Nine police officers were killed in the five-day span between Oct. 28 and Nov. 2, marking one of the deadliest stretches for law enforcement so far in 2016.
On Wednesday, America woke to the news that two Dallas County police officers had been shot dead while sitting in their patrol cars in a suburb just outside of Des Moines, Iowa.
Just after 1 a.m. Wednesday morning, police officers responded to a report of a shooting in Urbandale. At the scene, they found 24-year-old Justin Martin dead inside his patrol car.
Just minutes later, a second officer was found shot inside his patrol car at an intersection in Des Moines. The officer, later identified as 39-year-old Sgt. Anthony Bemino, was rushed to a local hospital where he succumbed to his wounds.
Law enforcement working the scene said it looked like the officers were shot ambush-style inside their vehicles, and that the two had no connection to one another. Officials later arrested 46-year-old Michael Greene in connection with the killings.
Martin and Bemino were the latest in a recent string of on-duty police deaths in the last several days. Nine police officers have lost their lives in the line of duty since last Friday, including five who were shot to death. The other four were killed in vehicle incidents ranging from vehicular assault to accidents, one of which occurred during a car chase.
Detroit Officer Myron Jarrett, 40, was killed on Oct. 28 in a hit-and-run when a van struck his vehicle as he was assisting other officers during a routine traffic stop.
The same day, 22-year-old Officer James Brockmeyer with the Chester Police Department in Illinois was killed in a car crash while pursuing another vehicle. He’d been with the department less than a year.
Also on Friday, Sgt. Allen Brandt died from gunshot wounds he’d received more than a week earlier when he was gunned down by 29-year-old Anthony George Jenkins-Alexie, who shot the 34-year-old officer four times in the legs and once in the chest. The chest shot was stopped by Brandt’s bulletproof vest, but a piece of shrapnel from the bullet ended up lodged in Brandt’s eye. He later died from complications from the surgery to repair the wound.
A total of 114 officers have already died in the line of duty over the past calendar year, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page. Fifty of those died from non-accidental gunfire, the single greatest cause of death. Another 19 officers died in car accidents,11 more were killed in vehicular assaults, and three were assaulted or stabbed to death. Other, much more infrequent causes of death included heart attack, 9/11 related illnesses and drownings.
With two months still to go in 2016, shooting deaths of police officers are already up 28 percent over last year, when 39 officers were shot to death in the line of duty. The year before, 48 officers died from gunshot wounds while on the job.
In fact, while the overall number of police officer deaths has decreased in recent years, more officers have died from non-accidental gunfire in 2016 than in any year since 2010, when 68 officers were killed by gunfire. That year, a total of 181 officers were killed in the line of duty.