The Department of Justice has eliminated its national database that tracked misconduct incidents among federal law enforcement officers.
“Agencies can no longer query or add data” to the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, the Justice Department posted in an online statement, confirming that it is being decommissioned as a result of an order signed by President Trump on his first day in office that rescinded 78 Biden-era executive actions.
The website where the database existed is now a dead link.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to CBS News’ request for comment.
The police misconduct database was operational for a little over a year, having launched in December 2023. It was not public. Instead, law enforcement agencies could privately search for information on whether a new hire or officer within their ranks had a documented history of abuse, or of violating department policies or law, for example racial bias or excessive use of force.
It was conceived in an attempt to reduce the problem of so-called “wandering officers” — instances where police who were forced out of their jobs because of substantiated misconduct simply found new jobs at different agencies that would otherwise have no way of knowing their history and the potential risk of arming them with a badge and gun.
The idea of a federal police misconduct database was proposed by the first Trump administration in an executive order called Safe Policing for Safe Communities (EO 12939) on June 16, 2020.
However, efforts to establish one did not begin until executive order 14074, signed on May 25, 2022, by then-President Joe Biden marking two years since George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer. The Biden order was among those rescinded by Mr. Trump on Jan. 20.
“It’s a reckless and harmful decision and a major step backward for transparency and public safety,” said Chiraag Bains, non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who led the development of Biden’s executive order establishing the database in his role as deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council,where he served until 2023. “Why would you shut this down? This helps no one except bad actors who had no business wearing the badge.”
All 90 executive agencies with law enforcement officers were required to report misconduct incidents related to their nearly 150,000 federal police nationwide. During its brief time in operation, an additional four departments also voluntarily submitted officer records.
The president only has the authority to require federal agencies to participate; however, the NLEAD was designed with the potential to incorporate state, local and tribal police departments as well, offering them a series of grants as incentives to opt in.
According to Bains, the Biden administration built the database in direct consultation with policing agencies, civil rights groups, and academics, and specifically included due process protections for individual officers, giving them the ability to challenge the inclusion of any potential mistaken information.
“This really makes cops’ jobs harder,” Bains said of the shutdown. The International Association of Chiefs of Police appeared to agree.
“Our members saw real value in the NLEAD database which is why we worked with both the Trump and Biden Administrations on conceptualizing and bringing the database to life,” IACP President Ken Walker told CBS News in a statement. “When hiring a law enforcement officer, leaders want to have as much information and context about candidates as possible while ensuring that each candidate’s due process rights are respected.”
In 2020, a team of researchers from Duke University and Chicago Law School studied data on all 98,000 law enforcement officers at nearly 500 police agencies in the state of Florida and found that officers with a history of substantiated misconduct were “more likely than both officers hired as rookies and those hired as veterans who have never been fired to be fired from their next job or to receive a complaint for a ‘moral character violation.'”
In its first annual report published last December, the Bureau of Justice Statistics through the NLEAD database identified 4,790 misconduct incidents between 2018 and 2023. Among those, nearly 1,500 federal officers were either suspended, fired or resigned “while under investigation for serious misconduct,” and more than 300 officers were convicted of crimes.
