About Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted

The FBI publishes Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted each year to provide information about the officers who were killed, feloniously or accidentally, and those officers who were assaulted while performing their duties. The FBI collects these data through the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program.

Data considerations

Before 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 part 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 different methodologies for collecting and reporting data about officers who were killed and those who were assaulted. As a result, the two databases, and therefore the tables derived from them, are not comparable.
Because the information in the tables of this publication are updated each year, the FBI cautions readers against making comparisons between the data in this publication and those in prior editions of the publication.

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, the law enforcement conference, “Prevention of Police Killings,” resulted in a Presidential directive to increase 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 feloniously 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.

Victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks

The deaths of the officers as a result of the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are not included in the trend data in the tables of this publication. Because of the unique nature of the data from this singular event, including these extreme values in rate or trend data would skew data for most analyses.

Recent developments

For the past several years, the FBI’s UCR staff has been working 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 this edition, the FBI will be producing Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted exclusively as a Web publication. The report contains all the information that was published in previous years’ hard copy reports but with the benefits of navigable files and downloadable information.

If you have questions about the data in this publication

Contact the Communications Unit of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division via e-mail at cjis_comm@leo.gov or by telephone at (304) 625-4995.

What do you think?

The E-Government Act of 2002 promotes more efficient uses of information technology by the federal government. This report is a product of the FBI’s effort to publish its statistics using twenty-first century technology and, as a result, reach a larger audience more efficiently. The FBI welcomes your feedback about this electronic report via a short evaluation form. Your comments will help us improve the presentation of future releases of Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted.

What you won't find in this publication

Raw data. The data presented in Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted provides information about law enforcement officers killed and assaulted in the Nation broken down by state and region. More detailed data (e.g., type of activity and victim and offender age, sex, and race at the incident and agency level [absent any personal identifying information]) are furnished via the UCR Program’s LEOKA Master File. The 2005 raw data from this file will be available in spring 2007. For more information, contact the Communications Unit of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division via e-mail at cjis_comm@leo.gov or by telephone at (304) 625-4995.

LEOKA data for 2006. Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted , 2006, will be published on the Web in the fall of 2007.

Resources

Data Tables/Figures

Roll over table numbers
for table titles
Feloniously Killed
Table 1
Table 2
Table 3
Figure 1
Table 4
Figure 2
Table 5
Table 6
Table 7
Table 8
Table 9
Table 10
Table 11
Figure 3
Table 12
Table 13
Table 14
Table 15
Table 16
Table 17
Table 18
Table 19
Table 20
Table 21
Figure 4
Table 22
Table 23
Table 24
Table 25
Table 26
Table 27
Table 28
Figure 5
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
Accidentally Killed
Table 46
Table 47
Table 48
Figure 6
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
Officers Assaulted
Table 63
Table 64
Table 65
Table 66
Table 67
Table 68
Table 69
Table 70
Table 71
Federal Officers Killed and Assaulted
Table 72
Table 73
Table 74
Table 75
Table 76
Table 77
Table 78
Table 79

Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted 2005

U.S. Department of Justice — Federal Bureau of Investigation

Release Date: October 2006