US Justice Department cuts database tracking federal police misconduct

By Kanishka Singh

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department has removed a database tracking misconduct by federal law enforcement, a list proposed by Republican President Donald Trump during his first term and formally created by Democratic former President Joe Biden.

The website of the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database appeared to have been taken down as of Thursday. The removal was reported first by the Washington Post.

The Justice Department website says the database is no longer active and was being decommissioned after Trump revoked Biden's executive order that had created it.

As of September 2024, there were 4,790 records of federal officer misconduct between 2018 and 2023 in the database, according to a report released last year.

Trump himself had proposed creating a database on "instances of excessive use of force related to law enforcement matters" in June 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man who died when a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck.

Trump in January, shortly after being sworn in to his second term in the White House, pardoned two police officers in Washington who were convicted in the 2020 murder of a 20-year-old Black man named Karon Hylton-Brown.

The deletion of the federal database does not impact the National Decertification Index, a national registry of state and local police officers who have lost their certification or licensing because of misconduct, the Washington Post reported.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; editing by Michelle Nichols and Leslie Adler)

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