In one of his first acts after returning to the White House, President Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to delete a nationwide database tracking misconduct by federal law enforcement.
Along with rescinding former President Joe Biden’s executive orders on policing, Trump scrapped the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), which logged more than 5,200 incidents of misconduct by federal officers and agents across various agencies.
In a written statement to The Washington Post, the White House said Biden’s executive order creating the NLEAD database “was full of woke, anti-police concepts that make communities less safe like a call for ‘equitable’ policing and addressing ‘systemic racism in our criminal justice system.’ President Trump rescinded the order creating this database on Day 1 because he is committed to giving our brave men and women of law enforcement the tools they need to stop crime.”
It is unclear what tool Trump is giving to law enforcement by deleting a nonpublic misconduct database—besides protection from future background checks.
Centralized databases of police misconduct are important because, traditionally, poor information sharing between departments and lax background checks have allowed problem officers to hop from one department to another, leaving a string of misconduct, rights violations, and expensive lawsuits.
Once upon a time, even Trump thought the database was a good idea. In 2020, the Trump White House issued an executive order directing the attorney general to “create a database to coordinate the sharing of information between and among Federal, State, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement agencies concerning instances of excessive use of force related to law enforcement matters, accounting for applicable privacy and due process rights.”
Biden’s NLEAD was actually less ambitious than Trump’s plan: It included only federal law enforcement, and access was limited to federal agencies. Still, federal law enforcement unions objected, complaining that the database included minor administrative infractions and didn’t give officers due process channels to dispute their inclusion.
The Appeal, a nonprofit publication covering criminal justice issues, obtained a copy of the now-deleted database through a Freedom of Information Act request and reported that the vast majority of federal law enforcement agents in the database were Bureau of Prisons (BOP) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees.
“BOP and CBP employees comprised more than 70 percent of the more than 5,200 misconduct instances recorded in NLEAD between 2017 and 2024,” The Appeal reported. “BOP officers accounted for more than 2,600 incidents—over half of all entries.”
By deleting NLEAD, Trump isn’t protecting beat cops from woke witch hunts—he’s covering for two of the most sprawling, unaccountable, and expensive law enforcement agencies in the federal government.
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