The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program published its Officers Killed and Assaulted in the Line of Duty, 2025 special report on May 11, 2026, and the headline number is hard to ignore: 13.8 assaults per 100 officers, the highest rate recorded in the past 10 years.
Assault Totals and the 10-Year Rate Record
Agencies reported 90,178 officer assaults in 2025, according to the report. That translates to the 13.8-per-100 rate that now marks the peak of the decade-long data window the report analyzes — a span running from 2016 through 2025. The UCR Program has tracked assaults on officers for decades, but this figure places 2025 at the top of the most recent 10-year trend line. The report does not attribute the increase to any single cause. What it does show is that participation in the LEOKA data collection remains voluntary for federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies, which means the 90,178 figure reflects only contributing agencies, not a universal count.
Firearm-related assault injuries told a different story. Officers assaulted and injured by firearms dropped to 445 in 2025, down from 470 in 2024 and well below the 10-year high of 517 recorded in 2023. Three consecutive years of data show a clear downward line on that specific metric, even as overall assault rates climbed.
53 Officers Feloniously Killed — and Where It Happened
Fifty-three law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty in 2025, the report states. Firearms were identified as the most frequently reported weapon used in those fatal incidents. Of the 49 offenders reported in connection with felonious killings, 95.7 percent were male and 64.4 percent were white. Twenty-nine of those offenders had a prior criminal record, according to the data.
Regionally, the South recorded the highest number of line-of-duty deaths — a pattern the report says has held for each of the last 10 years. But the South also posted the sharpest improvement in 2025. Deaths in that region fell to 21, down from 28 in 2024, a 25 percent decrease. The South continues to lead the nation in raw totals while simultaneously showing the largest single-year drop.
Accidental line-of-duty deaths followed a separate but consistent pattern. Motor vehicle accidents remained the primary cause of accidental deaths every year from 2021 through 2025, the report confirms.
Offender Data and What the Record Shows
The demographic breakdown of offenders connected to felonious killings comes from 49 reported individuals. That number is slightly below the 53 officers killed, reflecting cases where complete offender data was available. The 95.7 percent male figure and the 64.4 percent white figure are the raw reported percentages — the report presents them as descriptive data, not as analytical conclusions about causation or trend.
Twenty-nine offenders with prior criminal records is a figure the report includes in its offender profile section. It does not compare that number to prior years in the verified data available from this release.
UCR Modernization and the Crime Data Explorer
The 2025 report marks continued movement away from traditional printed tables. The FBI has shifted LEOKA data presentation to the Crime Data Explorer, which provides visual charts and downloadable data elements in place of static publication formats. The UCR Program's modernization effort, according to the report, is moving toward interactive dashboards as the primary delivery mechanism for this data.
The report also incorporates data from the Law Enforcement Employee Counts collection, which tracks full-time sworn and civilian personnel. Those counts are intended to help agencies assess manpower needs and protection requirements, the FBI said. Separately, the FBI's National Use-of-Force Data Collection now covers approximately 77.6 percent of the estimated 937,000 sworn officers nationwide as of May 2025 — a benchmark the FBI published alongside the LEOKA release.
The raw datasets are available through the federal open-data catalog, giving researchers and agency planners direct access to the underlying numbers behind every figure in the special report. With assault rates at a decade high and felonious killings still in the dozens annually, agency administrators have concrete, current data to bring to staffing decisions, training program reviews, and legislative briefings heading into the second half of 2026.
