A St. Louis cop was shot in the head, and another wounded in the leg, on Saturday, Aug. 29, 2020, by a gunman who then barricaded himself in a house after ordering the owners to leave. Police negotiators are trying to get him to surrender. Update (8/31/20): The suspect surrendered after a 12-hour standoff. The officer died Sunday (photo right, story here).
The shooting happened while the widow of a retired St. Louis police captain killed in June by looters (photo) was leading a march for “peace and healing.” Two people were killed in other St. Louis shootings during the day. The governor declared “this violence must end,” which, of course, it won’t.
The St. Louis police department, which currently has 1,319 uniformed officers, had 13 cops shot at, and 8 hit by gunfire, in the last 3 months:
July 27, 2020 — Shots fired toward 3 cops talking to a motorist they had pulled over.
July 26, 2020 — A 23-year-old white dude (photo) called 3 cops “cowards” for not killing him after he wounded them with a sawed-off shotgun.
July 21, 2020 — An off-duty cop escaped injury in a gunfight with three youths trying to carjack his unmarked car.
June 1, 2020 — 4 cops were shot during a protest.
Read stories here, here, here, here, and here. Yeah, that’s a lot of links and stories, but there’s is a lot of shootings. And that’s only one city. America has lots of big cities that have lots of shootings.
Fwiw, if you assume each officer on the force contacts 15 people a week, on average, then St. Louis police would make ~250,000 contacts with the public in a 90-day period, and in the last 3 months, 5 have resulted in cops being shot at. That’s about 1:50,000, which suggests an average St. Louis cop gets shot at once every 277 years. This is back-of-envelope and could be way off. Even once is too many. Meanwhile, Covid-19 has infected nearly 6,000 people and killed 188 in St. Louis through Aug. 29, 2020, which doesn’t make shooting at police all right, but it sounds like cops are better off than health care workers, at least until they’re shot. Then, you’d rather be the ER nurse than the cop.
I don’t want any cops to get shot, or anybody else, but I don’t know what the solution is. There probably isn’t one. I have a pretty good idea what the problem is, though: Too damn many guns. Probably too many humans packed into too little space, too.
