Introduction.

Each year, the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program publishes Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) to chronicle information about the officers who were killed or assaulted while performing their duties. There are features that affect the interpretation of the data that appear in the tables, charts, and narrative summaries that the reader should keep in mind. First, the Program counts victim officers, not the number of incidents or weapons used. Next, the 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 the data. Also, agencies use different methodologies for collecting and reporting data about officers who were killed in the line of duty and those who were assaulted. Consequently, these two databases are not comparable. Finally, the data in the tables of this book are updated yearly; therefore, the UCR Program advises data users to exercise caution when attempting comparisons between the data in this publication with those in prior editions of LEOKA.

Victims of the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks

The deaths of the officers that resulted from the events of September 11, 2001, are not included in the data in Sections I and III 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 measurements in the UCR Program's analysis.