New US background database unlikely to stop police misconduct, critics warn
A new US justice department database intended to track the backgrounds of officers working for federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI and ATF is unlikely to solve the problem of police with checkered pasts moving between departments, defense attorneys and reform advocates warn.
Announced in December, the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD) will compile reports of misconduct by federal law enforcement officers, after legislation to create a national catalog of complaints against police at all levels of government was blocked in Congress.
But information about the approximately 136,000 officers working under various federal departments – including well-known agencies such as the Secret Service and Drug Enforcement Administration and more obscure branches such as the US Mint Police – will not be available to the public, nor to the leadership of state and local police agencies.
“This is available for federal agencies, for particular people in some federal agencies that are doing hiring. So, what does that mean if you were the sheriff or the police chief in X city or town? Would not there be the same interest in knowing that this officer you’re about to hire has a deeply problematic history?” said Jumana Musa, director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’s Fourth Amendment Center.
The more than 17,500 state and local police agencies in the United States employ about 788,000 officers, but no comprehensive database exists of their employment records, despite concerns over “wandering officers”, or police who bounce from department to department after resigning or being terminated due to misconduct.
A 2020 study from the Duke University School of Law and University of Chicago Law School found that police in Florida who were previously fired from their jobs are more likely to be terminated or receive complaints over their “moral character” in the future. Officers with poor disciplinary records have been involved in high-profile killings, such as the 2014 shooting of 12year-old Tamir Rice.
During his brief time on a small Ohio force, Timothy Loehmann, who killed Rice after joining Cleveland’s police department, was judged by his superiors as unfit for the job. Years after the shooting, Loehmann was briefly hired to serve as a small Pennsylvania town’s sole officer, before quitting amid a public outcry.
Although they interact with the public less often than state and local police, federal law enforcement officers have also been involved in controversial shootings. As a sheriff’s deputy in a California county, Justin Tackett had been suspended four times and resigned before he could be fired. He later joined the US Border Patrol, where in 2012 he shot and killed Valeria Munique Tachiquin Alvarado, 32, as she was trying to drive away from him in a San Diego suburb, according to court records.
The NLEAD’s creation comes as the result of an executive order Biden signed in 2022, after Republicans in Congress blocked passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a reform bill that, among its provisions, would have created a national database of misconduct by officers at all levels.
“As part of my administration’s executive order on policing, we committed to create a first of its kind database to track records of law enforcement misconduct so that agencies are able to hire the best personnel,” Biden said in December, when the federal database was announced.
“This database will ensure that records of serious misconduct by federal law enforcement officers are readily available to agencies considering hiring those officers. We are also working to allow and encourage state, Tribal, local, and territorial law enforcement agencies to make available and access similar records as part of their hiring processes.”
Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, a group of attorneys that focuses on police and jail misconduct, said it’s less common for federal law enforcement officers to hop between jobs than for police elsewhere. However, the NLEAD could serve as a model for states to set up similar systems, which the Biden administration appears to want to encourage.
As it announced the database, the justice department also said it will begin awarding grants to state and local agencies that use the National Decertification Index in their hiring process, which is a separate database of officers who have their certifications revoked or suspended.
“It could be a useful model for states to use, where I think that is a more common issue or problem,” Bonds said.
While the justice department has promised an annual report into its use,
Bree Spencer, senior director of the justice program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, worried that without public access, it will be hard to tell how effective the database is.
“There won’t be a way, for example, for civil rights organizations to tell whether or not it’s actually being utilized, or if it’s being utilized correctly, if it’s being utilized all the time,” she said. “It’s not everything, it’s also not nothing. It is a step in the right direction.”
Because it was created by an executive order rather than enacted into law by Congress, Musa warned the NLEAD could be shut down under a future administration.
“The simple fact of an executive order, only lasts as long as the executive wants it to. And if the executive changes, that order can go away,” Musa said. “It’s just another piece of how … fleeting this kind of so-called reform is.”