COVID-19 is the leading cause of death for police officers even though members of law enforcement were among the first to be eligible to receive the vaccine, CNN reports, citing data from the Officer Down Memorial Page.
Nearly 476 police officers have died of COVID-19 since the pandemic started, compared to the 93 deaths as a result of gunfire in the same time period, according to ODMP and CNN.
The NY Times reported last week:
Over the last year and a half, a majority of the roughly 40 police officers who patrol Baker, La., a suburb of Baton Rouge, tested positive for the coronavirus. All of them recovered and went back to work — until Lt. DeMarcus Dunn got sick.
Lieutenant Dunn, a 36-year-old shift supervisor who coached youth sports and once chased down someone who fled the police station after being arrested, died from Covid-19 on Aug. 13. His wedding had been scheduled for the next day.
Chief Carl K. Dunn said he had assumed that the lieutenant, a distant relative, was vaccinated, but thought it would be inappropriate to ask. It was not until after the death, the chief said, that he was told Lieutenant Dunn had not gotten a shot. For some others in the department who had been resisting vaccination, it was a turning point.
“They were like, ‘Oh, look, wait a minute,’” Chief Dunn recalled last month. “Those are the ones that started getting it after DeMarcus left us.”
More than 460 American law enforcement officers have died from Covid-19 infections tied to their work since the start of the pandemic, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, making the coronavirus by far the most common cause of duty-related deaths in 2020 and 2021. More than four times as many officers have died from Covid-19 as from gunfire in that period. There is no comprehensive accounting of how many American police officers have been sickened by the virus, but departments across the country have reported large outbreaks in the ranks.
While the virus has ravaged policing, persuading officers to take a vaccine has often been a struggle, even though the shots have proven to be largely effective in preventing severe disease and death.
Some elected officials say police officers have a higher responsibility to get vaccinated because they are regularly interacting with members of the public and could unknowingly spread the virus. The debate echoes concerns from earlier in the pandemic, when police officers in some cities resisted wearing masks in public.
Yet as more departments in recent weeks have considered requiring members to be vaccinated, officers and their unions have loudly pushed back, in some cases threatening resignations or flooding systems with requests for exemptions.
In San Jose, Calif., city leaders decided just as a vaccine mandate was taking effect to allow unvaccinated officers to remain employed through the end of the year, with incremental discipline and testing requirements. Mayor Sam Liccardo of San Jose said he wanted to keep as many police officers as possible on the job, but worried about the public health risks of having unvaccinated officers on the streets.
“It’s a huge challenge, and I think mayors throughout the country are balancing the safety imperatives of responding to 911 calls against the safety imperatives of having a vaccinated work force,” Mr. Liccardo said.
But the officers have leverage. Many police departments have an abundance of job openings and a dearth of qualified applicants. And city leaders say they do not want to risk a mass departure of officers at a time when homicides have surged nationally.
“If you decide to move forward with mandating this vaccine, the loss of officers is on you,” Josh Carter, an officer in Leesburg, Va., said at a recent meeting where Town Council members considered a vaccine mandate for municipal workers (and decided not to vote on it that day). “I’m going to come back and ask what your plan is to keep my family and my neighbors safe with little to no officers patrolling our streets or our schools,” Mr. Carter told the Council.
Still, proponents of the mandate have noted that there were risks to the public in not requiring the shots. Mayor Kelly Burk of Leesburg, in the Washington exurbs, said she favored requiring vaccines.
“We have a job, and that job is also to protect, and they’re a component of that protection,” Ms. Burk, a Democrat, said of the town’s police force. “And so if they’re not vaccinated, if they’re not willing to wear masks, then it becomes a real problem.”
I think this is a clarifying moment. Police believe they should have carte blanche to beat, taser and shoot with impunity and insist that we must rely on their judgment to determine whether they are in mortal danger or not.
The officers who refuse to get vaccinated are proving that their judgment is dangerously impaired and they should not be on the job armed with lethal force. If they cannot be trusted to do this simple thing to protect themselves, their families and the public — with whom they interact on a daily basis, up close and personal — then they need to find a different profession. It’s really pretty simple.
When all is said and done, any police officer who refuses to get vaccinated should be forced to give up all qualified immunity from prosecution. They must be presumed to be reckless with the security of the public.