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.
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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.
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