The notion of growing “warfare” against police stems in part from a statistical jump in the number of law officers murdered — “feloniously killed,” in the jargon of the FBI’s numbers.

In 2014, the year of the Ferguson protests and increased media attention on police misconduct, 51 officers were killed nationwide. That was a jump from the 27 killed in 2013 and many took it as a sign of greater danger for police.

Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and an assistant law professor at the University of South Carolina, calls that interpretation “nonsense.”

“It’s misleading to compare one year to another year,” he says.