Law enforcement officers (LEOs) face multiple occupational stressors ranging from traumatic events to long or irregular work hours. These and other hazards encountered in the profession can negatively affect health. However, little is known about the specific levels of all-cause and cause-specific mortality risk among LEOs in the United States.
Researchers with the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center (ALERRT) at Texas State University set out to examine the leading causes of death among this specific group of first responders. The findings, “Mortality among law enforcement officers in the United States: a population-wide analysis of the National Occupational Mortality Surveillance data, 2020–2023,” are published in the journal “The Lancet Regional Health – Americas.”
Previous studies suggest that LEOs experience higher mortality from heart disease, cancer, suicide and other causes. Yet most prior research was limited by one or more factors: restricted geographic coverage (such as data from individual departments or states), a narrow focus on specific causes of death or statistics that did not provide both absolute and relative mortality risk. These gaps leave an incomplete picture of the overall mortality burden among LEOs in the United States.
