Many aspects of the criminal justice field are counted and reported—how many officers each agency employs, the number of arrests they make, the types of crimes they investigate, and many more. Since 1930, the FBI has responded to the needs of the law enforcement community by collecting such data and adapting these efforts through the years to refine and improve the data. The types of data the FBI collects have expanded, and the level of detail included in reported crime incidents in the United States has vastly improved with the use of technology. These criminal justice data can be studied and used by researchers, the academic community, city officials, and law enforcement (among others) to better understand crime trends in society and to attempt to answer the questions of why something is happening and how it can be stopped or reduced. In 1937, line-of-duty death statistics were first collected and published in the annual Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) publication, Crime in the United States.¹ Today, agencies can submit that information, along with added incident details and with assault or accidental death information, to the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) Data Collection. These critical data are compiled and published annually on FBI.gov and the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer website. However massive this collection of data is, it is notable that there has been no national counting of the act that takes more officers’ lives in the United States than any other: suicide.

In 2019, suicide was the 10th ranked overall cause of death of individuals in the United States.² When comparing the 2019 LEOKA statistic of 89 officer deaths (felonious and accidental) to a figure from the same year provided by Blue H.E.L.P.—a nonprofit organization that has been collecting law enforcement suicide information since 2016—showing 239 officer suicides in 2019, it is alarming to see that suicide claims more law enforcement lives than felonious killings or accidental deaths in the line of duty.³ Some nonprofit organizations, such as Blue H.E.L.P., the Police Executive Research Forum, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police, have worked to collect officer suicide statistics and compile resources for their colleagues to offer potential solutions and to remove the stigma of seeking help. To support such efforts, the U.S. government is doing the same. After a unanimous vote in the Senate and agreement from the House of Representatives, the U.S. Congress passed and former President Donald Trump signed the Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection Act on June 16, 2020.⁴ The goal of this new data collection is to help agencies better understand and prevent suicides among current and former law enforcement officers at the federal, state, tribal, and local levels.⁵

The Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection Act

The Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection Act charges the U.S. attorney general, acting through the director of the FBI, to establish a data collection where law enforcement agencies may submit information about their officers who have died by or attempted to commit suicide. Because the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division already houses many other criminal justice data collections in its UCR Program, it seemed the natural fit for the FBI to task the CJIS Division’s UCR Program to establish and manage this new data collection.

Data collections managed by the CJIS Division’s UCR Program include the following:

• • LEOKA
  • National Use-of-Force Data Collection
  • National Incident-Based Reporting System
  • Hate Crime Statistics⁶

According to the Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection Act, the FBI must collect, at minimum, the following information for each officer who died by or attempted to commit suicide:

• • The circumstances and events that occurred before the act or attempt
  • The general location where the act occurred
  • The demographic information of the officer
  • The occupational category of the officer
  • The method used in each suicide instance or attempt⁷

The act provides the FBI one year to establish this new data collection and, after two years of collecting these data, requires the FBI to annually publish a report containing the collected information on the FBI’s website.⁸

Building the New Data Collection

Shortly after the Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection Act was passed, the FBI UCR Program began work to build a system to collect these data and to create a marketing plan to make law enforcement agencies aware of the coming data collection. Following the same guidelines as the other data collections managed by the FBI UCR Program, this new collection will employ best practices used by other federal statistical programs to manage the risk of disclosing the victim officers’ identities.⁹ The reports will not contain any information directly identifying any of the officers.

This data collection differs from other programs that collect officer suicide data in that only law enforcement agencies can submit information, and each agency will be responsible for reporting information about officer suicides for their own officers. As with all UCR data collections, submission of information is voluntary. To submit information about an officer’s suicide or attempted suicide, agencies will log in to their Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal account. There, they can enter and submit incident information.

In addition to the act’s list of mandated data points, the Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection will gather more information about each suicide and attempted suicide, including the officer’s agency information, whether the officer had access to mental health resources through his or her agency, the officer’s employment status at the time of the incident, any possible known contributing stressors in the officer’s home or work life, and whether the officer reported or the agency observed any mental health warning signs prior to the incident. The information contributed to the Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection will be published to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer website. To meet the time frame set forth by the act, the FBI will establish this new data collection in June 2021 and plans to begin publishing the data online in mid-2022.

Data to be Published on the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer Website

The Crime Data Explorer website is the starting point for all users of UCR data. The website is an extensive, interactive tool that enables law enforcement and academia, as well as the general public to more easily use and understand the massive amount of UCR data currently collected. On the site, users can view charts and graphs that break down the data of their choosing in a variety of ways.¹⁰ The FBI created the Crime Data Explorer to help provide transparency about the data contained there, to create easier access to it, and to expand awareness of criminal and noncriminal justice data sharing.¹¹ Adding comprehensive officer suicide and attempted suicide data will provide a government-built foundation to help researchers and policy makers create and fund national mental health programs that will help law enforcement officers operate at their best and to provide support for them when they are facing stress and mental health issues.

As more is understood about officer suicides, more comprehensive prevention plans can be established and disseminated. To help remove the stigma associated with officers requesting mental health help, better understanding is needed about the causes and situations surrounding law enforcement suicides and attempted suicides. The first step to begin this government-backed endeavor is to gather data. Law enforcement agencies can do their part by breaking the silence and partnering with the Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection to report any instances within their ranks. With more comprehensive information comes more thorough understanding, and—ideally—more federal resources to support suicide awareness, therapy, and prevention.

Notes:

¹Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), “About LEOKA,” 2019 Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted.

²American Association of Suicidology “Facts and Statistics.”

³FBI, “Officers Feloniously Killed,” 2019 Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted; FBI, “Officers Accidentally Killed,” 2019 Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted; Blue H.E.L.P., “Suicides to Date by Year.”

⁴S. 2746– Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection Act “Actions Overview.”

⁵S.2746– Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection Act, “Summary.”

⁶FBI, Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS), Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, “Services.” ⁷Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection Act, Pub. L. No. 116-143, 134 Stat. 644 (2020).

⁸Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection Act.

⁹Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection Act.

¹⁰FBI, CJIS, UCR Program, “Services.”

¹¹FBI, Crime Data Explorer.

Please cite as

Tara Perine, “The Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection: The FBI’s New Data Collection on Officer Suicide and Attempted Suicide,” Police Chief Online, May 26, 2021.