Law officer deaths on duty plunged in 2022 in Florida. There is one big reason why

A year after COVID-19 infiltrated police departments from Key West to Tallahassee and drove on-duty deaths to previously unseen levels, there was upbeat news on the health front for law enforcement agencies.

In 2022, only 10 law enforcement officers were killed at work in Florida — none of them succumbing to COVID, according to a website that tracks police fatalities. That’s an enormous fall-off from the 63 on-duty statewide deaths in 2021, in which 85 percent were caused by COVID-19.

“The science is pretty clear. The vaccine has lowered hospitalizations and death,” said University of Miami criminology professor Alex Piquero, who also serves as the U.S. government’s director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. “And these are people who worked day in and day out and couldn’t take time off. At the height of the pandemic they still had to respond and do their jobs.”

There were still tragedies. Three of the officers killed on duty in 2022 were in South Florida, all in Miami-Dade County. In one case, a state law enforcement officer was killed in a car crash. In another, a federal agent lost his life during an accidental shooting at a practice range. And Miami-Dade Police Officer Cesar “Echy” Echaverry was killed in August during a shootout with a suspected armed robber.

Three years after the pandemic caused a worldwide panic and upended police departments around the country, the availability of vaccines and less fatal variants of the disease have allowed police departments to return to normal staffing levels. Long gone are the days when up to 40 percent of sworn officers at a large local agency were sidelined because of COVID-19 and when an entire motorcycle squad had to be quarantined because a visiting foreign dignitary tested positive.

“The way we do business has changed,” said South Florida Police Benevolent Association President Steadman Stahl. “A lot of our people have been vaccinated and we’re doing things differently, like avoiding contact. Some of us are even wearing masks. Hospitalizations have spiked recently, but the numbers for us are way down.”

By all accounts, 2021 was one of the most brutal years police departments around the nation have ever suffered. A total of 669 officers lost their lives in the line of duty with 71 percent of those deaths attributed to COVID, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page.

This year, the number of on-duty fatalities plummeted to 228, with only 32 percent of those deaths attributed to the disease. Several other states like California, New York and Georgia had similar line-of-duty death totals to Florida’s 10. Only Texas with 33, stood out. Of those, 17 were attributed to COVID and most of those deaths occurred early in 2022.

South Florida deaths

Of Florida’s 10 on-duty deaths, six were attributed to car crashes and the other four were caused by gunfire, two of them inadvertently, police determined. Locally, the first of the three deaths was in August, when Miami-Dade Police Officer Cesar “Echy” Echaverry died a few days after being shot in Liberty City.

Echaverry, 29, a detective in the department’s elite Robbery Intervention Detail, was one of a number of RID detectives who thought they had suspected armed-robber Jerome Willie Horton, 32, contained on a Liberty City street. After a lengthy standoff in which he refused to get out of his car, Horton took off, smashing through cop cars. Police chased. Horton eventually ditched his car after hitting a light pole a few blocks away. During the foot chase there was gunfire back and forth. Both Horton and Echaverry were hit. The officer’s death was the first of a RID detective in its 26-year history.

Three days later another local law enforcement officer lost his life. Jose Antonio Perez, 55, died three weeks after getting into a wreck while on his way to a burglary call in Northwest Miami-Dade. The major and former Marine, was killed after colliding with Ysmael Javier Sandoval, 35, at the intersection of Northwest 127th Avenue and Seventh Terrace. Sandoval, who police said tested positive for booze and cocaine, was charged with vehicular homicide.

Finally, on Oct. 19, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent Jorge Arias, 40 and a nine-year veteran, was killed by what investigators said was accidental gunfire by a fellow agent during a training session at a West Miami-Dade gun range. Both were instructors. Law enforcement sources said the agent who shot Arias and who hasn’t been identified, exchanged his training weapon with his real gun during a bathroom break and forgot when the two later took part in a role-playing scenario involving “close-quarter combat.”