Eighty-six American law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty in 2015, a Federal Bureau of Investigation report released Tuesday said.
About half of the deaths occurred in accidents. But 41 were felonious acts, the vast majority committed with firearms — down from 51 in 2014.
Of the 41 who died in 2015, eight were investigating suspicious persons or circumstances, seven were involved in tactical situations and six were conducting traffic stops.
More than 50,000 police officers were assaulted that year, though less than 30 percent of them were injured in the assaults. Most of the assaults were committed with "personal weapons," the FBI said.
Police officers are under increased scrutiny in the U.S. because of allegations of brutality, many of them involving the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of law enforcement.
Last month, protests erupted in Charlotte, North Carolina, following the fatal shooting of Keith Lamont Scott by police officers, whose department then was slow to release body and dash camera footage to the public.
Though the 2014 and 2015 police death tolls were significantly higher than the figure from 2013, when just 27 officers were killed in felonious acts, they did not differ much from statistics over the past decade. The figure from 2013 was the lowest since the 1980s.
