Dropping Police Misconduct Database
Terry H. Schwadron
Feb. 22, 2025
Among Donald Trump’s many, continuing executive orders this week was one to wipe out the first nationwide database tracking misconduct by federal police officers.
Obviously, this is not meant to save money to pay down the ballooning national debt, nor is it a direct part of the Trump retribution campaign, but as The Washington Post and Axios, the move seems a simultaneous slap to Black Lives Matter, Joe Biden, and the idea of public accountability altogether.
The kicker is this: Systematic collection of date for the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database was first proposed by Trump in 2020 after the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. It wasn’t implemented until Biden did so two years later by his own executive order.
So, in the spirit that all things not done by Trump must be bad, the database is being tossed.
Doing so will make it easier for one police department’s problem officers to move to another department without accountability. The move also downplays police brutality as an issue, and it takes effect as the Trump Justice Department says it is walking away from seeking police department investigations and consent degrees for better policing practices.
The Rationale
Though the White House and the Justice Department declined to explain why they had “decommissioned” the database, what the administration has said it that Trump needed to revoke Biden polices to reduce the size and cost of the federal government. And it needs to erase diversity, equity and inclusion policies in the broadest context.
Biden’s policing order 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. Or as Trump said in issuing this order, they had “embedded deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices within every agency and office of the Federal Government.”
On some level, Trump’s revocation orders fulfill a campaign promise to reverse police reforms that came out of the 2020 protests following the Floyd murder, protests that spawned backlash from the political Right.
Biden’s Executive Order 14074 established the national database to help police departments know of any official past misconduct by an applicant. It required all federal law enforcement agencies to participate and use the database to screen personnel. And it banned the use of chokeholds and carotid restraints “unless deadly force is authorized” and restricted the use of no-knock entries.
The Biden order also mandated body-worn camera policies and the expedited public release of footage in cases of serious bodily injury or deaths in custody for all federal agencies. It restricted the transfer or federal purchases of military equipment “that belongs on a battlefield, not on our streets.” And it tracked use-of-force incidents.
Does that sound “deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical”?
Trump, Police and Crime
So in reversing these orders, Trump seems to have eased the notion that one department can dismiss an officer over misconduct, without another agency knowing about it. All 90 executive branch agencies with law enforcement officers had provided thousands of disciplinary records dating to 2017, a report issued by the Justice Department in December said.
Unless he is discussing pardons for Jan. 6 rioters, Trump is a big talker about local crime, which he often mischaracterizes to advance his beliefs that undocumented migrants are disproportionately responsible. He talks about crime along with race, and makes it sound as if Black Lives Matter protests are organized looting campaigns.
Just this week, Trump expanded the Jan. 6 pardons to include unrelated gun and drug-related charges for those convicted of crimes, including violence against Capitol police officer.
The National Association of Police Organizations, a coalition of police unions and associations had challenged entering the names of 150,000 officers into a database because those law enforcement personnel were not given a chance to dispute the information before it was entered. So, presumably that group is glad to see the database go.
Advocates for public safety see this as a loss for policing accountability. With Trump’s mass deportation plans getting underway, for example, the potential of misconduct among those directly participating from multiple agencies — or from those who are ready to be deputized, like state troopers in Texas — are growing.
The Post noted that the “wandering officer” phenomenon has been widely studied over the years. One study from Yale Law School found that 3 percent of active officers in Florida had been previously fired by another agency in Florida. Deletion of the federal database does not affect the National Decertification Index, a national registry of state and local police officers who have lost their certification because of misconduct.
After the database went live in December 2023, usage rose steadily. records show. More than 4,000 officers in the database had 4,800 reports of misconduct, though only a small number were seen as matching with applicants for jobs with other agencies.
These numbers, of course, will be dwarfed by the dismissals and demotions that newly installed FBI director Kash Patel will order in his agency, and by the expanding efforts by Homeland Security to redeploy federal law enforcement to round up migrants for the civil violation of having crossed the border without documents. Our talk about crime is not aligning with our actions.
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