Gun victimization in the line of duty

• Published date: 01 August 2020
• Author: Justin Nix,Michael Sierra‐Arévalo
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12507
• Date: 01 August 2020

DOI: ./-. 

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH IN POLICE POLICY AND PRACTICE

Gun victimization in the line of duty

Fatal and nonfatal firearm assaults on police officers in the United

States, 2014–2019

Michael Sierra-Arévalo1Justin Nix2

University of Texasa t Austin

University of Nebraska Omaha

Correspondence

MichaelSierra-Arévalo, Department

ofSociology, The University of Texasat

Austin, E rd St, A, RLP .,

Austin, TX  .

Email:msa@utexas.edu

Research Summary: Using open-source data from the

Gun Violence Archive (GVA), we analyze national- and

state-level trends in fatal and nonfatal firearm assaults

of U.S. police officers from  to  (N=,).

Results show that (a) most firearm assaults are nonfatal,

(b) there is no compelling evidence that the national rate

of firearm assault on police has substantially increased

during the last  years, and (c) there is substantial

state-level variation in rates of firearm assault on police

officers.

Policy Implications: GVA has decided strengths rela-

tive to existing data sources on police victimization and

danger in policing. We consider the promises and pit-

falls of this and other open-source data sets in polic-

ing research and recommend that recent state-level

improvements in use-of-force data collection be repli-

cated and expanded to include data on violence against

police.

KEYWORDS

danger, firearm assault, gun violence, policing

After more than  years of social science research on policing in the United States, the dan-

ger of police work remains a salient feature of police officers’ occupational environment (Lof-

tus, ;Marenin,; Sierra-Arévalo, ). Scholarly attention to the danger of policing has

been renewed by recent discussion of a “war on cops” that began after the  police killing

of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Proponents of this hypothesized war posit that the

contemporary political climate has resulted in widespread distrust and even disdain of police

Criminology & Public Policy. ;:–. ©  American Society of Criminology 1041wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp

1042 SIERRA-ARÉVALO NIX

on the part of public officials, academics, and the news media; in turn, the public has become

increasingly “anti-police” and emboldened to question, resist, and violently attack police offi-

cers on U.S. streets (Mac Donald, ). Despite widespread concern among police administra-

tors (Nix, Wolfe, & Campbell, ), however, empirical research on the most dire implication

of a war on cops—violence against police—finds no significant increases in fatal or nonfatal

violence against police in recent years (Maguire, Nix, & Campbell, ; Shjarback & Maguire,

). Nonetheless, the issue of violence against police remains highly salient to U.S. politics and

policy, including the rise of the Blue Lives Matter movement and the growth in laws seeking

enhanced penalties for killing police officers (Craven, ).

Despite the rich history of research on danger in police work, there are several long-standing

limitations to this body of scholarship. First, researchers’ operationalization of “danger” tends

toward the rarest, most extreme measure of danger in police work: felonious line-of-duty deaths

that are driven by firearm assaults (see White, Dario, & Shjarback, , p. ). This focus on felo-

nious deaths underestimates the total scope of the danger police confront by ignoring nonfatal

violence against officers (cf. Bierie, ; Bierie, Detar,& Craun, ), including nonfatal firearm

assaults that, even though they do not result in a line-of-duty death, represent cases of deadly force

directed at police. Second, analyses that attend to all assaults on police officers better capture less-

than-lethal violence (e.g., punches and kicks) but do not differentiate such cases from especially

lethal threats like firearm assaults (Shjarback & Maguire, ; Tiesman, Gwilliam, Konda, Rojek,

&Marsh,;cf.Bierieetal.,). Third, data sources that rely on voluntary reporting by police

(e.g., LEOKA and NIBRS) are limited by a lack of consistent reporting by law enforcement agen-

cies and marked lag times in the release of said data, frustrating timely, confident estimates of a

pressing public safety and policy issue (Kuhns, Dolliver,Bent, & Maguire, , p. ; Nix, Richards,

Pinchevsky, & Wright, ,p.;Shjarback&Maguire,).

Because of its inattention to cases in which officers are shot but not killed, existing research

tends to provide either an underestimate of gun violence directed at officers or eschew specificity

in favor of an estimate of assault broadly defined. This, in combination with the data quality and

timeliness issues that affect data sets commonly used to examine violence against police, pre-

vents accurate estimates of total firearm assaults on officers that are of long-standing salience to

the issue of officer safety in the United States (Cell, ; The President’s Commission on Law

Enforcement and Administration of Justice, ,p.).

Given the decided gravity of the prob-

lem at hand, there is a clear and urgent need for researchers to bring new, more timely data to

bear.

This article addresses these issues with open-source data provided by the Gun Violence Archive

(GVA), a nonprofit organization that collects and constantly updates data on firearm assaults of

police officers across the United States. Because GVA records both fatal and nonfatal firearm

assaults on police, we are able to provide an estimate of firearm assaults on police officers that

includes (and differentiates) fatal and nonfatal shootings.We use these data to providenational-

and state-level estimates of fatal and nonfatal firearm assaults against police officers in the United

States from  to . Weconclude with consideration of future directions for this research as

well as the promises and limitations of data like those collected by GVA in research on violence

against and by police. We also provide concrete policy recommendationsfor improving the qual-

ity and timeliness of data on violence against police to better support police agencies, researchers,

and policy makers.