declared it his priority at the start of his term, his socialist government does not give official data on police killings.
Government officials did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters.
The public is aware of the police murders via media and talk on the street, but sympathy does not run deep because of disgust at well-known corruption and crime within police ranks.
“In the US, if one policeman is killed, there is an outcry. Here, no-one raises a voice to support policemen,” said Jackeline Sandoval, a former police lawyer and public prosecutor who heads Fundepro. “If there’s no security for police, what does that say for the rest of us?”
Her Twitter feed, chronicling police deaths, often draws distasteful comments. “For me, let them all die, they’re mistreating the students,” someone wrote this month, referring to last year’s clashes with demonstrators.
International comparisons show the depth of Venezuela’s problem. In the United States, which has a population 10 times bigger, the FBI says 27 law enforcement officers were killed in 2013. In Venezuela, the number that year was 214.
Even the world’s worst homicide hot spot, Honduras, has far fewer killings of policemen than Venezuela.
Ravaged by gang and drug violence, Honduras had a murder rate of 90.4 per 100,000 people in 2012, versus 53.7 in Venezuela, UN data shows. But Honduras’ government says there were 35 police killings in 2013 and 32 in the first 11 months of last year.
Though murders of policemen have been shockingly high for several years now in Venezuela, Fundepro said criminals are becoming ever-more brazen with some assaults on whole police stations in order to steal weapons.
In November, 30 men stormed a police base in Guarico state before dawn to carry off weapons, bullet-proof jackets and uniforms.
Among the victims so far this year, Alvaro Blanco was buying bread in the small town of Tacata when two men followed him in.
One shot the 49-year-old policeman in the back of the head as he was at the counter, a security camera video showed.
The gunman then coolly leant over Blanco’s body to take his gun before fleeing. Both men were later tracked down by police and killed in a shootout, local media said.
Blanco’s boss, Elisio Guzman, who runs Miranda state’s police force, complained impunity for criminals was endangering his men. He said his force last year arrested 1,073 people in the act of committing crimes but 653 of them quickly returned to the street unpunished.
“On top of this, the prisons are overflowing, the police’s weapons are inadequate, there are constant death threats.”
Private monitoring groups say only about 10 percent of murder cases end in convictions in Venezuela.
The government concedes that police are often involved in crimes themselves and it recently “intervened” in several units around the country, meaning they were raided and had their supervisors removed.
In one, a senior detective was caught cashing a ransom for a kidnapped businessman, said Freddy Bernal, head of a presidential commission to “revolutionise” Venezuela’s police.
As well as working to root out bad apples, Bernal’s team is making proposals to improve wages, insurance, training and equipment for policemen. “We need to recover the authority of the state ... give security to the police,” he said.
The government has also launched a disarmament drive, but only brought in a tiny fraction of the estimated 9-15 million guns circulating in the nation of 30 million people.
Despite the perils of the job and starting wages of around 7,000 bolivars, police recruitment days still draw huge numbers of unemployed young men.
“I know it’s dangerous,” said Martin Gomez, 21, a youth from Caracas’ Petare slum who was heading to a recruitment event for the Bolivarian National Police Force set up by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. “But I have to eat, don’t I? And I’d love to help my country.”