The national database that monitored officer conduct, which was established in 2022 by the Biden Administration to prevent police officers with disciplinary records from being rehired into other agencies without oversight, has been shut down. The National Law Enforcement Accountability Database NLEAD, which collected information on about 150,000 officers, had been proposed by Trump himself in 2020 but never implemented until Biden’s executive order. The current shutdown is part of Trump’s intended strategy of shrinking the federal government. Police reform experts have criticized the decision, warning that it could facilitate the reinstatement of officers with disciplinary records.
Trump himself had proposed creating the database collecting information on “excessive use of force cases related to law enforcement issues” after the murder of African American George Floyd, who died in 2020 when a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, killing him. Floyd’s death, seen as a serious incident of racism and abuse of power, drew attention globally and pressure from the Black Lives Matter movement, triggering a series of demonstrations around the world calling for justice and reforms regarding the way law enforcement operates.
Last January, shortly after he officially took office for his second term in the White House, Donald Trump pardoned two D.C. police officers convicted of the 2020 murder of a 20-year-old black man named Karon Hylton-Brown in an unauthorized police car chase that ended in a fatal collision for the 20-year-old.
According to a U.S. Department of Justice report released in 2024, as of September, 4,790 misconduct reports had already been collected that included federal officers between 2018 and 2023.
As noted in the report, disciplinary practices applied to law enforcement when necessary are intended to improve public trust and public safety. The U.S. Attorney General was charged with establishing the National Law Enforcement Database named by the acronym NLEAD to document instances of federal law enforcement misconduct and produce an annual report for that very reason.
Currently, as the Washington Post reports, the deletion of the federal database has no impact on the National Decertification Index, a national registry of state and local police officers who have already lost their certification or license due to misconduct.
