Twice this year we have seen federal charges brought in Western New York over threats to law enforcement officials.

It’s two times too many, in our opinion.

The most recent case involved threats made against a Cattaraugus County Sheriff’s Office deputy. Few details about the case that generated the threat have been released, but the background is frankly immaterial in this case. There are legal avenues that can be pursued in instances where a police officer is behaving inappropriately. And, lest we forget, Attorney General Letitia James is certainly not one to shy away from legal action against rogue police officers.

Who knows if the man was capable of making good on threats to harm both the deputy and the deputy’s family. The threats are bad enough – and the number of threats is increasing across the country.

Between 2013 and 2026, violent threats targeting public servants in the United States surged across all levels of government and political parties, with local public servants targeted most frequently based on The Impact Project’s analysis of thousands of news reports. Whereas a decade ago, threats were seemingly concentrated at the federal level, between 2015 and 2025, there was a more than 1,000% increase in threats to local public servants. Further, families of public servants were also increasingly impacted, with reported threats increasing by more than 3,000% over the same period. Of these, about 30% occurred in 2025 alone.

It’s obvious both from the anecdotal local instances of threats against law enforcement and the hard data across the country that we as a society are getting too comfortable with threatening words. We’re too regularly crossing a line with our words that we didn’t cross in years past. The words are a problem.

What happens when we start crossing a line with actions, too? We’ll have a bigger mess on our hands.