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Anti-police sentiment remains a major problem in America, several past and present members of law enforcement told Blaze News, despite waning support for the "defund the police" movement and the impending second term of President-elect Donald Trump, who has long been seen as a friend to law enforcement.
While the number of officers killed in the line of duty has dipped in the last couple years, the number skyrocketed in the aftermath of the May 2020 death of George Floyd, the re-emergence of Black Lives Matter, and the calls from Democrats and activists across the country to defund police departments.
According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, a police nonprofit, an alarming 722 officers died in connection with their professional responsibilities in 2020, though that number includes 285 officers who died from COVID-19.
Thankfully, the total number of duty-related blue deaths dwindled to just 137 in 2024, the lowest number recorded at ODMP in the last 10 years.
'They ambushed him': Deputy Bradley Reckling
Though police fatalities are down overall, verbal and physical attacks on police continue in earnest. In fact, the number of gun-related officer deaths has remained fairly consistent over the last decade, averaging about 57 per year and reaching a high of 63 in 2021 and 2022.
And that number includes only those who lost their lives on account of their injuries. It notably does not include those who were wounded but survived, according to Officer Dave Goitia, a 23-year veteran who recently made the switch to full-time labor work as president of the Fraternal Order of Police in Glendale and the second vice president of the Arizona Fraternal Order of Police.
"The numbers of police officers who are shot in the line of duty, for example ... has been rising pretty significantly over the past four years," Goitia told Blaze News. "It doesn't necessarily mean that they were killed, but just the number of shots has been on the rise."
While abstract numbers can at times obscure the painful reality of officers wounded or killed in the line of duty, Sheriff Michael Bouchard (R) and the rest of his office in Oakland County, Michigan, learned firsthand the devastating effects of losing one of their own at the hands of a violent suspect.
On June 22, 2024, Oakland County Deputy Bradley Reckling, 30, was shot and killed while conducting an investigation into a possible auto theft in Detroit in neighboring Wayne County.
Sheriff Bouchard told Blaze News that the auto-theft investigation began, like thousands of others do, with several detectives arriving separately on the scene "in the middle of the night."
"[Reckling] just came across the car first," Bouchard explained, "then they ambushed him."
Deputy Reckling, a nine-year veteran, left behind a pregnant wife and three children. Three 18-year-olds were later arrested and charged in connection with his death.
Bouchard described the murder of Deputy Reckling as a "crushing blow" to everyone at the department.
'This stuff affects us.'
Officer-deaths are also personal for Angel Maysonet, a retired NYPD detective who after 22 and a half years on the force now provides security for the executives of a utility company in a private capacity. In his conversation with Blaze News, Maysonet was able to rattle off the names of five colleagues who died violently while on duty during his tenure with the NYPD and provide minute details regarding the circumstances of their deaths — not to mention, he added, his brother officers who died on September 11, 2001.
"Officers are human," he said. "We're human beings. We have hopes. We have dreams. We have families. We have tragedies. We suffer losses. We celebrate our victories."
"We see officers suffering from PTSD," he continued. "We see officers, especially now that we're in the holidays, taking their own lives. It's happening at an alarming rate right now. We're humans.
"This stuff affects us."
'Unfairly targeted': Politicians fan the flames of outrage
Sheriff Bouchard blames the public's relatively low regard for law enforcement on high-profile politicians who have continuously bad-mouthed officers for using force in cases involving troubled and potentially dangerous individuals, like George Floyd in May 2020.
Maysonet and Goitia, however, believe the problem began much earlier. In their separate conversations with Blaze News, each mentioned President Barack Obama infamously accusing Sgt. James Crowley of acting "stupidly" when responding to an alleged break-in at the home of Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2009. Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, later hosted a Beer Summit with Crowley and Gates at the White House to discuss their differences.
"[Obama] had no information about what happened at all, no details," Goitia explained. "[He] said that officer 'acted stupidly' and then realized later on what a bad statement that was. So he had to have the Beer Summit."
Maysonet, a one-time Obama voter, also noted that in July 2016, several years after the Cambridge incident, Obama even implicitly aligned himself with some BLM grievances during remarks at a wake honoring five Dallas police officers slain at a BLM rally.
"Faced with this violence, we wonder if the divides of race in America can ever be bridged," Obama said. "We wonder if an African-American community that feels unfairly targeted by police, and police departments that feel unfairly maligned for doing their jobs, can ever understand each other’s experience."
In that speech, Obama also took time to recognize Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two black men who had died just days earlier during encounters with police. "Today, in this audience, I see people who have protested on behalf of criminal justice reform grieving alongside police officers. I see people who mourn for the five officers we lost but also weep for the families of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile," Obama said.
Sterling, who served five years for tussling with a police officer while armed, was shot and killed by a cop in Baton Rouge on July 5, 2016, after reportedly threatening someone with a gun.
While Castile had no known history of violence, he pled guilty to several traffic violations after having been pulled over more than 50 times. He was shot and killed during a traffic stop for an alleged broken tail light near Minneapolis a day after Sterling died.
'The controversy is what sells.'
Four years later, George Floyd — who served several years behind bars after pointing a firearm at the abdomen of a pregnant woman — died during an encounter with police. At that point, Black Lives Matter stormed back onto the national stage, demanding not only police accountability but a reallocation of resources to starve departments and promote social justice instead.
Many leftist politicians happily trumpeted BLM's call to "defund the police." In October 2021, the Republican National Committee released a nearly seven-minute video of various big-name Democrats — including Vice President Kamala Harris, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and Reps. Nancy Pelosi of California, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — embracing the "defund the police" sentiment.
Omar, in fact, went so far as to demand that local governments "dismantle" their police departments and "reimagine" law enforcement and public safety.
In the years since, support for defunding police has plummeted as violent and property crime spiked across America. In fact, some Democrats, such as Reps. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri, may have even lost their respective seats in part because of their association with the "defund the police" movement.
Other Democrats such as Mayor London Breed of San Francisco and former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, who actually implemented policies to defund police, later walked those policies back and restored police funding. Despite the about-face on defunding San Francisco police, Breed still lost her bid for re-election in November.
"They see that it doesn't work," Maysonet said.
Dave Goitia, who was decorated with the Public Safety Officer Medal of Valor by then-President George W. Bush, noted that federal lawmakers, state governors, and local mayors are not the only ones who have contributed to anti-police fervor. Far-left district attorneys, many of them funded by George Soros, have likewise exploited their prosecutorial discretion to wreak havoc on public safety to the detriment of local police.
Goitia described these DAs as "soft-on-crime" activists who advocate for "the elimination of certain bail standards" rather than "keeping ... bad actors behind bars."
News reports about officers from around the country who were allegedly shot in 2024 by suspects with a criminal history seem to support his point. Headlines regarding those cases reveal an alarming pattern:
Black Lives Matter did not respond to Blaze News' request for comment.
In addition to pushing local policies that sometimes benefit defendants at the expense of police, the Democratic Biden-Harris administration has also implemented open-border policies that have caused cities to swell with a new population of people who do not understand local laws and customs and who likely already committed a crime when crossing into the U.S.
Moreover, members of violent international criminal organizations like Tren de Aragua have likewise stolen into the country and terrorized local residents. Not only do these violent gangs add considerably to the workload of local police departments, but reports indicate that gang leaders have even put a hit out on cops, making an already dangerous situation even more dangerous for police and residents alike.
"Credible human sources from Colorado provided information on TdA giving a 'green light' to fire on or attack law enforcement," read a memo reportedly released by the Homeland Security Investigations office in Chicago this summer.
Goitia attributes at least some of the violent attacks on police to unfettered immigration. "I think that the border has been a big problem for law enforcement," he said. "We definitely have seen some bad actors coming across this border."
Maysonet agreed. "Gang members ... are coming from Venezuela and being essentially just let loose to commit crimes," he said.
"The big mouths and the anti-police crowd are going to ... continue to place the lives of police officers in this country in danger."
'It's clickbait': Media outlets pile on
The media has also played an important role in creating anti-police animus, Goitia, Bouchard, and Maysonet all told Blaze News.
Maysonet said that the media relentlessly harps on the rare cases of black men who die during encounters with police to stoke racial tensions. "They make it into always a racial issue," he said.
Evidence supports Maysonet's claim.
In 2015, the Washington Post began tracking "fatal police shootings" and providing an updated tally of yearly totals. In describing its methodology, the outlet listed "the race of the deceased" first among the "details" it considers in each incident.
A 2020 episode of "Hidden Brain" on NPR entitled "The Air We Breathe" explored alleged "implicit bias and police shootings." During the episode, panelists noted that protests in the wake of George Floyd's death sparked "a global conversation on the issue of racism and police brutality — especially in communities of color."
In 2021, the BBC published a list of all the "major incidents" of black people dying during an encounter with police in the past decade. The article featured pictures of police in full tactical gear while seemingly unarmed protestors peacefully stand, march, or raise their fists, further promoting the idea of an adversarial relationship between police and their communities.
Goitia argued that the media may even have a vested interest in pushing this narrative. "The controversy is what sells," he told Blaze News.
"It's clickbait, and it garners viewership," he said. "That's what the media is about. They want to have a large audience. They want people looking at their content."
To illustrate his point, Goitia pointed to an article published just this month in U.S. News & World Report that claimed that "black youth with autism" face "special dangers" during "encounters with police."
"If you look into the story, there's zero statistical evidence of this at all," Goitia said. "They spoke with caregivers for black youth with autism, and these caregivers, they had concerns. They had feelings about how those interactions might go based on what we know about people with autism."
He's right. The article is based on a study in which researchers consulted "43 Black caregivers of Black children with autism." The article does not discuss any particular police incidents involving an autistic black child or include the perspective of "a single cop."
Sheriff Bouchard, who is also the vice president of government affairs at the Major County Sheriffs of America organization, similarly called out the "demonization" of cops by "some media outlets."
"It's constant 'police reform,' 'police reform,' 'police reform,' and that rhetoric makes it sound like we're broken, that all cops are doing something that's inappropriate," Bouchard said, "and that's absolutely false."
This mischaracterization of law enforcement has led to poor recruitment and retention as well as public mistreatment of law enforcement officers, he said.
"The degree of danger, the unpredictability of what you might face on any given day certainly are factors that people consider whether it's something they want to do," Bouchard said.
"They are the Vietnam veterans of today," the sheriff further said about law enforcement agents. "When the veterans came home from Vietnam, they were demonized, even though they went to do a very tough job on behalf of the American people. They didn't make the policy decisions to be there, but they stood up and did what was asked of them."
'Without prejudice': Cops doing their duty despite circumstances
Sheriff Bouchard, Officer Dave Goitia, and retired Det. Angel Maysonet all admitted that, as with all professions, there are some bad apples in law enforcement, and they all advocated for holding bad officers accountable. However, they also expressed hope that public opinion of law enforcement will improve under a second Trump administration.
Bouchard told Blaze News that once Trump resumes office, "support of law enforcement will go up dramatically."
Goitia seemed to agree. "President Trump has always been very supportive of law enforcement," he said. "Anytime he's in the public, just about, he will praise law enforcement. He will thank law enforcement. He makes it clear that law enforcement is not the problem in this country and that law enforcement need to be supported."
While Maysonet, who voted for Trump in 2024, is similarly optimistic about a second Trump term, he is concerned that the media and some lawmakers will continue to vilify law enforcement agents, especially those charged with conducting mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
"It's gonna come down to, again, people trying to portray the police as being brown coats and just doing what the government wants," he said. "The anti-police crowd are going to twist [Trump's] words and continue to place the lives of police officers in this country in danger."
'They're just going to work through it.'
Regardless of how the public perceives them or the media and politicians portray them, officers will continue to do their jobs, they said.
"When somebody calls 911 for service, the dispatcher and the police officer don't say, 'What God does this person worship? What's their skin color? Who do they sleep with? How do they identify?' We go without prejudice, and we respond, and we lay our lives on the line for everyone without prejudice," Maysonet said.
"We don't ask those questions," he continued. "It doesn't matter to us."
Goitia expressed a similar sentiment to Blaze News, claiming that, while members of law enforcement have a "foxhole mentality" and will fiercely defend their own, they often set aside personal issues and emotions to serve the public.
"[Officers] show up on Christmas, show up on New Year's Eve and still do their do their duties," he said. "They're really not going to be able to take to take time off."
"They're just going to work through it."
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