The FBI published its 2025 Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted report on July 15, 2026, through the Uniform Crime Reporting program. The document covers felonious line-of-duty deaths, accidental deaths, and assaults against sworn officers across the United States. It is available directly through the FBI's Crime Data Explorer, according to the report.
What the 2025 Report Actually Measures
The LEOKA program tracks specific circumstances surrounding officer assaults — not just raw counts. The 2025 report breaks down assault incidents by weapon type, including firearms, knives, and blunt objects, according to the report. It also analyzes the timing and location of assaults, detail that agencies can apply directly to deployment scheduling and patrol resource decisions.
The report distinguishes between felonious acts and accidental deaths. That separation matters operationally. A felonious killing carries a different set of threat indicators than a traffic fatality during a pursuit, and the FBI's methodology keeps those categories distinct to give command staff a cleaner picture of actual operational risk, the report states.
Historical comparison is built into the analysis. The LEOKA program places 2025 figures against multi-year trend lines, according to the report, allowing agencies to identify whether conditions are worsening, improving, or holding steady relative to prior years.
How Data Reaches the FBI
Collection depends entirely on voluntary participation. Agencies submit data to the UCR program, and the FBI aggregates it into the national picture, according to the report. The FBI explicitly encourages all agencies to participate, noting that incomplete participation weakens the national understanding of officer safety trends.
The University of Illinois Law Enforcement Epidemiology Project flags one structural boundary in the dataset: LEOKA data covers sworn officers only. Civilian support staff — dispatchers, records clerks, evidence technicians — are excluded from the count regardless of whether they are injured or killed in connection with law enforcement operations, according to the Epidemiology Project.
The FBI has continued to expand its data collection methods to capture more granular detail about the nature of officer-involved incidents, according to the report. The 2025 edition also incorporates interviews and case studies drawn from critical encounters, identified as lessons learned, the report states.
What the Data Is Designed to Do
The report is built explicitly for command-level decision-making. According to the report, it serves as a primary resource for command staff evaluating the effectiveness of current officer safety and wellness initiatives. It is also designed to support evidence-based decisions on agency policy and equipment procurement.
Training is a direct downstream product of LEOKA analysis. The program tracks assault circumstances specifically to assist in developing safety training curricula, according to the report. When assault data shows a concentration in particular weapon types or encounter settings, that information can be fed back into academy and in-service training design.
The 2025 report reinforces that accurate agency reporting is not a bureaucratic exercise. The FBI states in the report that precise submissions are necessary to ensure training programs are tailored to real-world threats rather than outdated or incomplete data.
Assaults Remain a Persistent Concern
The 2025 data indicates that assaults against officers continue to be a significant concern for law enforcement leadership, according to the report. The frequency of assaults is treated as a critical metric for assessing whether existing safety protocols are working.
The FBI uses UCR data to identify trends in violence directed at law enforcement personnel, the report states. With the 2025 figures now available, agencies have a current baseline against which to measure local experience — whether their own assault numbers track with national patterns or diverge in ways that warrant localized review.
Researchers and policy makers have direct access to the underlying data through the FBI's Crime Data Explorer, according to the report. That access point is intended to reduce friction for academics, legislative staff, and agency analysts who need the numbers without intermediary processing.
The LEOKA report does not set mandates. It produces information. What agencies do with the timing and location breakdowns, the weapon-type distributions, and the multi-year trend comparisons is a command decision. The FBI's role, as reflected in the 2025 publication, is to make sure the information exists, is accurate, and reaches the people who need it.
