The FBI released its 2025 Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted report on May 11, 2026, and the headline number is stark: 90,178 assaults against law enforcement officers in a single calendar year, translating to a rate of 13.8 assaults per 100 officers. The FBI identifies that rate as the highest ever recorded in the history of the LEOKA program.
Record Assault Rate Defined by the Numbers
The 13.8-per-100-officers figure is not an estimate or projection. It comes directly from participating agencies submitting data through the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program, the federal government's primary mechanism for tracking line-of-duty violence. The raw count — 90,178 assaults — reflects incidents reported across the 2025 calendar year. The FBI notes that non-fatal assaults have trended upward since 2021, meaning this record did not appear without warning. Command staff who have monitored annual LEOKA releases have watched the assault numbers climb across multiple reporting cycles. The 2025 figures are the peak of that multi-year trend.
What that volume means operationally is a question each agency must answer using its own deployment data, but the FBI has consistently described the LEOKA dataset as a primary resource for command staff evaluating operational risks and officer safety protocols. The report is accessible through the FBI's Crime Data Explorer portal, which allows agency-level filtering for departments that want to compare their own figures against national rates.
Felonious Deaths Drop to 53 in 2025
While the assault data broke records, the fatality count moved in the other direction. Fifty-three law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in 2025. That is down from 64 officers killed in 2024, a 17.2% decrease. The FBI characterized that drop as a significant deviation from the prior year's figures in its release.
Of the 53 officers killed, 43 died from gunshot wounds. That means firearms accounted for roughly 81% of all felonious line-of-duty deaths in 2025. The majority of officers killed were identified as White males. Geographically, the Southern region of the United States recorded the highest concentration of fatal incidents, a pattern that has appeared in prior LEOKA reporting as well.
The 2025 report covers both felonious and accidental deaths alongside the assault metrics, giving agencies a full accounting of how officers were lost during the year. The FBI did not release a breakdown of accidental deaths in the figures cited here, but the report contains those statistics for agencies that need them.
How the LEOKA Program Collects and Reports This Data
The LEOKA program operates annually. Agencies across the country submit data to the FBI through the UCR program, and the FBI compiles it into a national report. Participation is voluntary, but the FBI has continued to urge agencies to contribute, arguing that broader participation improves the accuracy of the national picture. Gaps in participation can leave blind spots in the data, which is why the FBI's call for agency involvement is a recurring feature of each year's release.
The 2026 release date — May 11, 2026 — means the report covers calendar year 2025 activity with roughly a five-month lag between the end of the reporting period and public availability. That timeline is consistent with how the UCR process works: agencies submit data, the FBI validates and compiles it, and the final report goes through an internal review before publication. The Crime Data Explorer portal hosts the underlying data for any department or researcher who wants to conduct agency-level analysis beyond what appears in the summary report.
What the Diverging Trends Mean for Agency Leadership
Two numbers define the 2025 LEOKA story: fatalities down 17.2%, assault rate at an all-time high. Those trends are moving in opposite directions, and that gap matters for how agencies plan training, deployment, and officer safety programs.
Fewer officers died in 2025 than in 2024. That is meaningful. But 90,178 assaults in a single year means officers are being attacked at a rate the FBI has never recorded before. The persistence of rising non-fatal violence across multiple years — the upward trend running from 2021 through 2025 — tells agency leadership that the 2025 figure is not an outlier. It is the current baseline.
The FBI released this data specifically to provide transparency on officer safety trends, according to the May 11, 2026 press release. The LEOKA program remains the federal government's primary tool for capturing this information at scale, and the 2025 findings will inform how agencies approach the question of officer safety in the near term. Departments are encouraged to access the full report through the Crime Data Explorer for the agency-level detail that national averages cannot provide.
