Page:Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2002.djvu/7

 Introduction

In reviewing the tables, charts, and narrative summaries presented in the publication, the reader should be aware of certain features of the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted program that affect the interpretation of the data. First, this publication presents tables, charts, and narrative summaries addressing the number of law enforcement officers killed and assaulted in the line of duty. The Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted program counts victim officers, not the number of incidents or the weapons used. Additionally, the program considers any part of the body that can be used as a weapon such as hands, fists, feet to be personal weapons and designates them as such in the following tables. Readers should also be aware that agencies use different methodologies for collecting and reporting officer killed data and officer assaulted data. Consequently, these two databases are not comparable. Further, the data in the tables of this book are updated yearly; therefore, the UCR Program advises data users to exercise caution when comparing data in this publication with those in prior year's editions of Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted. Finally, readers should note that the tables in the current edition have been reorganized according to subject matter. An appendix in the back of this book provides a correlation between the tables in this report and those in previous editions. To assist readers in locating specific data, the appendix also contains a breakdown by subject matter and tables relating to each subject. 1