No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

by Rachel Louise Snyder

In my first years of asking ride-along questions, police would almost unequivocally answer that domestic violence calls were their most dangerous (occasionally, someone might also include traffic stops). But in the past two or three years, officers have begun to say to me, anecdotally, that it’s active shooters. That’s the scenario they fear most. In a law enforcement report that studied FBI data on active shooter incidents between 2008 and 2012, the authors found that the perpetrator stopped shooting about 40% of the time when police arrived; of those incidents that were ongoing even after police arrived, the law enforcement officers were shot about 15% of the time. Active shooter events, called ASEs in law enforcement parlance, were both on the rise and now among the deadliest for police, the study concluded.8 The idea that many of the active shooter situations officers were likely to encounter began as domestic violence wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the report.