to rural law enforcement agencies.
The article’s premise that “rural sheriff’s departments are killing more civilians” implies that the deputies themselves are the problem. That’s not just inflammatory, it’s shallow. The writer goes on to quote statistics that are alarming without context — that sheriff’s offices form a quarter of the nation’s law enforcement but account for a third of the killings by police. The writer cites Mapping Police Violence (MPV), stating that since 2013, killings by sheriff’s deputies have risen 43% while killings by police have risen by 3%. Let’s take that apart.
First, sheriff’s offices are not all rural. Most states have one in every county and in most of those counties, deputies patrol just like police departments do. The “43% rise” conflates both urban and rural shootings.
Second, not all rural police interactions, lethal or otherwise, are by sheriff’s offices. Small towns often have their own police departments; state and federal officers also operate in rural places, conduct investigations, make traffic stops, serve warrants, and back up deputies and each other. Because rural departments are sparsely staffed, critical incidents regularly involve backup officers from many different departments.
Next, MPV as a source is profoundly troublesome. “Police violence” is a broad, provocative term. The definition from the site is “Any incident where a law enforcement officer (off-duty or on-duty) applies, on a civilian, lethal force resulting in the civilian being killed whether it is considered “justified” or “unjustified” by the U.S. Criminal Legal System.” Italics and bold mine.
In less than an hour scrolling the data page, I found incidents like an off-duty Virginia state trooper who killed a man who was breaking into his home, an off-duty officer who killed his domestic partner and then himself, an off-duty deputy who struck a bicycle rider at night on a Florida highway notorious for wrecks, an officer who killed a disruptive train passenger who attacked him with brass knuckles after being tased, and multiple incidents of suspects shot while brandishing replica weapons (which MPV classifies as being “unarmed” despite the realistic nature of such items). In fact, the first shooting cited in the WSJ article is about a teenager killed by a deputy when he pulled such a replica firearm from under his shirt. Such incidents deceptively inflate the numbers and muddy the point the writer makes.
The article also indicates that officers responding to mental health calls are a risk to the subjects in crisis. No mention is made of officers (or even other citizens) who are hurt or killed by spiraling suspects; as far as I know, no one tracks that at all. Suicidal people are frequently homicidal as well; getting hurt by someone who is not responsible for his actions doesn’t negate the injury.
| LISTEN: In this episode of the Policing Matters podcast, Kathleen Dias talks about her project looking at officers killed in the line of duty, with an emphasis on incidents specifically in rural settings.
The real story behind rural officer-involved shootings
A few weeks before the WSJ article broke, the Washington Post ran an opinion piece on the same topic, and the contrast between the two is exceptional, especially considering the WSJ reputation as a center-right source, and the Post’s as left-center.
The Post writers acknowledged increasingly violent interactions between law enforcement and the small-town public with this statement, “Officers didn’t become more trigger-happy. They’re dealing with more threats.” And then they backed it up with statistics from sources like LEOKA, the federal database that tracks all assaults on officers. Cops — especially cops in short-staffed agencies — are responsive. They go where they’re dispatched, and dispatched responses (especially to disturbance calls) are correlated with higher incidences of shootings. It was a refreshing read after the emotion-laden stories in the WSJ article, and it makes sense: if rural officers are dealing with more threats and more attacks, they will be responding with force. It’s not pretty. It’s just realistic.
There was an implicit undertone in the WSJ article’s descriptions of small towns and remote places of the incongruity of violence in those places — that somehow a rural setting made violence even less acceptable than usual. I believe that underscores the writer’s lack of understanding of rural places, and also the perception of risk by officers. I’ve lived in remote Western places my whole adult life, and residents see their regions as enormous small towns. When geography is vast, distance contracts. An attack on an officer two-hours’ drive away is an attack on your neighbor; it might take two hours just to get to the nearest store, let alone an emergency room.
If rural officers are dealing with more threats and more attacks, they will be responding with force. It’s not pretty. It’s just realistic.
The writer cited a 2024 shooting on an Otero County, New Mexico road near a reservation, with emotional quotes from the suspect’s grieving family. The deputy has been charged with murder in that case. I recognized the location and looked up some recent incidents, because the deputy may prove to be guilty, but that does not mean he should not have had heightened awareness of risk. People are a risk factor, not population density.
An Otero County deputy was last shot and killed in 2004, in a village of 756 residents. Fallen officers become department lore. Two Alamogordo police officers were shot and killed in 2016 and 2023, and Alamogordo is the Otero County seat. Also in 2016, an officer in the small town of Hatch, New Mexico was shot and killed; a Navajo tribal police officer was ambushed and killed on a remote desert road the following year. In 2021, a state trooper was shot and killed 15 miles east of the small town of Deming. Three months before the Otero deputy’s shooting in 2024, another state trooper was shot and killed 80 miles west of Albuquerque near mile marker 320, by a driver with a flat tire whom he offered a ride to town. Four months before the Otero County shooting, a Las Cruces officer was stabbed to death an hour from Alamogordo.
These aren’t all the officers assaulted, only the ones who died. All of these incidents, plus more in Arizona and west Texas, would be crowding the awareness of every officer in the big small town of the Southwest.
Rural officers need better staffing, higher pay, more training and equipment that works. There is no arguing with that, and I’ll go to the wall with the WSJ writer on those points. Nevertheless, the officers themselves are not the problem. Indeed, they’re expected to be the solution to every problem that comes the way of every other resident, but that’s impossible. They’re cops, not Swiss Army knives. Despite the criticism and the optics, I know that most officers are doing the best they can with what they have and feel both the moral and legal weight of the public’s expectations. If they are falling short of those expectations, criticize their performance but do it fairly.
Tactical takeaway
National stories often miss the realities of small-agency policing. Use data, not headlines, to explain your challenges — and make sure decision-makers understand what “limited resources” really looks like in your world.
