The Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report on the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), which includes 4,790 records of misconduct for 4,011 federal officers within 94 federal agencies, covering the years from 2018 to 2023.
Yet NLEAD only covers federal officers – and only federal law-enforcement agencies can search it. After the 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of officers, the House passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act to create a full national database -- the National Police Misconduct Registry -- of complaints lodged against officers at all levels of government. But the legislation failed in the Senate.
So in May 2022, President Joe Biden created the NLEAD by executive order. NLEAD encompasses 148,000 federal-law enforcement officers, 84% of which work either in the Department of Homeland Security (65,150) or the Department of Justice (59, 570). Those two departments also make up the overwhelming majority, 88%, of NLEAD incidents, which include criminal convictions and actions related to misconduct including suspensions, terminations, resignation while under investigation, and sustained complaints or records of disciplinary action based on serious misconduct.
Once a record is more than seven years old, it is removed from the database. Records from 2017 have begun to drop out of the system.
NLEAD was developed to inform hiring, job assignments and promotion decisions within law enforcement. Policing watchdogs had long called for a national system to track officer misconduct, since officers involved in wrongdoing sometimes jump to other police departments, even after high-profile misconduct. For instance, the officers who shot Tamir Rice and Sonya Massey both had checkered histories but ended up landing new jobs, because their records were not made clear to their new employers. A 2020 Duke University analysis of Florida law enforcement called “The Wandering Officer,” found that officers fired for misconduct were more likely to be terminated or receive complaints in subsequent positions.
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