“I was wondering if that was really gunfire, because that doesn’t really happen here.”
That’s a quote from a neighbor when an officer in a small Illinois town was shot in 2016, the year I started writing about rural policing. Fast forward to December 2025 in an Idaho town of 800-ish residents. A gunman attacked the Shoshone County Sheriff’s station, wounding two citizens and a police officer, and the same refrain was repeated by a witness.
“This happens in other places,” … “It doesn’t happen here.”
Clearly though, “it” does: officers who work in small towns and remote places do get shot, and a significant number die of their wounds. Nevertheless, idealized perceptions of small town America persist, skewing the basis for decisions about officer training, equipment and staffing levels. That’s why in 2019 I started tracking the numbers of officers shot, broken down by where they fall. I wanted to prove that rural officers face real risk, and now I have seven years of data doing just that.
The project
I track the numbers of officers shot because those assaults are reliably reported and difficult to dismiss. Intent might be debatable when an officer gets hit by a car, but not when a suspect points a gun and pulls the trigger. Although officer deaths in the line of duty have fallen recently in line with national murder rates, the rates of overall assaults on officers have risen, including felonious gunfire.
I start each day by visiting Gun Violence Archive, and then search news reports for verification and to find cases that fall through the cracks (often game wardens, or incidents on tribal property). Then I find the location and population for each incident. Since there is no single definition for “remote,” “rural” or “small town,” I flag incidents that happen in towns with populations smaller than 30,000 residents, and further break that down into places with fewer than 11,000 residents, excepting places that are actually immediate suburbs of cities. Armor saves are noted, as well as ambush incidents shared by the National Fraternal Order of Police.
All sworn officers are counted; what matters to me is where the incident happens, not names on patches. State police and federal officers work for large agencies, yet they patrol remote stretches of highway, forests and desert, and investigate crimes on vast tribal reservations.
For example, Border Patrol Agent David Maland was murdered on a traffic stop in a tiny Vermont town in January 2025, one of the first officers killed last year. The attack was notable not just for where it happened, but because it was one of two shootings of officers in small towns by left-wing radicals including rare multiple female assailants. (The other, an attack on an ICE detention facility, wounded an Alvarado police officer).
You can find past years’ spreadsheets here: 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019.
What kinds of shootings involved rural police in 2025?
The year began at an encouragingly moderate pace. As summer heated up, so did the violence against law enforcement including officers in the places I write about.
In the week from June 30 to July 7, a total of 12 officers were shot. Six of them were small-town officers, including two fatalities: a detention officer shot by a federal inmate in North Carolina, and a South Carolina deputy ambushed along with another deputy on a warrant service in a town of fewer than 900 people.
In August alone, there were five multi-casualty events in places with fewer than 30,000 residents, resulting in 12 officers shot. There were also five fatalities in August, four in the places I track, including two of the three officers shot in an ambush attack in Utah.
In all, there were 30 officers shot that month, 16 of them in small towns and rural places. In addition, five of the month’s six ambush attacks were in small, rural or remote places.
The theme carried through September, when all fatalities occurred in these small places. Among them was yet another mass casualty ambush in Pennsylvania , wounding two officers and killing three more, in a township of only 2500 residents.
The violence peaked and ebbed through the rest of the year, punctuated by oddities that made tracking confusing sometimes, like two separate mass casualty shootings two days apart, both involving deputies from Osage County Sheriff’s Offices — one in Kansas, and the other in Oklahoma. Neither location had more than 3,000 residents.
What do this year’s numbers show?
The short answer is that the pattern holds steady: rural and small town officers aren’t exempt from the threats posed by other humans. Risk isn’t about population density, it’s about the existence of other people. Anything people will do in urban places, they will also do in the country, where there are fewer resources to handle them.
Total officers shot in 2025: 328
Fatalities: 42 = 13% of the total
Armor saves: 32 = 10% of the total
Ambush: 70 = 21% of the total
The total number of officers shot rose slightly from 311 in 2024 to 328; fatalities dipped from 14% to 10%, and armor saves and ambush percentages were similar within a percent or two.
Ambush numbers remained down significantly from 2023, where there were 104.
Now we’ll look at a smaller population set.
| Officers shot population >11,000 to <30,000 in 2025 |
| 25 officers were shot (8% of the national total) |
| 6 died of their wounds (14% of the national total) |
| 1 was saved by ballistic armor (3% of the national total) |
| 8 were shot in ambush attacks (11% of the national total) |
As expected, a smaller population brought small numbers of officers shot. But take a second look: only 25 officers were shot in this population bracket, but 32% of those officers fell to ambush attacks, a significant proportion of such a small group.
Let’s check out the smallest places, and see what the numbers tell us.
| Officers shot population <11,000 in 2025 |
| 91 officers were shot (28% of the national total) |
| 13 died of their wounds (31% of the national total) |
| 9 were saved by ballistic armor (28% of the national total) |
| 18 were shot in ambush attacks (26% of the national total) |
As they have for each of the seven years I’ve been tracking these incidents, the smallest places — some with barely a hundred residents — saw a considerable spike in the numbers of officers shot. The total numbers of officers shot more than tripled from the next larger set; fatalities doubled and so did ambush attacks. Armor saves increased from just one to nine.
This is a pattern, not an anomaly. The least populated places are not the “safest.” In fact, while violent crime fell nationwide, the numbers of officers shot in the smallest towns increased from 61 in 2024 to 91 in 2025.
Taken together, the number of officers shot in the small/rural/remote places I cover represent 35% of all officers shot in 2025 (an increase from 29% the year before), and 45% of the total fatalities — up from last year’s 37% (but still down from 2023’s disastrous 56%). They also represent a full third of the armor saves, and more than a third of the ambush attacks. Considering that very small departments (fewer than 25 officers) employ only about 14% of the total law enforcement officers in the nation, these are totals that should be — have to be — taken seriously.
“We are biased to do nothing”
Writer Amanda Ripley describes normalcy bias that way in her book, The Unthinkable. She writes about the way disasters overtake unsuspecting humans who persist in denial, but who have the option to plan and prepare instead, to increase survivability.
It’s true that no individual assault on a particular officer can be predicted. However, every boss can reasonably predict that an assault on any officer is a possibility. As legendary police trainer Gordon Graham has taught for years, predictable is preventable. Getting department heads and decision-makers to acknowledge risk in the first place is the hard part — overcoming that bias to do nothing.
What should police leaders do with this information?
Every Police Week for years now I’ve analyzed these numbers without seeing anything change. Partly, that’s because of the way we receive information about violent assaults on officers.
It’s mostly open-source, scattered, irregularly reported, with no formal channel for conveying it to the people who could make a difference. Small town news stays local, the stories unconnected to the larger issue of officer safety. By bringing this information into one place, I want to convince decision-makers that the lives of rural and small town officers depend on their grasp of reality, not sunny presumptions based on mythical absence of risk.
So first, share this data with someone else who should see it: a reporter, a police chief or sheriff, a county administrative officer, a city financial manager. Numbers matter when making a case for change, and these numbers represent wrecked lives and families, and traumatized agencies. If that doesn’t provoke a response, then convey this: it’s expensive to replace an officer. Where morals and ethics falter, conscript fiscal restraint to fill the gap.
Next, acknowledge what can be done. Difficult geography can’t be changed, but radio and cell phone coverage can be improved. Distance from trauma care can’t be changed, but closing the time gap by improving backup response and accurately tracking officer location is possible.
No small department has a money tree, but grants exist and can be used for training, ballistic armor and cages in patrol vehicles. Where size and funding pose an absolute impossibility for staffing and training, consider the really tough choices: does your town, your county, need to rework its entire structure? Are your officers’ lives worth considering the need to collaborate, to sacrifice some local control in exchange for realistic resources?
No one likes change. But right now, what is staying the same from year to year is the disproportionate risk rural officers face. As of this writing in 2026, they represent about a third of the officers shot (again) but well over half the fatalities. I track these numbers because I believe these officers matter. It’s time for the concept of officer wellness to include them a little more literally.
NEXT: From underfunded departments to officers working without backup, rural law enforcement faces challenges few outsiders see. In this Policing Matters episode, journalist Kathleen Dias shares firsthand accounts from small-town officers navigating the realities of doing more with less.
