The FBI released its Officers Killed and Assaulted in the Line of Duty, 2025 Special Report on May 11, 2026, alongside national law enforcement employee counts, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The headline number is stark: participating agencies reported 90,178 officer assaults occurring nationwide throughout 2025. That volume translates to an assault rate of 13.8 assaults per 100 officers — the highest rate recorded in recent tracking, the FBI said.
Record Assault Rate and What the Numbers Mean
The 13.8-per-100 figure is the top-line finding from the 2025 report. To put it in context, Department of Justice five-year historical averages reflect approximately 22,445 officers suffering injuries following on-the-job assaults annually, according to the University of Illinois Chicago Law Enforcement Epidemiology Project. The 2025 assault total of 90,178 counts reported incidents, not necessarily injuries, so the injury subset drawn from historical averages represents a fraction of the broader assault picture. Still, the gap between the 2025 assault count and the historical injury average illustrates how large the overall exposure volume is relative to documented physical harm.
Longitudinal data from the same source shows an average of 60 law enforcement officers are feloniously killed by civilians annually nationwide. Accidental officer line-of-duty fatalities average 44 per year, predominantly involving motor vehicle collisions or being struck by moving vehicles, according to the University of Illinois Chicago Law Enforcement Epidemiology Project. Those averages provide a steady-state baseline against which each annual LEOKA release is measured.
Who Participates in LEOKA and Who Is Excluded
The annual LEOKA collection is a cooperative effort among sworn federal, state, county, city, tribal, territory, and campus law enforcement agencies, according to the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Division. The program tracks both felonious and accidental deaths alongside line-of-duty assault figures, the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Division said.
Not every officer category falls inside the standard reporting boundary. LEOKA collection standards typically exclude correctional officers, bailiffs, and probation or parole officers from standard reporting unless specific criteria are satisfied, according to the FBI. The program also explicitly excludes deaths resulting from natural causes, off-duty personal altercations, or suicides from line-of-duty assault tallies, the FBI said. Those exclusions matter when agencies compare their internal incident logs against LEOKA-reported figures — discrepancies often trace directly back to eligibility boundaries rather than data gaps.
One boundary shift is worth tracking in historical comparisons. Effective March 23, 2016, LEOKA criteria expanded to encompass Department of Defense military and civilian law enforcement officers performing policing functions when not in deployed or combat status, according to the FBI. Any trend analysis stretching back before that date needs to account for the expanded population.
Felonious killing carries a specific definition under the program. LEOKA defines it as an incident type in which the willful and intentional actions of an offender result in the fatal injury of an officer performing official duties, according to CNA's Center for Justice Research and Innovation. The definition draws a hard line between intent-driven officer deaths and deaths classified as accidental — a distinction that shapes both how agencies report and how advocates interpret the data.
How the Data Moves Into Training and Policy
The FBI does not treat LEOKA data as a static statistical archive. Data collected through the LEOKA program is incorporated into the Officer Safety Awareness Training curriculum delivered to partner agencies, according to the FBI. That means the assault and fatality figures gathered each year feed directly back into training content — agencies receiving that curriculum are, in effect, being trained against the patterns their own peers reported.
The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program also publishes updated monthly preliminary statistics on officer assaults and line-of-duty deaths via the Crime Data Explorer platform, according to the FBI. Agencies and researchers do not need to wait for the annual special report to track directional movement in the numbers. Monthly updates on the platform allow administrators to monitor trends in closer to real time than the once-a-year publication cycle would otherwise allow.
The 2025 Report in the Broader Statistical Record
The 2025 assault rate of 13.8 per 100 officers is described by the FBI as the highest recorded in recent tracking. That claim sits alongside a longitudinal picture that includes an annual average of 60 felonious officer deaths and 44 accidental fatalities, according to the University of Illinois Chicago Law Enforcement Epidemiology Project. Motor vehicle collisions and being struck by moving vehicles account for the dominant share of those accidental deaths, the same source said.
The 90,178 assault figure comes from participating agencies only. Agencies that did not submit data to LEOKA for 2025 are not reflected in the count, meaning the true national volume could differ from what the report captures. That participation-dependent caveat applies to every LEOKA release and is built into how the FBI frames the data.
The full Officers Killed and Assaulted in the Line of Duty, 2025 Special Report and accompanying law enforcement employee counts are available through the FBI and the Crime Data Explorer platform maintained by the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division.
