The FBI released its Officers Killed and Assaulted in the Line of Duty 2025 Special Report on May 11, 2026, and the headline number is stark: law enforcement agencies across the United States recorded 90,178 officer assaults during the 2025 calendar year, according to the report.
The Numbers Behind the Record
The assault rate for 2025 came in at 13.8 incidents per 100 officers — the highest rate the FBI has recorded in recent reporting cycles, the report states. That figure is not simply a count of incidents. It reflects a ratio that accounts for total officer staffing levels, making it a more direct measure of individual officer exposure to violence than raw totals alone.
The 2025 report also includes specific breakdowns of officer fatalities that occurred during the same period, as well as comprehensive law enforcement employee counts. Those employee counts provide the denominator that makes the per-officer rate meaningful. Without accurate staffing data, assault rates would be impossible to calculate with any precision — a point the FBI has consistently tied to its push for complete agency participation.
How the Data Was Collected
The 2025 statistics come from a voluntary reporting system. Thousands of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies submitted data to the FBI as part of the agency's ongoing effort to track personnel safety nationally, according to the report. The FBI has repeatedly emphasized that the accuracy and completeness of national safety statistics depend directly on agencies choosing to report — and reporting correctly.
The FBI's reporting mechanism distinguishes between different categories of assault. The 2025 report separates incidents involving weapons from those involving physical force only, giving analysts and command staff a more granular picture of the threat environment officers face. That distinction matters operationally. An agency seeing a spike in weapon-involved assaults faces different training and equipment questions than one dealing primarily with unarmed physical confrontations.
The report is accessible through the official FBI newsroom and press release portal.
What the Report Is Built to Do
The FBI describes the 2025 special report as a resource for multiple audiences. Command staff can use it as a baseline to evaluate their current officer safety and wellness programs — comparing local figures against the national rate of 13.8 per 100. Policymakers reviewing use-of-force and officer safety mandates have a fresh set of national statistics to work with. And agencies trying to identify trends in violence against law enforcement have a standardized data set built for exactly that purpose, according to the report.
The 2025 findings are part of the FBI's broader, continuing effort to track the safety of law enforcement personnel in the line of duty. The report does not represent a one-time snapshot. It feeds into a multi-year data series that allows agencies to measure whether conditions are improving, worsening, or holding steady over time.
Field Conditions That Frame the Statistics
The record assault rate in the 2025 report does not exist in isolation. Operational incidents from August 2026 illustrate the kind of threat environment the FBI's data attempts to quantify. In one documented case, a West Chester police officer fired a round while responding to a knife-point hostage situation on August 25, 2026. Separately, officers in another incident attempted to deploy pepperball munitions inside a vehicle before suspects opened fire on them.
Neither incident is captured in the 2025 report — both occurred after the reporting period closed — but they reflect the persistent threat environment the FBI's findings describe. The 2025 data, covering incidents through the end of that calendar year, gives agencies a documented record of how often and in what ways those threats materialized against officers during the year.
The FBI's 2025 special report marks the highest officer assault rate in recent reporting cycles. Ninety thousand assault incidents across a single year works out to roughly 247 recorded assaults every day. At 13.8 per 100 officers, that rate means that for every precinct, department, or agency with 100 sworn personnel, the statistical expectation was nearly 14 assault incidents over the course of the year. The FBI continues to call on agencies to maintain accurate, complete reporting as the foundation for keeping those statistics reliable.
