Curry is now thinking twice. He spoke as he watched over a crowd of about 1,500 people gathered at an impromptu memorial at a gas station in a Houston suburb, where an on-duty officer from a neighboring department in Harris County near Houston was gunned down Friday in an apparently unprovoked attack while fueling his car. "This was an ambush, a coward that took advantage," Curry said. The killing was the latest in a spate of deadly attacks in which police officers have been the targets. Last week, two Louisiana officers were killed in separate incidents and two officers in Mississippi died in May when they came under fire during a traffic stop. At least 25 police killings in New York, Pennsylvania, San Jose and elsewhere have rattled police already this year.
And although dozens of police officers are slain on duty in any given year, active and retired police officers across the country said the recent bloodshed feels different. As the nation has been roiled by strong currents of distrust and fear of police that surfaced after last year's killing of Michael Brown by a cop in Ferguson, Mo., an ugly byproduct of the turmoil has been a newfound willingness to do harm to those in uniform, many police officers say. "The general public has a perception that we may or may not be the good guys," said Curry, 51, a law enforcement veteran who now works with the Harris County Constable's Office.
Mourners pay their respects to Deputy Darren Goforth at the Houston-area gas station where he was shot to death.
The scrutiny, some say, is coming in many forms. The U.S. Justice Department is overseeing the operations of several major police departments across the country; police are being sued, investigated, arrested and indicted; a routine traffic stop may be recorded by dashboard video, body camera or a nearby cellphone; an officer in full uniform can get shot while filling up his vehicle at a gas station. None of these are new, but their frequency and the ongoing national debate over policing have crystallized into a sense of being under siege on all fronts, officers said. "Day to day, you're a little more aware of your surroundings, you're a little more skeptical of people," said Rick Perine, a 17-year veteran of the Mesa, Ariz., Police Department.
Perine said he has found himself being "hyper-vigilant" since the killings in December of two New York City police officers, who were ambushed in their patrol car. Their killer had boasted on social media that he planned to kill cops in retaliation for the deaths of Brown and Eric Garner, who died during an arrest by officers in Staten Island, N.Y. Garner's and Brown's deaths — coming three weeks apart in 2014 — became part of a growing public outrage toward law enforcement. "These days, if I don't know you, I'm going to be extra guarded around you," Perine said. "It is a different world." The brazen nature of the shooting in Texas on Friday night echoed the New York City killings.
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