By Briana Vannozzi
Correspondent
The numbers are headline worthy. In the first half of 2016, police fatalities from firearms spiked 78 percent over the same period last year. And ambush-style killings — like that of Baton Rouge or Dallas — are up dramatically, too.
A report issued by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund shows as of Aug. 1, 34 officers were killed by gun fire in the line of duty — up from 20 at this time last year. Overall 69 officers have been killed in 2016 — one in New Jersey.
“It has to stop. People have to stop and think before they do things. As police officers, sometimes we have a split second. These things were thought about and then done,” said New Jersey Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund Executive Director of the Police Unity Tour Harry Phillips.
Phillips and Pat Montore work with New Jersey’s chapter of the memorial fund. The nonprofit raises awareness and honors the service of fallen officers. It issues two of these statistical reports a year by using data from local and federal agencies.
“It also educates the law enforcement community on the types of incidents and deaths that occur to better educate them to be either more prepared or understanding of the environments that they may be patrolling. And also the climate, the emotions of people so they can better serve the community, their customers and the people,” said Montore, senior director of law enforcement relations for the New Jersey Law Enforcement Officer Memorial Fund.
But criminal justice experts caution against drawing broad conclusions from short-term data, saying it’s a snapshot that can be misleading.
“When you’re looking for trends that would tell us, is something that’s happening in the world the beginning of a very bad problem or is it just a kind of temporary change that is going to reverse itself, you have to look more, at more than just a six-month period,” said University of Pittsburgh Law Professor David Harris.
Additional data from the New Jersey Law Enforcement Memorial Fund shows that overall, police fatalities from all causes are down substantially.
Montore agrees that data should be studied carefully, but says it doesn’t change the fact that many officers are living in a new world with a target on their backs.
“I think collectively policies are driven by emotions sometimes and I think that they shouldn’t be driven by emotion, even laws. Sometimes laws will be pushed out because obviously this horrific action happened and we got to do something, everybody wants to do something — law enforcement, citizens, the political bodies. I think that educating, understanding, investigating and finding the determining factors and then how to approach it. Then policy change will be made,” Montore said.
“I think it’s extraordinarily troubling to them, but nothing is going to change the way that our police officers react to serving the public. I think that we have the best trained and most professional law enforcement officers in the country,” said New Jersey State PBA Director of Government Affairs Rob Nixon.
The next report will be issued at the end of the year. All of the parties involved have the same hope — they won’t have to add another officer’s name to the memorial.