It allows them to keep the ignorant in a state of constant paranoid frenzy so they will accept any policy which promotes the fascist domestic agenda on taxes, employment and regulation. Ignorance, fear, anger and hatred. And people wonder why half the Republican party is spreading its legs for Trump and his clones. But even conceding that,I don't see what any of that has to do with that graph you posted. All it suggests is that there were substantially less per capita police deaths (is that dead cops or dead citizens?) AFTER the election of FDR and the introduction of Liberal policies and the New Deal. Even I don't think that's relevant.

BTW, that little bump in the 70s is the boomers hitting their 20s. Its purely demographic, not political.

Did it ever occur to you that perhaps demographic factors such as white flight from the central cities, the growth of the suburbs, the influx of blacks from the rural agricultural south into the urban industrial north and the subsequent ghettoization of American cities might just have a little to do with this? Maybe cop-related deaths have gone down overall, but the price we pay for it is urban warfare in the cities.

Tom, you view the world through a glass darkly. Everything you see is colored by your perception (no doubt of psychological origin)that everything bad in the world can be traced directly to the growth of Bolshevism. And with the internet, you can always find some statistic or factoid somewhere that can be twisted to either support that conclusion, or to confirm your conviction that there is an organized sinister conspiracy afoot to conceal it. And although I don't doubt the accuracy of your data, I see you went to the American Enterprise Institute to get it. Could there possibly be a selection effect at work here? You know us old astronomers, we've been trained to be very aware of how the availability of data can affect conclusions based on it.

Black Lives Matter addresses a self-evident social phenomenon. There are decaying communities and collapsing social institutions in the black ghetto, the barrio, and the Reservations. We are seeing this symptomology creeping into the white rural areas and suburbs too as a consequence of the erosion of American prosperity and the spread of drug use among the collapsing middle class. This causes more crime, which forces an underpaid and overworked police to crack down harder and more violently, which in turn forces a backlash from the communities they are supposed to protect. Cops feel they are being ambushed and abandoned, the community feels it is being oppressed and occupied, the cycle feeds on itself. And both sides are justified in feeling they are being unfairly targeted. They are both right.

And Tommy, in his comfortable upper middle class enclave in Silicon Valley, thinks getting more Republicans in power is going to magically turn this around. What magnificent horseshit.

Don't make me get the duck, Tom. So far, that appears to be the only cure for your conspiracy theories and political anomalism.

“Hey Hey, Ho, Ho, this shit has to stop.”