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Justice Department deletes database tracking federal police misconduct
Trump executive order ends National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which he proposed creating in 2020.[This eliminates] a resource that experts said improved public safety by helping to prevent bad officers from jumping to new agencies and starting over with clean records.
The “wandering officer” phenomenon has been widely studied over the years. One study from Yale Law School found that 3 percent of active officers in Florida had been previously fired by another agency in Florida.
The database was first proposed by Trump in 2020 in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. But it wasn’t created until two years later when an executive order from President Joe Biden launched the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database. Trump issued an order last month revoking Biden’s orders, and the database.
The national database encompassed nearly 150,000 federal officers and agents, from the FBI and IRS down to the Railroad Retirement Board. And though it launched only in December 2023, by the end of last year all 90 executive branch agencies with law enforcement officers had provided thousands of disciplinary records dating to 2017, a reportissued by the Justice Department in December said.
“Everyone, cops and communities alike, has an interest in keeping officers with histories of serious misconduct from rejoining the profession,” said Thomas Abt, director of the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland. “Nonpartisan public safety reforms like these should be placed above politics and maintained across administrations.”
