(Image Source: St. Petersburg Times)

BY TARA GRIMES

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The town of St. Petersburg, Fla. is mourning after the shooting of two police officers. A tragedy that the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund says is becoming more common.

The two officers were shot and killed Monday morning in St. Petersburg after attempting to serve a felony arrest warrant. According to CNN, this is just one in a slew of shootings over during a 24-hour period that injured or killed eleven law enforcement officers across the nation.

CNN posted an interview with Police Chief Charles Harmon from St. Petersburg cable-station Bay News 9. Harmon called the officer’s deaths  “devastating,” and a “chief’s worst nightmare.”

“At the end of the day the two officers that died, died heroes in my eyes. They were trying to take somebody off the street who needed to be taken off the street to protect the rest of the community. This thing unfolded, and as an officer you make these decisions on a fly. Who expects to walk into a house and get gun fire from an attic?”

All the while, just four hours away, Miami-Dade police officers were mourning the loss of two of their own as they were laid to rest.

On Thursday, Jan. 20, 22-year-old Johnny Simms shot and killed both officers in Miami as they attempted to serve an arrest warrant for a previous murder. Simms was also killed in the standoff.

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, a non-profit group that tracks police deaths, reports in 2010, 60 federal, state and local officers were killed by gunfire. This is a 20 percent increase from 2009, when 49 were killed in the line of duty. It’s these statistics that have many asking ‘why?’”

Hal Johnson, general counsel for the Florida Police Benevolent Association, told a blogger for CNN he sees the shootings as acts of desperation.

“They are shooting at people they know have guns ... I don’t know what’s going on out there, but I’ve never seen it like this. I do see the developing of a callousness. It’s almost as if shooting a police officer has lost its shock effect.”

Simm’s mother told the Miami Herald a different story.

“I am sorry for whatever officers went down, but my son was not an evil man. As I watched my son lying outside dying, my son told me, ‘Mom, they were going to kill me anyway.’ He felt like he had no choice.”

According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, one law enforcement officer is killed in the line of duty every 53 hours somewhere in the United States.

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