2010 Deadly Year For Police....................R.I.P.

If you remember the uproar that Ice-T’s rock group, Body Count, caused with their incendiary track “Cop Killer” then you can be sure that somehow, someway, the significant rise of police deaths will be tracked back the urban community.
Two officers in a remote Alaska town were ambushed as they chatted on a street. A California officer and deputy were killed by an arson suspect with a high-powered rifle as they tried to serve a warrant. Two other officers doing anti-drug work were gunned down by men along a busy Arkansas highway.

These so-called cluster killings of more than one officer helped make 2010 a particularly deadly year for law enforcement. Deaths in the line of duty jumped 37 percent to about 160 from 117 the year before, according to numbers as of Tuesday compiled by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, a nonprofit that tracks police deaths.

There also was a spike in shooting deaths. Fifty-nine federal, state and local officers were killed by gunfire in 2010, a 20 percent jump from last year’s figures, when 49 were killed. The total does not include the death of a Georgia State Patrol trooper shot twice in the face Monday night in Atlanta as he tried to make a traffic stop.

And 73 officers died in traffic incidents, a rise from the 51 killed in 2009, according to the data.

Craig Floyd, director of the Washington-based fund, said the rise in fatalities could be an aftershock of the nation’s economic troubles as officers in some communities cope with slashed budgets.

We salute all the men and women who work tirelessly, and for little pay, to make sure that our streets are as safe as possible. Clearly all cops aren’t good cops and to those crooked, racist, a**holes, we say…protect your neck, Karma is a b*tch!

(bossip)

A total of 160 officers from the federal and local levels died in the line of duty as of mid-day Dec. 27, an increase over the 117 killed in 2009 when those deaths reached a 50-year low, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.

Most died in traffic-related incidents. The 2010 tally does not include the death of a Georgia State Patrol trooper shot twice in the face Monday night after an attempted traffic stop and brief chase in Atlanta.

More officers, 18, were killed in Texas than in other states. The agencies with the most deaths were the California Highway Patrol and Chicago Police Department, each with five, the memorial fund reported.

Traffic deaths remained by far the leading cause of officer line of duty deaths as they has been for the past 13 years, with 73 officers killed in traffic-related incidents in 2010 compared to 51 in 2009, the organization announced.

Officers shot and killed were also up, with 59 such deaths in 2010, a spike over the 49 killed in 2009 driven in part by shootings of clusters of officers in Fresno, West Memphis and Hoonah, Ark., Tampa and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

A Washington Post investigation found that 511 police officers were killed by firearms in the United States from the beginning of 2000 through this past Sept. 30. The Post tracked how the killers got their guns.

(AP)