The FBI released its 2025 Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) special report on May 11, 2026, and the headline number is stark: law enforcement agencies across the country recorded 90,178 officer assaults during the 2025 calendar year. That works out to a rate of 13.8 incidents per 100 officers, according to the FBI. The agency says that rate is the highest it has recorded since the LEOKA program first began collecting officer safety data — making 2025 a benchmark year in the program's history by the worst possible measure.
The report was published alongside comprehensive law enforcement employee counts, giving analysts and agency command staff a full picture of both workforce size and the volume of assaults against that workforce. The FBI's LEOKA publication serves as the primary national repository for officer safety and assault metrics, and the 2025 edition continues that function while adding the record-setting assault rate to the program's longitudinal archive.
What the LEOKA Program Collects and How
The LEOKA program collects data on felonious and accidental line-of-duty deaths as well as assaults. Data collection includes aggravated assaults that result in serious injury or involve the use of a weapon — including those involving cutting instruments, which receive specific breakdowns in the 2025 report. Monthly reports submitted by participating agencies feed into the FBI's UCR Program, which processes and validates the incoming data.
Approximately 18,233 U.S. law enforcement agencies voluntarily participate in the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, according to the FBI. Participation is not mandatory. The 2025 data collection effort involved coordination with state-level UCR programs to help ensure reporting accuracy. The FBI continues to push for broader agency participation, saying wider involvement improves the granularity of national officer safety data.
The UCR Program's structure allows data to be broken into subsets based on state code, population group, and geographic division, giving researchers and administrators the ability to isolate regional trends rather than relying solely on national aggregates. Idaho State Police, in its 2024 Crime in Idaho report, confirmed that LEOKA data is used at the state level to measure operational challenges facing law enforcement — an example of how the federal dataset feeds directly into state-level analysis.
Record Rate and What It Means for Agency Operations
At 13.8 assaults per 100 officers, the 2025 figure breaks a record that stretches back to the program's inception. The FBI has not assigned a single cause to the rise. What the data does show is that the 2025 rate represents a significant marker in the program's historical dataset, which the LEOKA program maintains specifically to allow longitudinal analysis of officer safety trends over time.
The implications for agency command staff are direct. The FBI states that LEOKA data is utilized by command staff to inform training and resource allocation decisions. The 2025 report, with its record assault rate and detailed breakdowns by assault type, gives administrators a concrete data point to take to budget discussions and training program reviews. The FBI also provides instructional services for Officer Safety Awareness built on the trends identified in LEOKA data, and the 2025 findings are expected to feed into that training framework going forward.
Beyond internal agency use, the FBI's LEOKA program provides outreach, statistical support, training, and research studies to assist agencies directly. The 2025 special report reflects that mission — it is not simply a data dump but a tool the FBI explicitly designs for operational use by the agencies whose officers are counted in it.
What Comes Next in the Reporting Cycle
The 2025 report is now publicly available through the FBI. Agencies that have not yet fully integrated LEOKA data into their planning processes have the full dataset, including assault type breakdowns and employee counts, at their disposal. The FBI has stated it will continue encouraging agency participation to close gaps in the national picture.
State UCR programs remain the conduit between local agencies and the federal dataset. Monthly reporting to those programs is what sustains LEOKA's ability to produce annual reports of this scope — 90,178 recorded assaults across roughly 18,233 participating agencies represents a substantial data collection and verification effort. The FBI processes those monthly submissions continuously, meaning the groundwork for the 2026 report is already underway.
The 2025 report's release on May 11, 2026 puts the data in front of agency leadership during budget and training planning cycles in many jurisdictions. Whether the record assault rate prompts changes in policy, staffing, or officer safety training across the agencies that rely on LEOKA as a decision-making tool will play out over the coming months.
