A candlelight vigil held on Sunday night wrapped up National Police Week with a solemn dedication ceremony at the Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in northwest D.C. “We’ll be dedicating 362 names of officers who died in the line of duty,” said senior director for the memorial Steve Groeninger. “That includes 163 officers who died in 2011 and 199 officers who died in years prior to that.” One of the names of the 163 officers includes Police Officer Deriek Crouse of Virginia Tech University, who was killed on December 8, 2011 while making a traffic stop on campus.
The “Police Unity Tour,” which concluded on Saturday, began in 1997 with 18 bike riders, and this year there were 1,400 riders. Officers biked hundreds of miles during three days to raise awareness of law enforcement officers who have died in the line of duty and to also raise money for the memorial. Two local police officers, Rodney Barnes of Fairfax County and Special Agent Kevin Whalen of the U.S. Treasury Department, rode on behalf of Officer Crouse. The memorial’s walls consists of nearly 20,000 names of fallen officers.
