Police officers increasingly were the target of gunfire in 2016. Now many officers are retiring or quitting their respective forces, in part, out of fear of being shot in the line of duty.
This is causing some police departments across the country to be concerned with their personnel dwindling since the trend of more police officers retiring or quitting than joining the force has been picking up steam as of late.
More than 100 police officers last week announced their intentions to retire from the police force in Houston, where a deputy constable was shot four times in an ambush in April.
A record number of New York Police Department officers were also considering retirement “because it’s too dangerous to stay,” a local police union official told the New York Post.
The same thing is happening in other major cities such as Chicago and Dallas, the latter of which had five officers killed and 12 hurt in an ambush-style shooting in July. Nearly 100 Dallas officers resigned from the force after the July ambush shooting.
Officers in Baltimore and Chicago are doing the same. Baltimore and Chicago have some of the nation’s highest murder rates.