The situation will change with the new administration in charge.
Via Free Beacon:
Police officers are “scared and demoralized” and have reduced “proactive policing” due to intense criticism from the public and national politicians amid heightened anti-cop activism, according to a recent FBI study.
The demoralization is in part due to the spike in attacks on police last year, which is partly driven by an anti-police narrative spread by the media and not discouraged by elected officials, the agency found.
The report, titled “Assailant Study–Mindsets and Behaviors,” was first reported Thursday by the Washington Times. It was written in April, according to FBI spokesman Matthew Bertron, and examined 50 of the 53 incidents last year in which police officers were killed on duty.
The report comes at a time when the killing of police officers is conspicuous in the news. Last summer, five officers were killed in Dallas and three in Baton Rouge in the wake of the shooting death of Alton Sterling by Baton Rouge police. These were two of the most high-profile incidents; 135 law enforcement officers were killed in 2016, a 10 percent increase from the prior year and the highest total since 2011, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.
The main cause of officers’ deaths was firearms-related incidents, with 64 being shot and killed, representing a a 56 percent spike from 2015. Among those shootings, 21 deaths were due to ambush-style attacks, including the deaths in Dallas and Baton Rouge. The NLEOMF said this was the highest total in more than two decades.
The FBI report, which focused on “mindsets and behaviors,” broke down the thinking that inspired attacks on police, as well as the underlying factors that it believes drove them. In surveying assailants, there were two expressed reasons for their actions: “a desire to kill law enforcement,” and the fear that the assailant was “going to lose their freedom by going back to jail or prison.”