The FBI released preliminary data on May 11, 2026, showing 53 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty during the 2025 calendar year. The same report counted 90,178 officer assaults reported by agencies across the United States over that same period. Those two numbers form the core of the FBI's Officers Killed and Assaulted in the Line of Duty, 2025 special report, which was first published May 7, 2026, with the formal press release following four days later.
What the FBI's 2025 LEOKA Report Contains
The report was produced through the FBI's Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted program, which collects line-of-duty death and assault data through the Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The LEOKA program defines felonious killings specifically as deaths resulting from intentional acts by an assailant — a definition that separates those 53 deaths from any accidental line-of-duty fatalities. The 2025 report covers both categories, according to the FBI, providing statistical analysis on felonious and accidental deaths together.
On the assault side, reporting agencies are required under LEOKA submission standards to count all assaults that result in serious injury or involve weapons capable of causing serious injury or death. That standard shapes what gets into the 90,178 total. The program does not capture assaults against correctional officers, jailers, or prison officials — those populations fall outside LEOKA's scope entirely.
Alongside the fatality and assault figures, the FBI included updated law enforcement employee counts in the same release. The FBI said its data collection methods for LEOKA have been expanded in recent years to give safety trainers more granular information to work with.
How the Data Gets Used
LEOKA data feeds directly into the FBI's Officer Safety Awareness Training program. Researchers draw on the program's findings to develop OSAT curriculum — meaning the 2025 numbers will shape how officer safety training is structured going forward. The FBI's Crime Data Explorer provides ongoing access to preliminary statistics and monthly infographics on officer safety, giving agencies a way to track trends between full annual releases.
FOP Reports Rising Violence Through Mid-2026
While the FBI's report covers the completed 2025 calendar year, the Fraternal Order of Police published a separate snapshot in July 2026 tracking violence against officers in the current year. According to FOP statistics released that month, 169 officers had been shot in the line of duty by July 1, 2026. Thirty-six of those officers were killed.
The FOP's July 2026 report states that the number of officers shot represents an increase compared to the same period in 2025. The organization described the data as reflecting an ongoing trend of violence against law enforcement personnel.
That mid-year 2026 figure — 169 shot, 36 killed in roughly six months — sits alongside the full-year 2025 FBI count of 53 felonious deaths. The two numbers come from different time frames and different methodologies: the FBI count covers all of 2025 and applies the LEOKA felonious-killing definition, while the FOP figure tracks shootings specifically and runs only through July 1, 2026.
What the Numbers Do and Don't Show
The 90,178 assault figure from the FBI covers 2025 in full, but it carries the caveat built into LEOKA reporting requirements — only assaults meeting the serious-injury or dangerous-weapon threshold are counted. Agencies that do not participate in UCR reporting, or that reported late, may not be reflected in preliminary totals. The FBI characterized the 2025 release as preliminary data, which means final figures could shift when the full annual report is completed.
The LEOKA program's exclusion of correctional staff is a hard boundary. An officer working a county jail, a state prison, or a detention facility is not in this dataset regardless of what happened to them in 2025. That limit is structural, not incidental, and it affects how the 90,178 assault count should be read — it is a count of sworn law enforcement officers in field and investigative roles, not a universal count of public safety personnel.
For agencies that use LEOKA data to benchmark their own officer safety programs or to inform resource allocation, the FBI's Crime Data Explorer offers access to monthly infographics and updated preliminary statistics between annual releases. The 2025 special report, the employee count data, and related materials are available through the FBI's press release published May 11, 2026.
