Since the 1780s, over 25,000 United States law enforcement officers have died while on active duty, or due to injuries and illnesses obtained while on duty. Gunfire is responsible for over half of all total law enforcement deaths recorded, particularly before the 1930s. From this point on, the total share of gunfire deaths has decreased significantly, mostly due to the increase in vehicle or health related deaths, although gunfire has remained the most common individual cause of death in almost every year. Gunfire deaths These deaths rose steadily after the Civil War, and peaked at over 200 annual deaths during the 1920s, due to the increase in criminal activity during prohibition. Because of this, the National Firearms Act of 1934 was introduced in an attempt to reduce gun-related crime, by requiring the registration of any transfer of ownership and imposing a tax on gun manufacturers and distributors. After Prohibition's end and the introduction of these measures, annual law enforcement deaths from gunfire have been well below 100 in almost every year, except for a brief spike in the early 1970s, during the crime wave that began in the 1960s and the beginning of the "War on Drugs". Overall, gunfire deaths of law enforcement have fallen since the 1970s, reaching a low of just 34 deaths in 2013. In contrast, the total number of people killed by police shootings has consistently been above one thousand for most of the past decade.

Increase in health-related deaths

The majority of non-gunfire deaths are a result of vehicle-related accidents, and the number of crashes and accidents rose throughout the 20th century in line with the increase in car ownership. However, the number of deaths from heart attacks and job-related illness has also risen over time, due to the aging of the population and increasingly unhealthy lifestyle trends across the country. In recent decades, additional health issues have emerged that have had a disproportionate impact on law enforcement. In 2001, 72 officers died as a result of the September 11th terrorist attacks, and over 350 additional deaths have been attributed to the adverse health effects (primarily respiratory illnesses) sustained by first responders from law enforcement. From 2020-2022, COVID-19 became the largest single cause of law enforcement deaths. Figures relate to cases where the individual contracted COVID-19 while on duty, and highlights the increased exposure to the virus faced by those considered to be frontline or essential workers. This number is likely to fall in the future as infection rates fall and newer strains of the virus are less lethal.

In 2022, a total of 226 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty in the United States. This is a significant decrease from the year before, when 458 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty in the United States.

In 2022, significantly more male law enforcement officers died in the line of duty in the United States than did female law enforcement officers. In that year, 204 male law enforcement officers died in the line of duty in the United States.

The study was a comprehensive analysis of felonious killings of officers. The purposes of the study were (1) to analyze the nature and circumstances of incidents of felonious police killings and (2) to analyze trends in the numbers and rates of killings across different types of agencies and to explain these differences. For Part 1, Incident-Level Data, an incident-level database was created to capture all incidents involving the death of a police officer from 1983 through 1992. Data on officers and incidents were collected from the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) data collection as coded by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. In addition to the UCR data, the Police Foundation also coded information from the LEOKA narratives that are not part of the computerized LEOKA database from the FBI. For Part 2, Agency-Level Data, the researchers created an agency-level database to research systematic differences among rates at which law enforcement officers had been feloniously killed from 1977 through 1992. The investigators focused on the 56 largest law enforcement agencies because of the availability of data for explanatory variables. Variables in Part 1 include year of killing, involvement of other officers, if the officer was killed with his/her own weapon, circumstances of the killing, location of fatal wounds, distance between officer and offender, if the victim was wearing body armor, if different officers were killed in the same incident, if the officer was in uniform, actions of the killer and of the officer at entry and final stage, if the killer was visible at first, if the officer thought the killer was a felon suspect, if the officer was shot at entry, and circumstances at anticipation, entry, and final stages. Demographic variables for Part 1 include victim's sex, age, race, type of assignment, rank, years of experience, agency, population group, and if the officer was working a security job. Part 2 contains variables describing the general municipal environment, such as whether the agency is located in the South, level of poverty according to a poverty index, population density, percent of population that was Hispanic or Black, and population aged 15-34 years old. Variables capturing the crime environment include the violent crime rate, property crime rate, and a gun-related crime index. Lastly, variables on the environment of the police agencies include violent and property crime arrests per 1,000 sworn officers, percentage of officers injured in assaults, and number of sworn officers.

Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 1,173 civilians having been shot, 248 of whom were Black, as of December 2024. In 2023, there were 1,164 fatal police shootings. Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 6.1 fatal shootings per million of the population per year between 2015 and 2024. Police brutality in the U.S. In recent years, particularly since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, police brutality has become a hot button issue in the United States. The number of homicides committed by police in the United States is often compared to those in countries such as England, where the number is significantly lower. Black Lives Matter The Black Lives Matter Movement, formed in 2013, has been a vocal part of the movement against police brutality in the U.S. by organizing “die-ins”, marches, and demonstrations in response to the killings of black men and women by police. While Black Lives Matter has become a controversial movement within the U.S., it has brought more attention to the number and frequency of police shootings of civilians.

Between January 1 and December 31, 2022, 33 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty in Texas -- the most out of any state. New York, California, Georgia, and Tennessee rounded out the top five states for law enforcement fatalities in 2020.

Since 1930, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has compiled the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) to serve as a periodic nationwide assessment of reported crimes not available elsewhere in the criminal justice system. Each year, this information is reported in four types of files: (1) Offenses Known and Clearances by Arrest, (2) Property Stolen and Recovered, (3) Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), and (4) Police Employee (LEOKA) Data. The Police Employee (LEOKA) Data provide information about law enforcement officers killed or assaulted (hence the acronym, LEOKA) in the line of duty. The variables created from the LEOKA forms provide in-depth information on the circumstances surrounding killings or assaults, including type of call answered, type of weapon used, and type of patrol the officers were on. self-enumerated questionnaireStarting with the year 1998, each of the four parts of the UCR data collection archived by ICPSR is released as a separate study under its own study number. The Police Employee data for the years 1975-1997 can be found in UNIFORM CRIME REPORTING PROGRAM DATA [UNITED STATES]: 1975-1997 (ICPSR 9028). Datasets: DS1: Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data [United States]: Police Employee (LEOKA) Data, 2004 Law enforcement officers killed or assaulted as reported by law enforcement agencies. inap.

The killing of Tyre Nichols in January 2023 by Memphis Police Officers has reignited debates about police brutality in the United States. Between 2013 and 2024, over 1,000 people have been killed by police in every year. Some of the most infamous examples include the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and the shooting of Breonna Taylor earlier that year. Within this time period, the most people killed by police in the United States was in 2023, at 1,353 people. Police Violence in the U.S. Police violence is defined as any instance where a police officer’s use of force results in a civilian’s death, regardless of whether it is considered justified by the law. While many people killed by police in the U.S. were shot, other causes of death have included tasers, vehicles, and physical restraints or beatings. In the United States, the rate of police shootings is much higher for Black Americans than it is for any other ethnicity and recent incidents of police killing unarmed Black men and women in the United States have led to widespread protests against police brutality, particularly towards communities of color. America’s Persistent Police Problem Despite increasing visibility surrounding police violence in recent years, police killings have continued to occur in the United States at a consistently high rate. In comparison to other countries, police in the U.S. have killed people at a rate three times higher than police in Canada, and 60 times the rate of police in England. While U.S. police have killed people in almost all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, New Mexico was reported to have the highest rate of people killed by the police in the United States, with 8.03 people per million inhabitants killed by police.

Police death toll statistics......................

BackgroundPrior research suggests that United States governmental sources documenting the number of law-enforcement-related deaths (i.e., fatalities due to injuries inflicted by law enforcement officers) undercount these incidents. The National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), administered by the federal government and based on state death certificate data, identifies such deaths by assigning them diagnostic codes corresponding to “legal intervention” in accordance with the International Classification of Diseases–10th Revision (ICD-10). Newer, nongovernmental databases track law-enforcement-related deaths by compiling news media reports and provide an opportunity to assess the magnitude and determinants of suspected NVSS underreporting. Our a priori hypotheses were that underreporting by the NVSS would exceed that by the news media sources, and that underreporting rates would be higher for decedents of color versus white, decedents in lower versus higher income counties, decedents killed by non-firearm (e.g., Taser) versus firearm mechanisms, and deaths recorded by a medical examiner versus coroner.Methods and findingsWe created a new US-wide dataset by matching cases reported in a nongovernmental, news-media-based dataset produced by the newspaper The Guardian, The Counted, to identifiable NVSS mortality records for 2015. We conducted 2 main analyses for this cross-sectional study: (1) an estimate of the total number of deaths and the proportion unreported by each source using capture–recapture analysis and (2) an assessment of correlates of underreporting of law-enforcement-related deaths (demographic characteristics of the decedent, mechanism of death, death investigator type [medical examiner versus coroner], county median income, and county urbanicity) in the NVSS using multilevel logistic regression. We estimated that the total number of law-enforcement-related deaths in 2015 was 1,166 (95% CI: 1,153, 1,184). There were 599 deaths reported in The Counted only, 36 reported in the NVSS only, 487 reported in both lists, and an estimated 44 (95% CI: 31, 62) not reported in either source. The NVSS documented 44.9% (95% CI: 44.2%, 45.4%) of the total number of deaths, and The Counted documented 93.1% (95% CI: 91.7%, 94.2%). In a multivariable mixed-effects logistic model that controlled for all individual- and county-level covariates, decedents injured by non-firearm mechanisms had higher odds of underreporting in the NVSS than those injured by firearms (odds ratio [OR]: 68.2; 95% CI: 15.7, 297.5; p < 0.01), and underreporting was also more likely outside of the highest-income-quintile counties (OR for the lowest versus highest income quintile: 10.1; 95% CI: 2.4, 42.8; p < 0.01). There was no statistically significant difference in the odds of underreporting in the NVSS for deaths certified by coroners compared to medical examiners, and the odds of underreporting did not vary by race/ethnicity. One limitation of our analyses is that we were unable to examine the characteristics of cases that were unreported in The Counted.ConclusionsThe media-based source, The Counted, reported a considerably higher proportion of law-enforcement-related deaths than the NVSS, which failed to report a majority of these incidents. For the NVSS, rates of underreporting were higher in lower income counties and for decedents killed by non-firearm mechanisms. There was no evidence suggesting that underreporting varied by death investigator type (medical examiner versus coroner) or race/ethnicity.

This data collection was designed to assess the impact of line-of-duty deaths of law enforcement officers on their family members in terms of the psychological, emotional, and financial effects. To assess the impact of the traumatic event, a wide variety of clinical and psychiatric measures of psychological disorder were employed. The data are stored in two files. Included in the first file are variables concerning the respondent's personal characteristics such as age, sex, ethnic origin, marital status, educational level, relationship to deceased officer, and employment. Also included are experiences and emotional reactions to the death of the officer and clinical symptoms of psychological distress. The file also offers information on the deceased officer's demographic characteristics such as age at time of death, sex, ethnic origin, educational level, number of times married, and number of years in law enforcement, as well as the date and time of the incident. The second file contains variables on the respondent's relationship with friends and relatives before and after the traumatic event, behavioral changes of survivors' children following the death, financial impacts on survivors, and satisfaction with treatment and responses received from police departments.

As of September 30, there were 54 law enforcement officers killed in the United States in 2024. Within the provided time period, the highest number of law enforcement officers killed in the United States was reported in 2021, at 73 officers.

Background: Police officers are at high risk for mental and physical health problems and suicidal ideation. The specific risk factors are numerous and concern stressful missions and administrative aspects of the police profession. So far, the police get only little training on specific missions as well as on coping with stress and suicidal ideation in the police profession. In this study we test the efficacy of the online training COPS (Coping with Suicide) for police officers.Methods: A total of 142 police officers from Germany and Switzerland participated in the study; complete data (baseline and post) are available from 102 participants. The training consisted of three modules covering the topics of delivering death notifications, dealing with individuals with suicidal ideation and dealing with one's own distress and suicidal ideation in the police profession. The primary outcomes are perceived knowledge and self-rated competence regarding the contents of the program, actual knowledge as well as symptoms of depression and anxiety (PHQ-9), and attitudes toward suicide (ATTS). The data are collected at baseline and after completing the training.Results: We found a significant increase in knowledge as well as in perceived competence after completing the training. Mental health and attitudes toward suicide did not change significantly. Years on the job had no moderating effect on the effectiveness of the training.Discussion: The results suggest that a short e-learning program significantly improves knowledge and self-rated competence in delivering death notifications, in suicide prevention and stress management. It can be easily integrated into the daily routine of police-officers, and participants could participate at their own pace and from any location. One limitation of this study is the lack of a control-group. Further advantages and limitations of this study are discussed.Clinical Trial Registration:https://www.drks.de/drks_web/, identifier: DRKS00023882.

This directory contains the data and code behind the story The Dallas Shooting Was Among The Deadliest For Police In U.S. History. The primary source of data is the Officer Down Memorial Page (ODMP), ...

Abstract (en): The Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD) program is an annual national census of persons who die either during the process of arrest or while in the custody of state or local law enforcement personnel. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) implemented the ARD program in 2003 as part of the Deaths in Custody Reporting Program (DCRP). The DCRP was initiated to fulfill the data collection requirement of the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act of 2000 (DICRA, P.L. 106- 247). It collects in-depth information on deaths during arrest and incarceration, and it provides national-level information on the deaths of suspects and offenders from their initial contact with law enforcement personnel through the time they are incarcerated in a jail or prison. ARD data are collected to quantify and describe the circumstances surrounding civilian deaths that take place during an arrest or while in the custody of law enforcement. These data describe the prevalence and incidence of arrest-related deaths across the nation, identify the circumstances or activities that contribute to these deaths, and reveal trends in the causes and circumstances of these deaths in custody at national and state levels. These data can be used to inform specific policies that may increase the safety of law enforcement officers and citizens, identify training needs in law enforcement agencies, and assist in developing prevention strategies. The current ARD program relies on state reporting coordinators (SRCs) in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia to identify and report on all eligible cases of arrest-related deaths. BJS compiles data from the states to produce national-level statistics on deaths that occur in the process of arrest by, or while in the custody of, state and local law enforcement personnel. ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Created variable labels and/or value labels.; Standardized missing values.; Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.. Arrests related deaths of individuals reported by state and local law enforcement agencies from 2003 to 2009. Smallest Geographic Unit: state Individual-level death data are collected from the 50 state department of corrections in the United States. mail questionnaire, self-enumerated questionnaire

The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 (DICRA) requires the head of each federal law enforcement agency to submit to the U.S. attorney general, information about the death of any person who is detained, under arrest, or in the process of being arrested by a federal law enforcement officer (or by a state or local law enforcement officer while participating in a federal law enforcement operation, task force, or other capacity) being transported to, incarcerated at, or detained at any facility (including immigration or juvenile facilities) pursuant to a contract with a federal law enforcement agency, state or local government facility used by a federal law enforcement agency, or federal correctional or pre-trial detention facility located within the United States (Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013, P.L. 113-242). The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) created the Federal Deaths in Custody Reporting Program (FDCRP) to collect the data required of federal law enforcement agencies. Federal law enforcement agencies are surveyed on an annual basis about deaths that fall under the scope of DICRA. This data collection includes the 2020 Arrest-Related Death Incident Report (CJ-13A) data and the 2020 Detention/Incarceration Incident Report (CJ-13B) data.

The circumstances surrounding "justifiable homicides" by police are the focus of this data collection, which examines occurrences in 57 United States cities during the period 1970-1979. Homicides by on- and off-duty police officers serving communities of 250,000 or more were studied. Data were collected through a survey questionnaire sent to police executives of the 57 cities. The Federal Bureau of Investigation supplied data on justifiable homicides by police, including age, sex, and race data. The variables include number of sworn officers, number of supervisory officers, average years of education, department regulations about issues such as off-duty employment, uniforms, carrying firearms, and disciplinary actions, in-service training, pre-service training, firearms practice, assignments without firearms, on-duty deaths, and off-duty deaths. The study was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Justice to the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

For a comprehensive guide to this data and other UCR data, please see my book at ucrbook.comVersion 12 release notes:Adds 2021 data.Version 11 release notes:Adds 2020 data. Please note that the FBI has retired UCR data ending in 2020 data so this will (probably, I haven't seen confirmation either way) be the last LEOKA data they release. Changes .rda file to .rds.Version 10 release notes:Changes release notes description, does not change data.Version 9 release notes:Adds data for 2019.Version 8 release notes:Fix bug for years 1960-1971 where the number of months reported variable was incorrectly down by 1 month. I recommend caution when using these years as they only report either 0 or 12 months of the year, which differs from every other year in the data. Added the variable officers_killed_total which is the sum of officers_killed_by_felony and officers_killed_by_accident.Version 7 release notes:Adds data from 2018Version 6 release notes:Adds data in the following formats: SPSS and Excel.Changes project name to avoid confusing this data for the ones done by NACJD.Version 5 release notes: Adds data for 1960-1974 and 2017. Note: many columns (including number of female officers) will always have a value of 0 for years prior to 1971. This is because those variables weren't collected prior to 1971. These should be NA, not 0 but I'm keeping it as 0 to be consistent with the raw data. Removes support for .csv and .sav files.Adds a number_of_months_reported variable for each agency-year. A month is considered reported if the month_indicator column for that month has a value of "normal update" or "reported, not data."The formatting of the monthly data has changed from wide to long. This means that each agency-month has a single row. The old data had each agency being a single row with each month-category (e.g. jan_officers_killed_by_felony) being a column. Now there will just be a single column for each category (e.g. officers_killed_by_felony) and the month can be identified in the month column. This also results in most column names changing. As such, be careful when aggregating the monthly data since some variables are the same every month (e.g. number of officers employed is measured annually) so aggregating will be 12 times as high as the real value for those variables. Adds a date column. This date column is always set to the first of the month. It is NOT the date that a crime occurred or was reported. It is only there to make it easier to create time-series graphs that require a date input.All the data in this version was acquired from the FBI as text/DAT files and read into R using the package asciiSetupReader. The FBI also provided a PDF file explaining how to create the setup file to read the data. Both the FBI's PDF and the setup file I made are included in the zip files. Data is the same as from NACJD but using all FBI files makes cleaning easier as all column names are already identical. Version 4 release notes: Add data for 2016.Order rows by year (descending) and ORI.Version 3 release notes: Fix bug where Philadelphia Police Department had incorrect FIPS county code. The LEOKA data sets contain highly detailed data about the number of officers/civilians employed by an agency and how many officers were killed or assaulted. All the data was acquired from the FBI as text/DAT files and read into R using the package asciiSetupReader. The FBI also provided a PDF file explaining how to create the setup file to read the data. Both the FBI's PDF and the setup file I made are included in the zip files. About 7% of all agencies in the data report more officers or civilians than population. As such, I removed the officers/civilians per 1,000 population variables. You should exercise caution if deciding to generate and use these variables yourself. Several agency had impossible large (>15) officer deaths in a single month. For those months I changed the value to NA. The UCR Handbook (https://ucr.fbi.gov/additional-ucr-publications/ucr_handbook.pdf/view) describes the LEOKA data as follows:"The UCR Program collects data from all contributing agencies ... on officer line-of-duty deaths and assaults. Reporting agencies must submit data on ... their own duly sworn officers feloniously or accidentally killed or assaulted in the line of duty. The purpose of this data collection is to identify situations in which

Characteristics of law-enforcement-related deaths from The Counted matched and unmatched to National Vital Statistics System mortality records using the National Death Index (US, 2015).

In 2023, it was estimated that five citizens per 100,000 inhabitants were killed in circumstances related to police operations in the state of Rio de Janeiro, a decreased when compared to the previous year. In 2018 and 2019, the city recorded its highest death rate since 2007.