Every time I see the thin blue line flag or a "support our police" sign (or both combined, as in several yards just outside of town) I get angry. It's willfully ignoring everything you just wrote about, at best.
I think people are operating with incomplete, non-overlapping sets of information.
A day or two ago, a police officer in my area was killed on duty in a gunfight. Some of the reactions on Twitter were deranged and vile, literally celebrating that an officer was killed. I saw the same shit the day or two before when a police department near me tweeted about one of their police dogs dying, apparently of old age.
People deliberately try to ambush and murder police on a fairly regular basis. It doesn’t get reported much—partly because it doesn’t fit any popular media narrative, partly, I suspect, to not encourage copycats, and partly because it’s not really news. In 2013 a man in Southern California—you might recognize his name but I won’t give him the dignity of using it—carried out a brief campaign of murdering police officers and their families in a self-declared campaign of “unconventional and asymmetric warfare” against the LAPD.
I used to personally be very strongly biased against the police. I’m less so now, and part of the reason for that is that I’ve had the opportunity to see dozens of dashcam and bodycam videos of actual officer-involved shootings. The vast majority of the shootings I’ve seen were situations where the officer’s life was very much at risk.
I can even pick out patterns when people post videos of police not shooting people, presumably because those people are white. It’s not because they’re white, it’s because while they might have a bladed weapon and occasionally lunge in an officer’s direction, cops usually hold their fire and maintain distance until the guy breaks into a full-on sprint to try and close that distance.
I’m not trying to minimize or dismiss the actual police brutality that takes place, and I agree that we need higher standards and accountability. But from actually listening to some of the people on that side of the issue and seeing their evidence, I can understand where they’re coming from.
Sure. Stories are important. It's really not all that common, though, if we're being honest. According to this random memorial page[1] 48 police officers were killed in the line of duty last year in the US, an annual fatality rate of 0.006% assuming 800,000 active officers.
The numbers aren’t that low for lack of trying, though. The majority of attempts fail because the police are better-equipped and better-trained than the people trying to kill them. That’s part of why there are so many officer-involved shootings in the first place.
