Deadliest States for Police Officers

Source: the Officer Down Memorial Page, a nonprofit that has documented U.S. line-of-duty deaths since 1996. We pull every officer with an end of watch in 2005 through 2026 (K9 records excluded) and tally them by state, cause and agency type. Counts are cumulative across the whole window so a single death in a small state does not swing the picture.

Per-capita figures are deaths per million residents using 2020 Census state populations. We do not use a sworn-officer denominator here. Deaths are mapped to the agency's home state. Federal officers (302) and officers in U.S. territories and multi-state agencies such as tribal and railroad police (120) appear in the national, cause and agency views but not the 50-state and DC map.

The city map and table cover municipal and county police departments only, joined to FBI city population with a 50,000-resident floor so per-capita rates stay meaningful. A city must have more than one unique deadly incident to appear in the ranking. ODMP publishes no incident identifier, so we treat one end-of-watch date at one agency as one incident: an ambush that kills three officers of the same department on the same day is one incident and three deaths on separate days are three. A city whose entire toll comes from a single incident is presumed a one-off and is excluded, whatever the death count. The qualifying incident count is measured over the same deaths shown. COVID-19 and 9/11-related illness are excluded by default, so a city whose only additional unique incidents are COVID or 9/11 deaths falls back below the threshold and drops out. It returns only if you toggle that tail back on.

ODMP counts illness as line of duty, including 9/11-related cancers (601 deaths, almost all attributed to New York agencies) and COVID-19 (887 deaths in 2020-2022). Both are one-time-event tails that distort a standing ranking, so both are excluded by default everywhere on this page, each with its own toggle to add it back. COVID otherwise swamps 2020 and 2021; 9/11 illness otherwise makes New York stand out for a 2001 event. Other illness such as heart attacks and duty-related illness stays in.

Agency types follow ODMP's classification, collapsed into city or municipal police, county sheriff, state police and highway patrol (troopers), tribal, federal and a catch-all for corrections, constables, campus, transit and similar special-jurisdiction agencies. ODMP totals run higher than the FBI and NLEOMF because those exclude most illness: for 2024, ODMP records 194 officer deaths against NLEOMF's 147.