Editorial: Lawmakers should put teeth in police database law

In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer in Minneapolis ignited protests around the country, the state of Pennsylvania passed a law creating a database of law enforcement personnel records.

The purpose was to prevent the shuffling of an officer with disciplinary problems from one department to another. It was meant to stop the spread of problems and the turning of blind eyes.

But is that how it’s working? Is it, in fact, working at all? A Spotlight PA investigation has identified issues.

As many cops could probably confirm, the problem with some laws is a lack of teeth. Without the bite of a ticket or an arrest, there is no reason to worry about laws governing speeding or stealing. Without impact, a law can seem more of a recommendation and less of a requirement.

And apparently, that is how some law enforcement agencies are taking the demand to populate the database.

During the negotiation to pass the bill, which had bipartisan support, the requirements for when exactly a report had to be made to the database were whittled. One would assume that if an incident occurred, a report should be made.

That’s not how it works. If an officer leaves an agency, that’s when reports have to be made. If the officer keeps his job, no disciplinary records have to be reported.

In the two years since the legislation was passed, only three reports have been made.

What makes this questionable is that law enforcement is one of the areas of public service experiencing a great deal of mobility at the moment, particularly with officers moving from one agency to another amid shortages. Pittsburgh is losing its police chief to the FBI in West Virginia. In 2021, he told WESA that a considerable number of the 93 people he had lost over 18 months was because of officers taking other law enforcement jobs.

So how could there be only three reports when just one department had so much turnover? In May, a national database was created by presidential executive order and since then, 61% of the 1,100 agencies who have signed up have contributed records.

When hammering out the law, Pennsylvania lawmakers and law enforcement agreed including every complaint was impractical. The database was not meant to be like Yelp with every bad review cataloged. It was intended for discipline based on founded incidents.

So are those three reports a good thing? Do they mean that only three officers in the state have been disciplined for verified incidents? Maybe — which could be good or bad.

Maybe it means that there are reports out there that could be made and haven’t been uploaded. It’s hard to tell because the database is not exactly like the Megan’s Law registry where people can just look up problems themselves. It is confidential information used for hiring agencies.

But either way, lawmakers should probably revisit the issue of putting some teeth in the law to encourage up-to-date and thorough participation.