Last year was one of the safest years on record for U.S. police, FBI data released Tuesday confirmed. The numbers follow a sustained downward trend in police deaths over recent decades, despite mounting concerns from police union bosses and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who maintain that violence against law enforcement is on the rise.
Forty-one U.S. law enforcement officers were intentionally killed in the line of duty in 2015, according to the FBI’s statistics, published annually as part of the agency’s Uniform Crime Report. Although annual figures tend to fluctuate, the past four years have seen historic lows in police fatalities. There were 20 percent fewer line-of-duty deaths last year than in 2014, but the totals marked about a 50 percent increase from an all-time low in 2013, when 27 officers were killed.
