The Department of Justice has discontinued its national database aimed at tracking misconduct incidents involving federal law enforcement officers.
“Agencies can no longer query or submit data” to the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, the Justice Department announced in an online statement, confirming the decommissioning as a consequence of an order signed by President Trump on his first day in office, which revoked 78 executive actions from the Biden administration.
The website housing the database is now a broken link.
The Justice Department did not immediately reply to CBS News’ request for comment.
The police misconduct database was active for just over a year, having been launched in December 2023. It was not accessible to the public; rather, law enforcement agencies could privately investigate whether a new recruit or existing officer had a documented history of misconduct or violations of departmental policies, such as racial bias or excessive force.
This initiative was developed to tackle the issue of “wandering officers”—cases where police officers who were removed from their positions due to verified misconduct managed to find employment at other agencies that would otherwise lack knowledge of their troubling history and the risks of granting them authority.
The federal police misconduct database concept was initially introduced by the first Trump administration through an executive order titled Safe Policing for Safe Communities (EO 12939) on June 16, 2020.
However, substantive efforts to create one did not commence until executive order 14074 was signed on May 25, 2022, by former President Joe Biden, coinciding with the two-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. This Biden order was among those reversed by Trump on January 20.
“This is a reckless and detrimental decision, representing a significant regression for transparency and public safety,” stated Chiraag Bains, non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who was instrumental in developing Biden’s executive order to establish the database during his tenure as deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council until 2023. “Why would you shut this down? It benefits no one except those bad actors who shouldn’t have worn the badge.”
All 90 executive agencies with law enforcement officers were mandated to report misconduct events related to nearly 150,000 federal police nationwide. During its short span of operation, an additional four departments voluntarily submitted officer records.
While the president can only compel federal agencies to comply, the NLEAD was designed with the potential to involve state, local, and tribal police departments as well, offering various grants as incentives for participation.
Bains noted that the Biden administration developed the database in direct consultation with policing bodies, civil rights organizations, and academic experts, ensuring due process protections for officers, allowing them to contest any potentially inaccurate information.
“This truly complicates the work of police officers,” Bains remarked concerning the shutdown, a sentiment echoed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
“Our members recognized the genuine value in the NLEAD database, which is why we collaborated with both the Trump and Biden administrations during its conceptualization and implementation,” IACP President Ken Walker explained to CBS News. “When selecting a law enforcement officer, leaders want as much information and context about candidates as possible while also safeguarding each candidate’s due process rights.”
A 2020 study by researchers from Duke University and Chicago Law School analyzed data on the 98,000 law enforcement officers at nearly 500 police agencies in Florida, revealing that officers with substantiated misconduct histories were “more likely than both rookie officers and veteran officers without prior termination to be dismissed from their next job or to face a complaint for a ‘moral character violation.’
In its initial annual report published last December, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, utilizing data from the NLEAD database, recorded 4,790 incidents of misconduct between 2018 and 2023. Among these incidents, close to 1,500 federal officers were either suspended, fired, or resigned “while under investigation for serious misconduct,” and over 300 officers faced criminal convictions.
