Justice Department creates database to track records of misconduct by federal law enforcement
The U.S. Department of Justice has created a database to track federal law enforcement misconduct, aiming to prevent agencies from unknowingly hiring problem officers, officials said Monday.
The federal move is a step toward accountability amid growing calls to close loopholes that allow law enforcement officers to be rehired by other agencies after losing their jobs or resigning following allegations of misconduct. The creation of the database was part of President Joe Biden's May 2022 executive order on policing, which included dozens of measures to increase the accountability of federal law enforcement officers.
“This database will ensure that data on serious misconduct by federal law enforcement officers is readily available to agencies considering hiring these officers,” Biden said in a statement.
But the database, which will only contain data for federal officers and will not be accessible to the public, falls short of the national misconduct database that some police reform advocates are calling for.
The National Law Enforcement Accountability Database currently only includes former and current Department of Justice officials who have records of serious misconduct over the past seven years. It will be expanded over the next two months to accommodate other federal law enforcement agencies such as the Secret Service and the United States Park Police, a Justice Department official said.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said it will give federal agencies “an important new tool for vetting and hiring officers and agents that will help strengthen our efforts” to build and maintain public trust.
“No law enforcement agency – including the Department of Justice – can do its job effectively without the public's trust,” Garland said in an emailed statement.
Federal agencies will be responsible for reporting and updating records of officers who faced criminal convictions, civil adjudications, dismissals, suspensions, dismissals or retirements while under investigation and ongoing complaints or disciplinary actions for serious misconduct, officials said . Serious misconduct includes excessive force, obstruction of justice, findings of bias or discrimination, filing a false report, making a false statement under oath, theft and sexual misconduct.
The database is currently accessible only to Justice Department employees and will eventually be expanded to allow access by users from other federal law enforcement agencies, as well as state and local law enforcement agencies, a Justice Department official said. The Bureau of Justice Statistics will produce an annual public report on the database, but the report will not include data on individual incidents and will be anonymized to protect officers' privacy, officials said.
The majority of police interactions occur at the state and local level, but policing is decentralized, with states and departments largely responsible for setting training standards and disciplinary decisions.
Several state legislatures in recent years have established statewide databases to track disciplinary misconduct and officer certification, which happens when a state licensing board revokes the certification or license required to be a law enforcement officer in that state. But few of those state databases are open to the public, and few are shared between states.
The International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training has also created a national officer decertification repository, which has more than 53,000 records from 49 government agencies. However, the provision of the data and its use is voluntary and the database does not contain other disciplinary measures such as dismissal or suspensions.
The federal government is trying to encourage more states and local agencies to participate in the National Decertification Index by giving priority in giving out grants to law enforcement agencies that use that database as part of their employment investigations, officials said.
Reform advocates have called for a national system to track officer misconduct, in part to address officers who are fired or resign and then jump to other police departments, sometimes in different states, often because there is no full accounting of alleged misconduct is available.
There have been a handful of recent examples of officers who were fired for high-profile police misconduct in local departments, including fatal shootings, and then hired by police departments in different states or, in some cases, in the same state.
Myles Cosgrove, the former Louisville Metro Police Department officer who was fired in January 2021 for violating use-of-force procedures and failing to use a body camera during the fatal raid on Breonna Taylor's apartment, was fired earlier this year hired by the Carroll County Sheriff. Department in Kentucky.
In 2022, Timothy Loehmann, the former Cleveland police officer who was fired after the fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014, was hired by a small town in Pennsylvania as its only police officer. He resigned amid public outcry.
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Richer reported from Boston, Lauer from Philadelphia.