The FBI reported 90,178 assaults against law enforcement officers across the United States in 2025 — the highest assault rate the agency has recorded in recent years. The findings appear in the FBI's 2025 Officers Killed and Assaulted in the Line of Duty special report, published May 11, 2026, through the FBI's official newsroom.
Assault Rate Reaches a Record High
The 2025 rate stands at 13.8 assaults per 100 officers, according to the report. That figure marks the peak of what the FBI describes as a significant metric for command staff evaluating officer safety and field risks. The raw count — 90,178 assaults — reflects incidents reported voluntarily by law enforcement agencies nationwide to the FBI's national database.
The FBI noted that the 2025 figures are consistent with broader concerns regarding the safety of law enforcement personnel in the field. The agency did not attribute the rise to any single cause, but the report frames the numbers as a signal that agencies need to take a hard look at tactical and operational exposure.
What the Report Covers
The 2025 special report is comprehensive. It includes data on officers killed in the line of duty, the circumstances surrounding those deaths, and the full range of assaults — broken down by type, including incidents involving weapons and those involving physical force alone, according to the FBI.
The report also contains updated law enforcement employee counts across the United States. Those counts inform how the per-officer rate is calculated and give agencies a baseline for comparing their own staffing and exposure levels against national figures.
The document is publicly accessible through the FBI's official newsroom and is available to both law enforcement professionals and the general public.
Data Collection and Voluntary Reporting
All figures in the report derive from voluntary submissions by law enforcement agencies to the FBI's national database. That voluntary structure matters. The FBI explicitly encourages all agencies to participate in the data collection program, stating that full participation is necessary for national statistics to be representative.
Agencies that do not report leave gaps in the national picture. The FBI said it continues to emphasize the importance of accurate and timely reporting of all line-of-duty assaults. Incomplete participation can cause the national rate to be understated — meaning the 13.8 per-100-officers figure may not capture the full scope of the problem.
The FBI's data collection effort is designed to help agencies identify trends in officer safety over time, not just to produce a single year's snapshot.
How Agencies Are Expected to Use the Data
The 2025 report functions as a primary reference for policy development on officer protection and tactical safety protocols, according to the FBI. Federal, state, and local agencies use the data to inform training programs and equipment procurement decisions.
The report also points toward the need for de-escalation and tactical training in light of the rising assault rate. That recommendation carries operational weight: with nearly 90,200 assaults recorded in a single year, command staff face direct pressure to re-examine how officers are prepared for high-risk contacts.
The FBI framed the 2025 findings as part of its ongoing commitment to transparency on law enforcement safety statistics. The agency has published this series of reports across multiple years, giving agencies a longitudinal tool for tracking whether conditions are improving or worsening.
For agency administrators, the combination of a record-high assault rate, a detailed breakdown of assault types, and updated employee count data gives a concrete foundation for budget requests, policy revisions, and contract negotiations around training and protective equipment — without relying on anecdotal evidence from individual incidents.
The 2025 report does not set compliance deadlines or mandate agency action. Its authority is informational. But given that the assault rate is the highest recorded in recent years, according to the FBI, the expectation is that the data will drive decisions at the command level across the country.
