Bill Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said the 89-percent spike from 2013 to 2014 is of "great concern" to his organization, which represents some 240,000 rank-and-file officers, as well as police groups nationwide. He attributed the rise to a "larger number of intentional attacks, of ambushes, of occasions where there's a traffic stop and the person stopped immediately shoots gunfire at the police, or [cases of] deliberate assassinations."
Officers assassinated