I noticed small blue plaques started popping up on light poles across the city. Many of them had dates from the early 1900s, so I wondered what the source was. There is a large effort to track and map “officer down” memorials. COVID-19 became a leading cause of death for police officers across the country during the pandemic. This site keeps a record of the locations and circumstances as well as the chronic disease causes of death of officers.

The memorials appear to cluster in the Downtown area likely due to the higher rates of crime Downtown and the historical nature of the memorials (back to 1883) showing more officers killed when the city was much smaller than it is today.