Also by Dean Scoville

For Officer Kris Lavoie of the Ontario (Calif.) Police Department, Super Bowl Sunday 2002 would prove to be a busy one. But not in the way that most Americans enjoy. For Lavoie had no idea just how busy. Or just how much he would feel like a real "gladiator" before the day was over.

The ghosts of the Twin Towers and the victims of the 9/11 attacks in New York City, at the Pentagon, and on United Flight 93 still loom over law enforcement. They loom both as an indictment of the lost opportunities to have prevented 9/11 and as an omnipresent reminder of a need for vigilance.

On Saturday Nov. 29, 2009, Seattle patrol officer Benjamin Kelly learned about the murders of four Lakewood, Wash., officers. From the time he got up, Kelly kept tabs on the investigation's progress and by nightfall had learned that one Maurice Clemmons was the prime suspect.

The rash of police murders and assaults this year is small compared to the body count inflicted on cops during the late 1960s and early 1970s. That era's law enforcement blood bath led to the adoption of better police tactics, more comprehensive police training, and the adoption of ballistic armor as standard police equipment.

A cursory glance at the numbers seemingly underscores such concerns. Thirty-one officers were feloniously shot and killed from January through mid-May 2011—a 34 percent increase over the same period a year before.

Within a day of Honda's holing up in the motel room, the Eureka Police Department received information of the man's whereabouts. The idea of dealing with a man desperately determined to avoid arrest and under the influence of meth was not something Eureka officers wanted to even think about it.

The incident started like a bad joke: "A black guy, a white guy, and an American Indian guy enter a restaurant..." But what happened when this diverse group walked into a Whataburger fast-food joint in Tulsa, Okla., shortly after 9 p.m. June 10, 1996, was not funny.

Cops are cursed by a tragic mix of impatience, skewed priorities, and self-preservation instincts that sometimes fail to rise to those of a drunken frat boy. As a result, traffic collisions have for decades been one of the top two causes of officer fatalities.

At the sight of the man with the gun, word spread quickly throughout the building, reaching Mike Jones, chief of safety, security, and police for Bay District Schools, who was in his fourth floor office. Running downstairs, Jones arrived to find Clay A. Duke casually swinging the barrel of his gun back and forth at the men assembled frozen before him.