The U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance recently launched the Preventing Violence against Law Enforcement and Ensuring Officer Resilience and Survivability (VALOR) program, an initiative designed to enhance the safety of police officers around the United States. The VALOR program has many moving parts, including a research endeavor in which the author of this article conducts interviews of police officers who have been involved in incidents in which they or other officers discharged their firearms against suspects. As of February 2012, 198 officers in 11 states had been interviewed; data collection is scheduled to stop after 20 or so additional interviews have been completed.

The shootings covered in the interviews included a wide variety of incident types that played themselves out in a wide variety of ways: Some shootings occurred at the termination points of vehicle pursuits; some occurred during standoffs between armed suspects and special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams; some happened during domestic dispute calls; some took place while officers were off duty; some were running gun battles; some involved a single shot; some of the officers interviewed were shot or otherwise notably injured during the events they recounted; and in some of the incidents discussed, other officers were seriously injured or murdered.