FBI Releases 2020 Statistics on Law Enforcement Officers Killed in the Line of Duty
According to statistics reported to the FBI, 93 law enforcement officers were killed in line-of-duty incidents in 2020. Of these, 46 officers died as a result of felonious acts, and 47 officers died in accidents. Comprehensive data tables about these incidents and brief narratives describing the fatal attacks were released today in the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) portion of the Crime Data Explorer website. Previous editions of the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted publication, which contain data from 1996 to 2019, are available on the fbi.gov UCR Publications page.
This reporting project began with a question:
Are people in the Mountain West more likely to be killed by police than elsewhere in the United States? To answer this question, we conducted an analysis of several databases of police killings in the U.S. We also looked at data on racial and socio-econmic demographics, police deaths, and police killings in other countries. This FAQ covers what we learned and how we conducted our analysis, as well as the limitations of the data and what it cannot tell us about police violence.
Where do the data on police killings come from?