What FBI data says about law enforcement use-of-force
FBI data offers some insight into when use-of-force incidents happen and what happens when they do.
A Minneapolis woman was shot and killed by an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent on the morning of January 7, sparking nationwide protests and further conversation around law enforcement-involved shootings.
In 2019, the FBI launched an effort to provide nationwide statistics on use-of-force incidents known as the National Use-of-Force Data Collection.
What is use-of-force?
There is no single definition of “use-of-force,” a term often used to describe scenarios in which law enforcement officers use physical intervention during an arrest or an incident. The National Use-of-Force Data Collection tracks incidents during which law enforcement activity results in someone’s death or serious injury, or when an officer fires a gun at somebody.
When is use-of-force legal?
The nation has nearly 100 federal and over 19,000 state and local law enforcement agencies. There's no single policy on when force is warranted.
The Department of Justice — home to the FBI and the department employing the second-most law enforcement officers — permits officers to use “only the force that is objectively reasonable to effectively gain control of an incident, while protecting the safety of the officer and others.” The policy specifies it must only be used in cases with no feasible alternatives.
The Department of Homeland Security, which is home to ICE, employs more officers than any other federal department. It uses similar language similar to the Justice Department to define its use-of-force policy. Both cite the 1989 Supreme Court case Graham v. Connor, which established this standard of “objective reasonableness.”
What can government data tell us about use-of-force incidents?
The FBI’s Use-of-Force Data Collection is a voluntary partnership with federal, state, local, and tribal agencies, which may choose whether to contribute data. In the 2025 reporting year, agencies that reported data — including 94 federal agencies — covered 78% of the law enforcement population.
This data, collected from 12,035 of the nation’s 19,277 law enforcement agencies, offers some insight into when these incidents happen and what happens when they do.
When do use-of-force incidents happen?
According to the 2025 release, over half (54.3%) of these incidents occurred while law enforcement was responding to unlawful or suspicious activity. Another 21% came during a traffic stop (12.9%) or other routine patrol (7.0%). Nearly 10% were categorized as other or unknown.
Over half of use-of-force incidents occur during a response to unlawful or suspicious activity.
Share of use-of-force incidents by reason for initial contact, 2021–2025
There is little available data on how routine law enforcement activity leads to a use-of-force incident, but the FBI does include the most common types of resistance reported by officers. In each of the five reported years, the top type of resistance has been a failure to comply with verbal commands or other passive resistance.
This was followed by attempting to escape, showing a weapon, using a firearm, and resisting arrest or handcuffing.
What happens during use-of-force incidents?
According to the FBI’s data, when an officer used force, it was most often a firearm. While the data doesn’t provide percentages, firearms were the most often-cited type of force used in 2025 incidents, followed by hands/fists/feet, tasers, police dogs, and impact projectiles like rubber bullets.
Throughout the five-year period of available data, including 2025, around 30% of reported use-of-force incidents resulted in the death of one or more people. In 2025, another 60% of incidents caused serious bodily harm, while around 10% involved a discharged weapon without bodily harm.
Three in 10 use-of-force incidents reported by law enforcement resulted in death.
Use-of-force incidents, January 1–August 28, 2025
What does the data miss?
In short: how often these incidents happen. The FBI data releases are limited by the agency’s participation thresholds, which it sets to ensure that the data it does release represents the national picture. To release total incident counts, for instance, the agency requires participation levels to cover at least 80% of the law enforcement population, a threshold that has not yet been met.
Without hitting that 80% threshold, the available data provides only a broad-strokes picture of what these incidents can entail, stopping short of including details about specific agencies, locations, subject demographics, and more.
The data collection program grew from 46% coverage in the 2019 reporting year to 80% in 2024, but dropped to 78% in 2025, falling shy of the top threshold in the seventh year of the program’s history.
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