As More New York Blacks Wear Blue, More Are Dying in the Line of Duty

Maybe they are only numbers: Four out of five.

Five times since the terrorist attacks of 2001, police officers have been shot dead in the line of duty. Four of those times, the families of black officers have taken front-row seats for the funerals.

The number of black people in the 37,000-member Police Department has risen slowly over the decades, but more rapidly in recent years. Blacks now make up 17.4 percent of the force – up from 9.2 percent in 2001 in a city where more than 25 percent of the population is black. Since 2001, though, the names of black officers and detectives have all but filled the list destined for permanent inscription in gilded bas-relief above the entrance to Police Headquarters: “Those Who Died in Performance of Duty,” as the plaque says.

“There were years where the Honor Roll read like the Emerald Society roster,” said Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman. “Now it reflects a more diverse department. The faces change. The courage doesn’t.”

After Dillon Stewart, a 35-year-old black patrol officer, was shot to death on Monday morning, his colleagues stood shoulder to shoulder outside the hospital where he died and inside the courtroom where a man accused of shooting him was arraigned. Men and women, black, white, Asian and Hispanic, investigators and ticket writers, they stood together.

Still, some of Officer Stewart’s colleagues could not help but remark on those numbers – four out of five. Indeed, of the last 10 New York officers killed in violent encounters on the job, 6 were black.

“Patrol, it can be like just routine and then all of a sudden it can escalate to a life or death situation,” said Sgt. Vernon Wells, a black officer who, after 20 years, worked his last day last week. “The more African-Americans that come on the job and Latinos that come on the job, they’ll be exposed to these life or death situations.”

Department officials and others, from criminal justice experts to officers on the street, said there was no single answer for what put any officer in harm’s way on the day or night of his death.

Some have theorized that the deaths of black officers might be explained by a mix of bad luck and department demographics. In a department where the top jobs are still dominated by whites, each new police academy class is filled with more black, Hispanic and Asian-American officers, all of whom start their careers on the front lines of patrol. The police academy class that graduated in July, for instance, was 18.3 percent black, a figure that, together with the Hispanic and Asian-American recruits, made it the first mostly minority class in the history of the department.

The department did not provide precise numbers but said that of the slightly more than 4,000 black police officers now in the department, most served on patrol – whether in radio cars, on public housing beats or in the transit system.

Thomas Reppetto, executive director of the Citizens Crime Commission and a New York police historian, had a simple explanation. “Street patrols are going to have a higher portion of younger officers. After people are around a while, they move to special units and higher in rank,” he said. “Since a lot of minority officers have been hired in recent years, not only have we increased the number of minority officers, but you’ve probably increased the number of those at an operating level.”

Whatever the appeal of such an explanation, federal statistics show that the New York officers killed over the years have tracked with national trends, and one of those trends is that more often than not it is a veteran officer who is killed as opposed to new or less experienced officers. None of the four black officers killed since 2001 were young or new to the force, and indeed three were detectives with considerable experience.

Black detectives have also risen in number in the department in recent years, and many of those detectives, along with Hispanic colleagues, now work in dangerous undercover positions. The department does not disclose specific numbers of undercover officers, but veteran officers estimated the ranks were mostly nonwhite.

“Narcotics and guns – the majority of undercover officers will be black and Hispanic,” said Anthony Miranda, a retired sergeant and executive chairman of the National Latino Officers Association and a former undercover narcotics officer.

Others seeking to make some sense of the recent police deaths point to a longstanding truth in the department – that officers gravitate toward neighborhoods that are familiar to them, both ethnically and geographically. Officers routinely seek assignments in precincts that require the shortest commute, the only restriction being a ban on working in the precinct where they live.

Capt. Eric Adams, president of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a fraternal organization, pointed to the number of black officers patrolling the so-called impact precincts where violent crimes have not dropped as radically as in other areas. He said he thought that might have had something to do with the grim recent catalog of slain officers.

“I think that one of the awful byproducts of living in communities where you inflict violence on people who look like you, at such an easy and confident rate, what may spill over is the comfort to do so whether that person is wearing a bus uniform or a police uniform,” he said.

Officer Stewart, for example, had spent years living near Flatbush, the Brooklyn neighborhood where he worked and died, which is one of the city’s more violent.

The department, for its part, says that it does not assign patrol officers on the basis of race or ethnicity, except in instances in which language skills are vital.

But almost everyone agrees that any attempt to divine too much from statistics and staffing, particularly with so small a sample, can be flawed. Of the seven officers injured, but not killed, by gunfire this year, five were white. Any of them could have fared worse. And when Officer Stewart was shot behind the wheel of his unmarked patrol car, the partner next to him was white.

A longtime police supervisor who is black and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because to do otherwise is a violation of department policy, said: “I don’t see any pattern. It’s just the luck of the draw.”

To back up and examine the last 20 officers slain on duty, the number of black victims rises only one more, to seven.

Still, he added that the numbers sent a message.

“It says to me that we’re just as dedicated and hardworking as the next guy,” the supervisor said. “That’s what I see. This clearly validates that we’re as willing to put our lives on the line as much as everyone else.”

Even if the recent numbers are just a statistical blip, the stories behind them are excruciating.

In 2003, two black detectives working undercover, Rodney Andrews and James Nemorin, were fatally shot while trying to buy illegal handguns on Staten Island. A year later, a black detective named Robert Parker was killed alongside his white partner, Patrick Rafferty, both of them shot to death by a suspect fleeing arrest.

Lee Brown, 68, the former mayor of Houston and the police commissioner under the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins from 1990 to 1992, praised the department’s success in increasing its number of minority officers, and noted the many consequences.

“When you have success in that area, you can logically conclude that minorities will be part of everything happening in the department,” Mr. Brown said, “and that includes those losing their lives.”

Reporting for this article was contributed by Al Baker, Michael Brick, Corey Kilgannon and William K. Rashbaum.