GlossaryCrime reporting systems
Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted
Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) is an FBI data collection concerning qualifying law-enforcement officers killed or assaulted.
Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) is an FBI data collection concerning qualifying law-enforcement officers killed or assaulted. Its publications apply specified officer-eligibility and incident criteria. A LEOKA figure describes that defined collection; it should not automatically be read as every injury, death, or workplace hazard affecting all agency employees.
What the program measures
The FBI's program description distinguishes felonious deaths, accidental deaths, and assaults and sets criteria for inclusion. These are separate categories, so a total for one does not represent all the others.
The program also supports officer-safety analysis and training. Its incident descriptions can help explain circumstances, but the collection heading alone does not establish a causal explanation for an individual death or assault. Comparisons need the exact table, reporting year, and category.
Example
Hypothetical example: A report lists officers feloniously killed in one table and officers assaulted in another. A local agency separately reports all employee occupational injuries, including a non-sworn employee's fall.
Those figures measure different populations and events. The employee injury cannot simply be added to a national LEOKA assault total. Likewise, comparing the local injury total with the national death total would not measure relative risk without aligned definitions and exposure information.
Common confusion
LEOKA concerns officers as victims of qualifying incidents. A use-of-force collection concerns force by officers. An officer-involved-shooting record describes another type of event and cannot be assumed to fit a LEOKA category merely because an officer was present.
An assault count also does not necessarily mean an injury count. Read the table's category and injury fields rather than supply that conclusion from the title.
Scope changes
The FBI's documentation explains officer criteria and dated exceptions. For historical trends, check those changes and the publication's coverage notes. Report the appropriate category in full rather than shortening a narrowly defined figure to “all line-of-duty deaths.”