Letters to the Editor
It is estimated that annually, police in the U.S. have 385,000,000 contacts with the public and make 11,205,833 arrests, in which 48,315 police officers are seriously injured and 990 people are killed by police. According to the Dolan Consulting Group (Richard R. Johnson, PhD), since 1971 police shootings have decreased at approximately 3.3 percent annually to historic lows.
Locally, here in Cheney officers responded to roughly 32,000 calls for service last year, and physical force was used in only 13 cases, with no deadly force being used. This is not unique to Cheney, as I have worked in five other much larger, urban police departments with the same or similar experiences.
The Center for Disease Control and Department of Justice numbers shared above support what many of us in law enforcement understand, that death at the hands of police is unfortunate, sometimes unavoidable, extremely rare and ugly. So why is the increasing use of force myth — particularly deadly force — being circulated?
I suppose a 24/7 news cycle that reports the same officer-involved shooting hour after hour contributes to this false narrative. Emerging body camera technology provides footage that generates interest, and I suspect that it fits the political agenda of various groups to insist that the police are out of control and in need of reform.
So by now you’re probably asking yourself, “What’s the chief’s point?” Well simply, do your own fact checking. Do not rely on some talking head on the evening news to report something as fact when it may not be true. Do not allow an online posting to make unsupported claims about the use of police force. Insist that people that make such claims cite their sources before accepting something as true.
John D. Hensley, Chief of Police
Cheney Police Department
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