By Joe Broadmeadow
Over twenty years with the East Providence Police Department, I stood in a lot of kitchens on the worst day of somebody’s life. I commanded the Investigative Services Division, worked narcotics, and served on the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force with the FBI and DEA. I have seen how people actually die.
Almost none of it looked like what they were afraid of.
Nobody died in a shark attack. Nobody died in a terrorist bombing. Nobody was snatched off the street by a stranger in a van. What I found were the ordinary killers: a man face down in his bathroom with a coronary nobody saw coming, a nineteen-year-old with a needle still in his arm, a kid ejected through a windshield on Pawtucket Avenue because the belt was too much trouble.
The gap between what frightens us and what kills us is not a curiosity. It is a policy failure, and we pay for it in bodies.
Start with the actual ledger.
In 2024, roughly 3.07 million Americans died. Heart disease killed 683,491. Cancer killed 619,876. Unintentional injury, meaning overdoses, falls, and car crashes, killed 197,449. Then stroke, chronic lung disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes. Ten causes account for 71 percent of every death certificate signed in this country.
There is no mystery on that list. It is boring. It is the same list it has been since Eisenhower.
Now the fear ledger.
In 2025, the International Shark Attack File recorded 25 unprovoked shark bites in the United States, one fatal. Terrorism killed 5,582 people worldwide, most of them in five countries, none of them ours. Heart disease kills more Americans before lunch on an average Tuesday than sharks have killed in the recorded history of the republic.
Any detective can tell you why the mistake happens, because we are trained against it. Vividness is not evidence. The witness with the most gripping story is rarely the most reliable.
One image, the fin, the plume of smoke, the stranger on a parking garage camera, crowds out ten thousand quiet deaths that arrive with paperwork instead of coverage. We do not calculate risk. We recall it. And what we recall is whatever was on the screen.
The consequences are not abstract. Money follows fear, not mortality.
We spend without argument on the threat that photographs well. Try funding the one that doesn’t. Rhode Island fought over the Providence overdose prevention center as though the stakes were symbolic.
They were never symbolic, they were tragic.
Heart disease kills more Americans before lunch on an average Tuesday than sharks have killed in the recorded history of the republic.
Joe Broadmeadow
An estimated 69,973 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2025, down almost 14 percent from the year before and far below the 110,000 at the 2023 peak. Rhode Island posted one of the steepest declines in the country, better than 25 percent.
That did not happen because anyone was afraid. It happened because naloxone got into people’s hands and treatment barriers came down. Prevention works. It just never looks like anything, which is the problem: you cannot photograph the funeral that never happened.
The same distortion runs through how we think about violence.
In two decades, I rarely worked a homicide that resembled the ones on television. The stranger in the shadows is a rounding error. The danger is almost always closer, duller, and already known to everyone involved: the ex-boyfriend, the argument that went one sentence too far, and the firearm in a drawer in a house where somebody is in crisis.
I am not arguing we should stop worrying. Fear is a legitimate instrument. It is simply a terrible investigator. Left unsupervised, it works backward from the story it likes best. Any cop who ran an investigation that way would put innocent people in prison, and some have.
The honest version is not comfortable, because the threats are not out there. They are in the house. They are the cigarette, the numbers on a chart you have not looked at in three years, the seat belt you skipped for a two-mile trip, the third drink before the drive home, the pill somebody swore was a Percocet, the appointment you keep pushing to next month.
None of that will ever lead a newscast. All of it will kill you.
And the most troubling of all actual deadly phenomena of life is willful ignorance. The anti-vax movement, based on anti-science politics, will kill Americans more effectively than putting a gun to their head. It’s killing the most vulnerable, our children, by exposing them without any protection to diseases we effectively eradicated in this country, measles for one and the rising threat of polio.
And it is a documentable lie.
We have become experts at bracing for the improbable while walking into the statistically certain. Spend one tenth of the energy on the ten causes that produce seven of every ten American deaths, and we would save more lives in a year than every security measure of the last quarter century combined.
Follow the evidence. It has been sitting in the file the whole time.
Joe Broadmeadow is a retired captain of the East Providence Police Department and the founder of JEBWizard Publishing.
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