Police registry plan would need state changes
Database idea relies on unified reporting
HOUSTON — Without major changes in almost every state, a national police misconduct database like what the White House and Congress have proposed after George Floyd’s death would fail to account for thousands of problem officers.
Lawmakers nationwide are struggling with how to reform policing following demonstrations, increased calls for change and a shift in public opinion on the topic. Democrats want to create a policing registry that would catalog disciplinary records, firings and misconduct complaints, and President Donald Trump’s executive order calls on the attorney general to create a “database to coordinate the sharing of information” between law enforcement agencies.
Any registry that emerges would depend on states reporting into it. But states and police departments track misconduct differently, and some states don’t track it at all. The result is a lack of reliable official data and a patchwork system in which officers can stay employed even after being arrested or convicted of a crime.
In the wake of Floyd’s death, lawmakers in several states have proposed bolstering their states’ powers to identify and remove problem officers.
“I think the politicians have been reluctant to take a step that might be perceived as anti-police,” Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said.
Yost and Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine, both Republicans, have proposed giving their state’s police licensing agency the power to remove officers from law enforcement for racial profiling or other misconduct that doesn’t lead to a criminal charge, a power many states already have.
“The potential for reform is better than it’s been in my professional lifetime,” Yost said. “That doesn’t mean it’s a certainty on how much we’re going to get, but there’s a genuine interest and willingness to look at these things seriously and honestly.”
One measure of police misconduct at a state level is decertification. Almost all states issue licenses to police officers by mandating standards and training. Most states can decertify an officer’s license to prevent a bad one from working in law enforcement.
The Associated Press this month asked all 50 states to provide the number of officers they decertified for the past five full years. Georgia said it decertified 3,239 officers between 2015 and 2019. Minnesota, where Floyd died after a white police officer pressed a knee on his neck for several minutes, decertified 21. Maryland decertified one officer.
Minnesota revokes an officer’s license automatically only after the officer is convicted of a felony. Georgia can take an officer’s license on several grounds, including misuse of force, committing a theft that isn’t prosecuted or lying in an internal investigation.
The suburban Minneapolis police officer who killed Philando Castile, a Black man, during a 2016 traffic stop was never decertified. The officer, Jeronimo Yanez, was acquitted of second-degree manslaughter and later left his department under a settlement.
He is not working in law enforcement elsewhere in Minnesota, according to the state licensing board.
A federal requirement to collect police misconduct data already exists. According to criminal justice experts, the Justice Department has never met a requirement in the 1994 crime bill — signed by then-president Bill Clinton, a Democrat — that it would “acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers” and publish an annual summary.