I was just taking a look at a claim from the excellent series 'Man Woman Myth' about the number of police deaths by gender. I see they give a figure of 44 out of 4000 police deaths being women, but the dates concerned are unclear. this source states that more than "4,000 police officers have been killed in the line of duty since 1792, when the first salaried constables went on duty". Looking here I count 59 women police officers killed in the line of duty; feel free to check my count. I guess that is more up to date than when 'Man Woman Myth' was produced. I make that around 1.5% women police officers of all killed.

However, those are not all criminal deaths, but also include lawful deaths. Looking specifically at homicides, I put the raw data into Excel and found 169 killings. Of those I counted eight women (judging by first names and the rank 'WPC' - Woman Police Constable), Mandy Rayner (1982), Jane Arbuthnot, (1983), Yvonne Fletcher (1984), Nina MacKay (1997) Alison Armitage (2001), Sharon Beshenivsky (2005), Fiona Bone (2012) and Nicola Hughes (also 2012). So that is rather higher at 4.7% of all historical police criminal deaths.

I've no historical figures to hand, but in recent years the proportion of female police officers in the 43 forces has increased in recent years from 22.3% in 2006 to 28.2% in 2015.

It's a little difficult to put those numbers together, but one can see an obvious disparity. Zoning in on the most recent years I have data for the gender of officers in the force, one can see that...

While making up over a quarter of the force, women accounted for...

13.5% (10) of all (74) deaths in years 2008-15 (Feel free to check my figures.)

Food for thought.