The FBI recorded 90,178 assaults on law enforcement officers during the 2025 calendar year, according to data published May 11, 2026, producing an assault rate of 13.8 incidents per 100 officers. The FBI identified that figure as the highest officer assault rate it has ever recorded.
What the 2025 Numbers Show
The 13.8 per 100 rate is not a rounding artifact or a product of fewer agencies submitting data. The FBI collects this information through its Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted program — known as LEOKA — which draws voluntary participation from federal, state, county, city, tribal, and university law enforcement agencies nationwide. The program's scope is broad by design. Participation remains voluntary, which the FBI has noted creates gaps in the national picture. The agency has called increased participation critical to developing accurate trend data.
The raw count of 90,178 assaults translates the rate into concrete operational terms. For agency commanders calculating staffing risk and training priorities, that number represents a meaningful baseline. The LEOKA program was built specifically to give agencies granular data for exactly that purpose — shaping training curricula and policing strategies aimed at reducing officer injuries.
Record Rate Arrives Alongside 2024 Felonious Killing Data
The FBI released the 2025 assault figures alongside a 2024 Special Report published in May 2025. That report documented 64 officers feloniously killed in the line of duty during 2024. Of those officers, 71.9 percent sustained gunshot wounds as the cause of death, according to the FBI.
The FBI continues to release monthly one-page infographics covering both accidental and felonious officer deaths. Those infographics draw from the same LEOKA collection infrastructure and are available to agencies tracking real-time trends between annual reports.
How LEOKA Data Is Collected and What It Captures
The LEOKA dataset goes well beyond a simple count of incidents. For each assault or killing, the FBI collects victim officer demographics — age, sex, race, and years of experience on the job. On the assailant side, the data includes criminal history, age, sex, and the number of assailants involved in a given incident. That combination of officer and assailant variables is what allows agencies to build evidence-based training protocols rather than relying on anecdotal patterns.
The FBI's UCR Program provides quarterly updates with guidance on how agencies should submit incident reports involving officer deaths or assaults. Agencies uncertain about submission procedures have that standing resource available.
Data covering 2020 through the present has been moved to the FBI's Crime Data Explorer, or CDE. The FBI's modernization of the LEOKA program replaced traditional publication tables with visual data representations housed on the CDE. Users can download and export specific data elements directly from the CDE LEOKA page. The federal data catalog entry for the LEOKA dataset was last updated April 20, 2026.
Use-of-Force Collection Provides Parallel Picture
Separate from LEOKA, the FBI's National Use-of-Force Data Collection gives additional context on officer-involved incidents. As of May 2025, that collection represented 77.6 percent of the estimated 937,000 sworn officers in the United States. Currently, 11,955 law enforcement agencies submit use-of-force data to the FBI's national collection.
That coverage level — 77.6 percent — means roughly one in four sworn officers nationwide works for an agency not yet contributing use-of-force data to the federal collection. The FBI has identified broader agency participation as essential. Without it, national statistics on both assaults and use-of-force incidents reflect an incomplete sample.
The LEOKA program and the use-of-force collection together represent the federal government's primary mechanism for tracking the physical risks officers face and the force they deploy. Both collections rely on voluntary submissions. Both are only as accurate as the agencies that contribute to them.
For departments that have not yet enrolled in LEOKA reporting or the use-of-force collection, the FBI's quarterly UCR guidance documents lay out the submission process. The CDE export tools allow agencies already participating to pull their own data for internal analysis without waiting for annual report cycles.
