More cops were killed in the line of duty during President Biden’s first year of office than any other year since 1995 — and a law-enforcement group says the driving force is the growing anti-cop sentiment, according to a new report.
Seventy-three officers were intentionally killed in the line of duty in 2021 — a nearly 59 percent increase over 2020, when 46 cops were murdered, Fox News reported Sunday, citing the FBI’s database on officers killed in action.
“We believe it’s a combination … of the George Floyd protests — riots, if you will; a general feeling of a preference for less law enforcement; and less prosecution and less policing,” Jason Johnson, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund and a 20-year police veteran, told Fox News.
“Law enforcement officers have essentially been marginalized and demoralized and cast aside and encouraged now to enforce the law. And so we’ve seen massive jumps in the homicide rate in cities across America,” he said.
Johnson noted that “it’s natural” that rising homicide rates in the US have “also resulted in many more officers being assaulted because … a lot of leaders in these cities and leaders in Congress and leaders in the White House have really voiced a lack of respect for law enforcement officers.”
According to the FBI database, 74 officers were killed intentionally while on the job in 1995, an analysis by by the conservative Heartland Institute shows. The next highest number was 72 in 2011.
Prior to 1995, the last time 74 officers were intentionally killed in the line of duty was 1987.
The analysis did not include the number of officers killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The Heartland Institute said one of the reasons for the increase in police officer killings has to do with a rise in “ambush” or unprovoked attacks on police. It said 32 officers were killed in an ambush or unprovoked attack in 2021, compared to 10 in 2020 and seven in 2019.
Two NYPD officers, Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora, were fatally shot on Jan. 21 when they were ambushed by an ex-con during a domestic disturbance call at a Harlem apartment.
Mora, 27, a four-year veteran of the force, and his rookie partner, Rivera, 22, were both shot in the head.
Rivera’s widow, Dominique Luzuriaga, blasted Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his liberal soft-on-crime policies as she delivered her husband’s eulogy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
“This system continues to fail us,” Luzuriaga told mourners Jan. 28. “We are not safe anymore, not even the members of the service. I know you were tired of these laws, especially the ones from the new DA. I hope he’s watching you speak through me right now.”
Biden traveled to the Big Apple last week to meet with Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul at One Police Plaza in the wake of Rivera and Mora’s killings to discuss curbing the soaring gun violence in the Big Apple.
But their message failed to make an impact on the rank-and-file officers who said there was nothing new to the political rhetoric.
“Typical political mumbo-jumbo. They talk a good game, but they don’t help,” a Brooklyn detective told The Post.
“The guns are already here. We have to keep the people that we arrest with guns in jail. That is the only hope for innocent victims that get shot.”
