Law Enforcement Deaths Fall Over 50%. Former Officer Explains Why.

A new report shows a 50% decline in the number of law enforcement officers’ deaths in the line of duty since the start of 2025, compared with the same period last year.  

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund released its 2025 midyear fatalities report this week. The report found that 42 federal, state, or local law enforcement officers have died in the first six months of 2025, representing a 53% decline from the 89 officer fatalities in the first half of 2024. 

While reluctant to decisively declare a specific reason America is seeing a decline in law enforcement officer fatalities, Bill Alexander, the CEO of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, said he suspects there are three factors driving the trend.  

First, the law enforcement community has recently been very focused on furthering “officer safety and wellness,” Alexander, who served in law enforcement for nearly 30 years, told The Daily Signal.  

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund has dedicated “quite a bit of resources” into looking at data and trends to determine “where, how, why are men and women in uniform facing too many fatal and tragic outcomes,” the CEO said. The group then takes that information and assesses “how can we use that data to potentially implement new programs or practices to try to make it safer for the men and women doing the job,” he added.  

Efforts to improve safety can’t fully explain the dramatic year-over-year decline in law enforcement officers’ fatalities, Alexander said.  

In the five years since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, “the tone, the tenor, the rhetoric surrounding law enforcement was almost universally negative,” he said. The negative rhetoric came from “popular media, social media, mainstream media, and even worryingly from, at least I would argue, too many of our elected officials.”  

The negative rhetoric about law enforcement in recent years has been “so slanted,” Alexander contends, that it may have not only affected the dialogue around men and women in uniform, but may have also influenced “public behaviors as they were interacting with law enforcement.”  

“My argument here is that over the last six to eight months, and we are not a political organization so I don’t mean this in any political way, but … there has certainly been a change in that tone and tenor and rhetoric about law enforcement,” Alexander said. President Donald Trump returned to the White House a little less than six months ago.

Third, and on a related note, Alexander says, “coinciding with the same civil unrest and the negative dialogue about law enforcement, there was a lot of talk across the country, not universally, but a lot talk about defunding and marginalizing police officers.”  

“I don’t currently hear that song being sung in terms of defunding the police,” Alexander said.  

The tide “seems to be turning in terms of communities, cities, states, towns, recognizing that police are a force for good in their communities,” he said. “And I think that has led to police agencies and police officers generally feeling supported and to some degree reengaging in the fight on crime, and that has resulted to some degree in pretty substantial drops in violent crime all across the country.”  

Firearms-related incidents represent the highest single-issue cause of death among law enforcement this year, accounting for 22 fatalities so far in 2025, down from 28 in the first part of 2024.  

Traffic-related incidents resulted in 13 law enforcement fatalities so far in 2025, compared with 26 in the first half of last year.  

Seven officers died from “other” causes in the line of duty, such as health-related issues, the report found, again a significant decline from the 35 officers who died from non-firearm or non-traffic-related incident in the first half of 2024.  

Among the 42 officer deaths in the line of duty in 2025, 39 have been male and three were females. On average, officers were 43 years of age at the time of their death, had served for 13 years, and left behind two children, according to the report. 

While Alexander says he is encouraged by the decline in officer deaths and hopes the trend continues, he is “hesitant to rely on this as some definitive, specific trend that is either repeatable or expandable,” adding: “It just worries me that to some agree this might be random chance, throwing out a data point which is not actually reflective of the real-world danger out on the streets.”

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