AUSTIN (KXAN) — Three Cedar Park police officers were shot after they responded to a scene Sunday, and while all are expected to survive their wounds, it raises the notion that being an officer is inherently more risky than it was before 2014 when police officers in Ferguson, Missouri shot and killed Michael Brown.
A study co-authored by a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin says that firearm assaults against police officers have remained relatively flat since then.
In an interview Monday with KXAN News Today anchors Tom Miller and Sally Hernandez, UT’s Michael Sierra-Arévalo said the shootings, “while tragic and a very serious social problem,” have averaged around 245 per year from 2014-2019 and “do not seem to be increasing markedly over time.”
Sierra-Arévalo and Justin Nix from the University of Nebraska Omaha authored the study that looked at data from the Gun Violence Archive, which uses crowd-sourced data rather than official records, to estimate how much gun violence takes place in the U.S. The study is published in the August 2020 edition of the journal Criminology and Public Policy.
Sierra-Arévalo said they not only took shootings against police that led to fatalities into account, but also shootings where the officers survived from their wounds. He said that anywhere between 14-21% of the shootings resulted in the death of an officer.
When it comes to states with high rates of firearm assaults against police officers, the research showed Texas was No. 18 out of all 50 states in terms of firearm assaults against police per 1,000 officers. Texas checked in just slightly above average with .54 of such incidents per 1,000 officers, even though raw numbers indicate Texas had the most incidents of any state over the time period.
“Texas definitely isn’t the worst state when it comes to firearm assaults, but it’d definitely be in the top half,” Sierra-Arévalo said.
Mississippi (2.29), New Mexico (1.56) and Alaska (1.07) were the top three states that had the highest rates of firearm assaults against police per 1,000 officers. The national mean is .47 per 1,000 officers.
Sierra-Arévalo said he understands the officers’ point of view, too. He said through another part of his research, he’s interviewed officers and taken rides with them, and he said they are trained to treat every call like one where they could potentially be shot.
“When they get a call for something like a disturbance in a home, that for an outsider, might seem like a very mundane call,” he said. “But the officers are trained, and they go about their work in such a way to try to prepare themselves for the potential for being shot at, fought with or stabbed. It’s ingrained in them through their training.”