With terrifying frequency, Southern California law enforcement officers have fallen in recent months: one in Oxnard, one in Pomona, one in Brea, one in Fullerton, one outside Ojai, and three in a murder-suicide in La Mesa.
This week alone, officers from San Diego County to Ventura County are wearing black bands across their badges, silent testimony to colleagues killed.
The reasons for those deaths are as different as the officers themselves. Some died in domestic disputes, some were killed by fleeing or desperate criminals, one was struck by a train in Brea and another was shot by a colleague.
But every one of them stirs deep trauma for friends, families and the law enforcement agencies, whose employees often feel overwhelmed by the dangers they face daily.
"We're a small department, just 129 officers, probably closer knit than a lot of big city departments," Capt. Bill McClurg of the El Cajon Police Department said after the La Mesa shooting July 12 that cost the lives of two of that city's officers. "When we lose someone, it's like losing family."
The deaths of those and other Southern California officers come at a time when statistics indicate that crime is declining, but those statistics do not account for the full reality of life for today's police. For even as some types of crime diminish, experts fear that the proliferation of weapons and strict sentencing laws may be empowering criminals and making them more desperate, a combination that may be making police work increasingly dangerous.
Since 1993, every year has seen a modest national increase in the number of officers killed on duty, ticking upward from 155 to 172 in 1995. Similarly, California peace officers' deaths on duty have marched higher through the 1990s: Ten California law enforcement officers died in the line of duty in 1991; last year, 16 working officers lost their lives to killers or accidents.
Nowhere is the threat to police more carefully scrutinized than in Los Angeles. Police Chief Willie L. Williams commands Southern California's largest law enforcement agency, one that has recorded 186 officers killed in the line of duty since about the turn of the century. About half died in accidents and half in shootings.
