I’ve been looking at officer fatalities data and started noticing some pretty big discrepancies between different sources of data.

So I'm making a thread (pt.1):

CW for death, mention of specific types of death, 9/11, cancer

On the FBI’s website it lists 89 deaths in its count of Law Enforcement Officers killed in the line of duty in 2019. These are separated into felonious (48) and non-felonious (41) deaths.

But, on the ODMP (Officer Down Memorial Page) and the NLEOMF (National Law Enforcement Officer's Memorial Fund), the numbers are much higher. They list 147 and 128 officers killed, respectively. The ODMP also breaks it down into felonious (41) and non-felonious (60) deaths.

So, what is going on?

Well, each site also breaks down the number further, so I made a chart. I combined car crashes, officers stuck by cars, vehicular assault, etc. into Vehicles.
I also combined gun deaths, though the number of accidental gun deaths was small (between 0-3).

Here is where this gets interesting.
While the numbers for vehicles deaths and gun related deaths are pretty consistent across all three data sets, the FBI doesn’t count deaths by Heart Attack / Duty Related Illness or 9/11 Related Cancer (air near the towers was carcinogenic).

9/11 Related Cancers account for roughly 16.3% of the ODMP Deaths and roughly 9.3% of NLEMF Deaths.

Heart Attack / Duty Related Illness account for roughly 14.2% of the ODMP Deaths and roughly 14.8% of NLEMF Deaths.

Combined, they account for roughly 30.6% of the ODMP Deaths and roughly 24.2% of NLEMF Deaths.

Why is this important? Well it skews the data, a lot. 9/11 was an event nearly 20 years ago and still accounts for a significant percentage of officer deaths. And while I can’t easily find data comparing the risk of heart attacks/duty related illness of Police Officers...

...verse other professions, I do know that FBI chooses not to list heart attacks in their statistics.

If you have gotten this far, my guess is that you already know a lot of public perceptions about policing being dangerous is wrong (it isn’t even one of the 10 most dangerous professions in the US), but it turns out those numbers were more BS than I thought they were

So umm part two is coming sometime soon once I do a bit more research

Also sources:

https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2019-statistics-on-law-enforcement-officers-killed-in-the-line-of-duty
https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2019
https://nleomf.org/newsroom/news-releases/128-law-enforcement-officer-fatalities-nationwide-in-2019
https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019 

Excellent thread by @Lumb_PDX on this topic https://twitter.com/Lumb_PDX/status/1384691476655841288?s=20