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Home LEOKA 2018 Resource Pages About LEOKA

About LEOKA

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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’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) data collection.

History

Beginning in 1937, LEOKA line-of-duty death statistics were collected and published in the annual UCR 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 LEOKA 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.

New release schedule

This year, the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2018 publication will be delivered in two installments:

Sections included in the Spring 2019 release

  • Officers Feloniously Killed
  • Officers Accidentally Killed
  • Federal Officers Killed and Assaulted

Sections included in the Fall 2019 release

  • Officers Assaulted
  • Officers Assaulted – Detailed Assault Data

Data considerations

When reviewing the tables, charts, and summaries presented in this publication, readers should be aware of certain features of the 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.

Caution against comparisons with data from other organizations. The FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted annual publication is one of a number of reports that issues information concerning line-of-duty deaths and/or assaults of law enforcement officers in the United States. Each organization has its own purpose and may use different methods to collect and report information or focus on somewhat different aspects of these important topics. Therefore, care should be taken not to compare LEOKA data to data provided by other entities, such as the Officer Down Memorial Page, National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, and others. Refer to the Criteria page for the requirements that determine which officers are included in this report.

Officer safety awareness presentations

Based on more than 40 years of research and data collection, LEOKA staff provides free officer safety awareness presentations to city, college and university, county, state, tribal, federal, and international law enforcement agencies. The goal of the presentation 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 addressed in the presentation.) To request this service in your area, e-mail LEOKA staff at .

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. 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 the same information that was published in previous years’ hard copy reports but with the benefits of navigable files and downloadable information.

eBook and Portable Document Format (PDF) file available

Included on the home page of this electronic publication of Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2018, are links to an eBook and a PDF file of summaries of incidents in which law enforcement officers were killed or assaulted and injured in the line of duty. The current compilation of narratives includes 15 years of information and will be updated for 2018 in the fall of 2019.

The objective of these products is to offer LEOKA information in portable, convenient formats (.epub and pdf) that can be downloaded for use on mobile devices (e.g., tablets, smartphones, etc.) by law enforcement researchers, trainers, and other partners.

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 leoka.statistics@fbi.gov.

LEOKA data for 2019. The LEOKA data collected in 2019 will be released in 2020.

Questions?

To submit questions about this information or for Web assistance, contact the FBI’s LEOKA Program at leoka.statistics@fbi.gov.