CNA Awarded Grant to Research Ambushes of Police

CNA has been awarded a grant (Cooperative Agreement # 2012-CK-WX-K036) to conduct research on ambushes of police as part of a new initiative by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (“COPS Office”).

In recent years, ambush attacks have been on the rise nationally, yet little is known about the characteristics of such incidents and what police departments can do to protect their officers. In response, the Attorney General’s Office has noted on the COPS Office website the need to “[develop] approaches to counter ambush-style attacks.” CNA’s initiative will fill this void with a two-phase, mixed methods study.

Phase I will be driven by research and analysis of ambush incidents, leveraging past research, the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) data set, and after-action/incident reports from the field. The purpose of Phase I will be to identify trends in these incidents in order to develop and inform policy and training protocols throughout the law enforcement enterprise.

The research team will then collaborate with law enforcement practitioners in Phase II of the project. CNA will conduct a series of focus groups and hold panel discussions to identify policy, training, and operational practices that can protect police officers against ambush attacks. CNA will be partnering with the International Association of Chiefs of Police to engage a broad law enforcement audience.

In the following weeks, the research team will be soliciting after-action/incident reports of ambush attacks of law enforcement across the country. If your agency has incident reports that can be shared with the CNA research team for this important endeavor, please contact principal investigator George Fachner by email (fachnerg@cna.org) or phone (703.998.4893).