The execution style murder of New York Police Department Officer Miosotis Familia late Tuesday night reflects a spike of nearly 20 percent in police deaths since the same time last year, Fox News reported.
According to numbers from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF), 57 officer on-duty related deaths occurred between January 1 and July 5, 2016.
A total of 67 officer fatalities from January 1 to July 5, 2017 have happened, an 18 percent spike since last year, and 24 of those instances were firearm related, a 9 percent increase from 2016.
“People now are more willing to engage the police in combat,” Randy Sutton national spokesman for Blue Lives Matter told Fox News. “Last year approximately 50,000 law enforcement officers were assaulted, that ran the gamut from pushing them to shooting them and causing disabling injuries.”
The largest growth this year, 33 percent, among officers’ job related fatalities so far has been from “other causes” that have been defined by the NLEOMF to include: Aircraft crash, drowning, electrocution, fall, fire-related incident, job related illness, and poison.
New York has seen the most officer fatalities so far with seven deaths, followed by Georgia, California, Florida, Texas, Louisiana and a host of other states and U.S. territories with either two officer fatalities or one officer death so far this year.
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