In the wake of incidents in Texas and Louisiana that claimed the life of law enforcement officers, some things may be changing while others remain the same for local police.
On July 7, five officers in Dallas, Texas, were shot and killed in what is being called an “ambush attack” on the officers working to police a protest rally. Just over a week later, on July 17 in Baton Rouge, La., six officers were shot during an ambush attack. Three of those six officers died as a result of their injuries.
Statistics on the national level show that the number of officers who have been killed in the line of duty have increased this year, particularly those whose death was due to a firearm.
The National Law Enforcement Officer Memorial Fund is a non-profit organization that serves as national clearing house for information regarding the death of officers in the line of duty. The NLEOMF receives information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as law enforcement agencies around the country.
According to data from the NLEOMF, from January 1 through July 20 of this year 67 officers have been killed in the line of duty, with 32 of those deaths being the result of firearms and 24 resulting from traffic crashes. For the same time period in 2015 62 officers died in the line of duty, with 18 of those deaths attributed to gunshots and 29 were the result of a traffic crash. For the past two decades according to the NLEOMF, the number one cause of death in the line of duty for officers has been traffic accidents.
The month of July has seen a total of 13 law enforcement officers around the nation die in the line of duty after being shot, according to the NLEOMF.
According to data from the FBI, in 2014 (the last year for which FBI statistics are available) a total of 48,315 officers were assaulted in the line of duty.

Often times, when people think of violence and police officers dying in the line of duty, they think of major cities like Dallas, or Chicago, or New York. But the last year has shown that rural Tennessee is not immune to the violence so often associated with much larger metropolitan areas.
In the past eight months, three local officers were injured in the line of duty, as was an officer in nearby Bristol.
While responding to a 911 call about an intoxicated man armed with a gun in December 2015, Carter County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Jenna Markland was shot twice in the head when the suspect allegedly fired on officers using an AK-47 and SKS rifles. She survived her injuries and returned to work.
In February, Elizabethton Police Department Capt. Jerry Bradley was attempting to arrest a wanted suspect on out-of-state and federal arrest warrants when the suspect allegedly opened fire on the officer. Bradley suffered two gunshot wounds but survived the encounter and has returned to work.
CCSO Deputy Tracie Pierson was injured in the line of duty in May when a suspect she was attempting to arrest allegedly struck and then drug the officer with a vehicle as the suspect fled the scene.
In the Bristol incident, an Bristol (Tennessee) Police Department Officer Matthew Cousins suffered a gunshot wound to his leg while responded to a call where a man was allegedly shooting at vehicles on a busy Bristol highway.
In the wake of both the national and local incidents where officers were killed or injured, some local law enforcement agencies are making changes, while others are not.
Elizabethton Police Chief Greg Workman said his department is not doing anything different at this time.
“We’ve trained for this,” he said of his department’s response to Bradley injury in the line of duty.
Workman said his department will continue to train officers to protect their safety as well as training in how to respond to an incident where an officer is injured.
Carter County Sheriff Dexter Lunceford said his department has recently made changes to the training officers receive.
“We went through our in-service this summer and we retooled it a little to focus some more on self defense,” Lunceford said.
In addition to changes in the training, Lunceford also hopes to create a new team that would assist officers responding to critical or large-scale incidents.
“We’re not a large department so we are trying to re-evaluate some ways to better utilize our staff,” Lunceford said.
Part of the plan would be to utilize some of the department’s corrections staff from the Carter County Detention Center and train them to be a part of the new response team.
“These officers are sworn officers but they are not armed,” Lunceford said.
With additional training, these officers could be certified and armed and would add to the number of officers the department would have available should a critical incident happen.
Some national media accounts regarding the officers who were slain in Texas and Louisiana have attributed the actions of the shooter to outrage regarding separate incidents were suspects or other individuals were killed by officers. In the wake of the incidents where officers shot suspects, public outcry has demanded justice for the slain and questioned whether officers were right in shooting the suspects.
Lunceford said he feels those types of reports have helped to increase the tension between officers and the public.
“They (the media) need to present the facts, not political agendas. If they present the facts, people will see things are not the way they are being shown now,” Lunceford said, adding that media accounts portraying the suspects as victims are not accurate. “All it does is fuels the anger. They were not victims.”
Officers in the field responding to a threat have only seconds, and sometimes a fraction of a second, to make a decision on whether or not to use force, Lunceford said.
“We can’t let them shoot first and hope they are a bad shot,” he said.
While some incidents where officers have used force or killed a suspect have been ruled to be the officer’s fault, Lunceford said those cases are few.
“There are 900,000 officers and less than 5 percent are found guilty of crimes,” Lunceford said. “We’re no different than any other profession, we have bad just like there are bad doctors, teachers or preachers.”
“We’re human,” he added. “No matter how much training you put in, you will have errors, and an error is different than a criminal act.”
In the wake of incidents in Louisiana and Minnesota where officers shot and killed individuals, many activists have called for more stringent review of officer involved incidents, including requesting that investigations be conducted by outside third-parties to prevent any bias.
Here locally, investigation of an officer involved shooting by a third party is standard practice.
“You don’t want to investigate your own,” Workman said. “Fortunately we have the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation that can come in and do an independent investigation.”
The TBI also investigates incidents for the Carter County Sheriff’s Office where an officers is involved.