The first national database tracking misconduct by federal police officers has been shut down by President Trump, deleting 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 database was proposed by Trump in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd. It wasn’t created until two years later when an executive order from President Biden launched the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database. The database encompassed nearly 150,000 federal officers and agents, from the FBI and IRS down to the Railroad Retirement Board. After it launched 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, the Washington Post reports.
Trump’s revocation of Biden’s executive orders was part of an effort to reduce the size of the federal government. The policing order revoked by Trump laid out steps to improve use-of-force standards and research, ensured appropriate use of body cameras, and required anti-bias training, in addition to creating a misconduct database. One police group had objected that officers weren’t given a chance to challenge the information about them before it was entered into the database, and said that only serious misconduct should be entered. Police reformers were disappointed by the shutdown. “Everyone, cops and communities alike, has an interest in keeping officers with histories of serious misconduct from rejoining the profession,” said Thomas Abt 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.” Lauren Bonds of the National Police Accountability Project, said, “Trump has made clear ... that he doesn’t think law enforcement accountability advances public safety.”