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About Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted
The FBI publishes Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted each year to provide information about officers who were killed, feloniously or accidentally, and officers who were assaulted while performing their duties. The FBI collects these data through the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program.
Data considerations
When reviewing the tables, charts, and narrative summaries presented in this publication, readers should be aware of certain features of the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) data collection process that could affect their interpretation of the information.
- The data in the tables and charts reflect the number of victim officers, not the number of incidents or weapons used.
- The UCR Program considers any parts of the body that can be used as weapons (such as hands, fists, or feet) to be personal weapons and designates them as such in its data.
- Law enforcement agencies use a different methodology for collecting and reporting data about officers who were killed than the methodology used for those who were assaulted. As a result, information about officers killed and information about officers assaulted reside in two separate databases, and the data are not comparable.
- Because the information in the tables of this publication is updated each year, the FBI cautions readers against making comparisons between the data in this publication and those in prior editions.
History
Beginning in 1937, the FBI’s UCR Program collected and published statistics on law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty in its annual publication, Crime in the United States. Statistics regarding assaults on officers were added in 1960. In June 1971, executives from the law enforcement conference, “Prevention of Police Killings,” called for an increase in the FBI’s involvement in preventing and investigating officers’ deaths. In response to this directive, the UCR Program expanded its collection of data to include more details about the incidents in which law enforcement officers were killed and assaulted.
Using this comprehensive set of data, the FBI began in 1972 to produce two reports annually, the Law Enforcement Officers Killed Summary and the Analysis of Assaults on Federal Officers. These two reports were combined in 1982 to create the annual publication, Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted.
Training
Based on more than 40 years of research and data collection, the LEOKA Program provides free Officer Safety Awareness Training (OSAT) to local, state, tribal, federal, and international law enforcement agencies. The goal of the LEOKA Program’s OSAT course is to provide relevant, high quality, potentially lifesaving information to law enforcement agencies focusing on “why” an incident occurred, as opposed to “what” occurred during the incident. (Tactical issues are not part of the training.) To request an OSAT course in your area, e-mail the training staff at leoka-training@leo.gov.
Publishing on the Web
For several years, the FBI’s UCR staff worked toward the goal of publishing all of its reports solely to the Internet, which removes many of the limitations of hard copy books without losing the value of the information being provided. Beginning with the 2005 edition, the FBI began producing Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted exclusively as a Web publication. That report, along with the subsequent publications, contains all the information that was published in previous years’ hard copy reports but with the benefits of navigable files and downloadable information.
eBook now available
This year, the FBI is releasing an eBook titled Narrative Summaries of Law Enforcement Officers Feloniously Killed, 2007-2011. This eBook includes the summaries regarding officers killed in the line of duty from 2007-2011. The objective of this product is to offer this LEOKA information in a portable, convenient format (.epub) that can be used on mobile devices (e.g., tablets, smart phones, etc.) by law enforcement researchers, trainers, and other partners. The eBook is available to download on the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2012, home page.
What do you think?
The E-Government Act of 2002 promotes more efficient uses of information technology by the federal government. This online report is a product of the FBI’s effort to reach a larger audience more efficiently. The FBI welcomes your input about this electronic report via a short feedback form. Your comments will help us improve the presentation of future releases of Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted.
What you won't find on this page
Raw data. The data presented in Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted provide information about law enforcement officers killed and assaulted in the nation broken down by state and region. More detailed data (including the source data from which this publication is created) may be obtained by contacting the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division via e-mail at cjis_comm@leo.gov.
LEOKA data for 2013. The LEOKA data collected in 2013 will be released in 2014.
If you have questions about the data in this publication
For questions about this information or for Web assistance, contact the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division at (304) 625-4995.
- Summaries of Officers Killed, by State
- Criteria
- Methodology-Officers Killed
- Methodology-Officers Assaulted
- Methodology-Federal Officers Killed and Assaulted
- Topic Guide
- Tables by Title
- Downloadable files
- Summary of LEOKA 2012
- Feedback
- About the UCR Program
- FBI UCR Program Directory
- State UCR Program Directory
Roll over table numbers for table titles.
- Table 1
- Table 2
- Table 3
- Table 4
- Table 5
- Table 6
- Table 7
- Table 8
- Table 9
- Table 10
- Table 11
- Table 12
- Table 13
- Table 14
- Table 15
- Table 16
- Table 17
- Table 18
- Table 19
- Table 20
- Table 21
- Table 22
- Table 23
- Table 24
- Table 25
- Table 26
- Table 27
- Table 28
- Table 29
- Table 30
- Table 31
- Table 32
- Table 33
- Table 34
- Table 35
- Table 36
- Table 37
- Table 38
- Table 39
- Table 40
- Table 41
- Table 42
- Table 43
- Table 44
- Table 45
- Table 46
- Table 47
Officers Accidentally Killed
- Table 48
- Table 49
- Table 50
- Table 51
- Table 52
- Table 53
- Table 54
- Table 55
- Table 56
- Table 57
- Table 58
- Table 59
- Table 60
- Table 61
- Table 62
- Table 63
- Table 64
Officers Assaulted
Federal Officers Killed and Assaulted