Donald Trump’s second presidential administration shut down a national database that tracked misconduct by federal police, a resource that policing reform advocates hailed as essential to prevent officers with misconduct records from being able to move undetected between agencies.
The National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), which stored police records documenting misconduct, is now unavailable, the Washington Post first reported.
The US justice department also confirmed the database’s elimination in a statement issued online.
“User agencies can no longer query or add data to the NLEAD,” the statement read. “The US Department of Justice is decommissioning the NLEAD in accordance with federal standards.”
A weblink that hosted the database is no longer active.
The police misconduct database, the first of its kind, was not publicly available. Law enforcement agencies could use the NLEAD to check if an officer applying for a law enforcement position had committed misconduct, such as excessive force.
Several experts celebrated the NLEAD when Joe Biden first created it by an executive order issued in 2023, the third year of his presidency.
“Law enforcement agencies will no longer be able to turn a blind eye to the records of misconduct in officer hiring and offending officers will not be able to distance themselves from their misdeeds,” the Legal Defense Fund president and director-counsel, Janai Nelson, said of the database at the time.
But Trump has since rescinded Biden’s executive order as part of an ongoing effort to slash federal agencies down. Trump himself initially proposed the database after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, months before Biden defeated him in the presidential election that November.
In an emailed statement to the Washington Post, the White House confirmed the database’s deletion.
“President Trump believes in an appropriate balance of accountability without compromising law enforcement’s ability to do its job of fighting crime and keeping communities safe,” read the statement. “But the Biden executive order creating this database was full of woke, anti-police concepts that make communities less safe like a call for ‘equitable’ policing and addressing ‘systemic racism in our criminal justice system.’ President Trump rescinded the order creating this database on Day 1 because he is committed to giving our brave men and women of law enforcement the tools they need to stop crime.”
News of the NLEAD’s erasure comes as police misconduct is far from rooted out in American law enforcement. For instance, in Hanceville, Alabama, an entire department was recently put on leave amid a grand jury investigation that found a “rampant culture of corruption”.
The 18-person grand jury called for the Hanceville police department, which only has eight officers, to be abolished.
A probe into that police department came amid the death of 49-year-old Christopher Michael Willingham, a Hanceville dispatcher. Willingham was discovered dead at work from a toxic combination of drugs.
The department also “failed to account for, preserve and maintain evidence and in doing so has failed crime victims and the public at large”, the grand jury ruled.
