FBI director highlights overlooked ‘phenomena’ of violence against police

FBI Director Christopher Wray in an interview Sunday highlighted the increased violence against police officers in 2021, including an alarming jump in police murders.

During an interview on “60 Minutes,” Wray was asked about the 59 percent increase in police killings, including 73 officers murdered last year. 

“Violence against law enforcement in this country is one of the biggest phenomena that I think doesn’t get enough attention,” he responded, adding that, in 2021, “officers were being killed at a rate of almost one every five days.”

The FBI director also said that many of the officers who fell victim to the violence were killed in ambushes or while out on patrol simply for being a police officer. 

“​​Wearing the badge shouldn’t make you a target,” Wray said in the interview. 

He also attributed the violence against law enforcement officers at least in part to an overall uptick in violent crime, including a 29 percent jump in murder in the country in 2020. 

“Certainly the pandemic didn’t help,” Wray said in an effort to explain the cause of the rise in violent crime, also citing issues like more juveniles committing violent crime, interstate gun trafficking and “an alarming frequency of some of the worst of the worst getting back out on the streets.”

Still, while data indicates that violent crime increased during the pandemic, its levels remain nowhere near peaks seen in the 1980s and 1990s. 

The FBI’s crime data shows that violent crime peaked around 1991 at a rate of around 758 violent crimes per 100,000 people. A decade later, that rate was down to around 504, and in 2011, it fell to about 387.