“Concepts.” According to a recent White House statement to The Washington Post, “concepts” are why President Trump shut down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD). The NLEAD is a “centralized repository of official records documenting instances of federal law enforcement officer misconduct as well as commendations and awards.” Trump did not express a disagreement with the mission of the database — in 2020, he first proposed creating the database, which was ultimately created by former president Joe Biden in 2022.
The White House statement also emphasized that Trump does believe in accountability for federal law enforcement officers’ actions. However, the president opposed Biden’s 2022 executive order initiating the NLEAD, stating that the order “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.’”
As such, the shutdown of NLEAD solely due to the executive order’s language marks both the end of a valuable resource and reveals Trump’s unserious approach towards governance.
The NLEAD, which was not publicly accessible, tracked the misconduct of over 136,815 federal law enforcement officers employed by 90 different agencies and contained 4,790 records of federal officers’ misconduct or awards from 2018 to 2023. These federal law enforcement officers included members of the Capitol Police, F.B.I. agents, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Before the NLEAD was created, federal law enforcement agencies faced challenges dealing with “wandering officers,” or officers who were forced out of one federal agency due to misconduct and simply moved to another agency lacking behavior records.
The NLEAD helped address this issue by documenting offenses across agencies so that members of one federal agency could access the records of any prospective hire who had worked for a different agency. Following the demise of the NLEAD, agencies have no access to the misconduct history of federal officers at different agencies. This may lead to a resurgence in the number of “wandering officers” working in federal law enforcement and violating citizens’ civil rights. Officers can now hide misconduct from future hirers to commit egregious crimes.
In addition, the decision to shut down the database, not because of its function but because of the language of its founding order, demonstrates the Trump White House’s priority of ideological purity over governance. The NLEAD served a critical function; it ensured that officers who violated people’s rights were held accountable. Dismantling the database because of wording — without creating a viable alternative — is profoundly illiberal and demonstrates that Trump is more committed to combating Biden’s past policies than to solving the problems that his duty, as president, to address.
