In the swipe of a pen, President Trump has shutdown a federal system housing data on police officers. His executive order signed on Jan. 20 appears to be a political move.
The National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD) was launched in 2023 as an electronic archive of professional records of federal law enforcement officers. The purpose of the database was a simple one, allowing potential employers to check a police officer’s background for misconduct. Now the system is offline.
Trump’s decommissioning of the database appears to be due to its connection to President Biden’s regime. The database was part of a package of police reforms signed by Biden on May 25, 2022, the second anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. The Trump administration has criticized many of Biden’s policies over what it calls “unlawful and radical DEI ideology.” And so, the database is gone.
The obvious question is whether this will make it difficult for law enforcement agencies to discover job applicants with problems in their past? The answer is yes, especially if officers are moving between federal agencies. The Biden administration created the database in the hopes it would allow police departments to check the records of former federal officers.
The upside to this dilemma is when local departments hire officers with previous experience, they usually come from state agencies rather than the federal government. There is another system, the National Decertification Index (NDI), which allows departments to check officers’ records in other states.
The NDI has become increasingly popular over the past few years due to the phenomenon of “wandering cops,” essentially officers who commit misconduct at a former job and hide their history when applying for new jobs. This type of anomaly was the reason GroupOne Background Screening was created in 1988. The problem then was “wandering nurses” who were fired at one hospital, oftentimes for drug issues, and hired at a new hospital on the other side of town.
For the NDI, over the past five years the percentage of police departments using the background check system has risen from 23% to 71%, with all 50 U.S. states participating.
We suppose the next question is if Trump could take down the NDI system as well. Thankfully, he cannot. The site is run by IADLEST, a group for state police standards, which is not controlled by the government meaning, it does not receive federal money to operate.
Many of Biden’s policies related to policing won’t necessarily be thrown out because of executive orders. One example is the call for federal agencies to have policies for body-worn cameras. Agencies reportedly will continue to use the present camera policies, despite Trump’s revoking of Biden’s original orders to set them up.
But for all intents and purposes, NLEAD appears to be permanently swiped.