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HARRISBURG — Five years ago, the murder of George Floyd kicked off a national reckoning over racism and policing. In Pennsylvania, the movement’s legacy is a statewide database aimed at tracking officer misconduct.
At the time, it was held up as a national model for accountability.
But today, even one-time champions say the database is riddled with loopholes and no longer a priority in Harrisburg.
“The database still has value,” said state Rep. Chris Rabb (D., Philadelphia), who wrote the original bill that became the database. “But it’s nowhere near as effective as it could be, and I’m not clear that there’s enough political will to make that happen.”
The 2020 statute requires law enforcement agencies to upload any “final and binding” disciplinary actions in an officer’s record to the database when that officer leaves their employment. An officer accepting formal punishment or going through an adjudication process for an infraction would meet those criteria.
Infractions that can land an officer in the database are use of excessive force, harassment, theft, discrimination, sexual abuse or misconduct, domestic violence, coercion of a false confession, filing a false report or a judicial finding of dishonesty. Criminal convictions for any of those infractions are also listed.
Departments are required to consult the database before hiring any new officer. If they want to hire an officer who has a disciplinary record, they must file a report explaining why.
However, as Spotlight PA has previously reported, the law likely doesn’t fully capture how many officers commit misconduct but are still hired at other police departments.
Law enforcement agencies don’t have to upload disciplinary actions that don’t result in final or binding disciplinary action, meaning there could be serious complaints against an officer that go unreported. They also didn’t have to upload records of any officers who left their employment before the law took effect in 2021.
And while the law requires departments to use the database, there is also no penalty if they don’t.
These agencies also aren’t required to give a detailed rationale for hiring a person with a disciplinary record. Many don’t, according to a review of more than a dozen reports filed to the database between May 2022 and July 2024 that were obtained via a public information request.
In one case, an officer in a probationary hiring period was terminated from the Allentown Police Department for excessive force after using a banned “pressure point” during a struggle. The hiring officer at the Colwyn Borough Police Department in Delaware County wrote little about the violation itself, but said he had been advised the officer was a “solid young man who loves the job and is excited to be given another opportunity.” He also noted the officer would get extra training.
Others have even less detail about key incidents, as in the case of a former State Police trooper terminated for sexual misconduct. Her hiring report from the Borough of Hellertown Police Department in Northampton County said only that the officer’s explanation of the incident “has not [sic] waivered” and that the hiring officers felt “the allegations do not rise to the level of Sexual Misconduct.”
A number of the reports concern new officers who were in probationary periods when they were fired or reprimanded, and several note that the officer would not have been disciplined in the same way if they weren’t probationary.
Others stress that hiring qualified police officers is difficult. One document, concerning a probationary officer who was put on leave after being accused of filing a false report, notes that the officer “is the only current application for employment I have.”
When Spotlight PA reported on the database two years ago, it found that more than 1,100 agencies were enrolled to use it. Due to conflicting state and federal data, reporters were unable to confirm how many law enforcement agencies exist in Pennsylvania.
A spokesperson for Pennsylvania State Police did not return a request for comment about how many agencies are enrolled in the database now, or whether the department tracks agencies that have not enrolled.
Some information is available through the state’s Right-to-Know Law, such as the reports justifying the hiring of previously disciplined officers that Spotlight PA obtained, the number of participating departments and the number of inquiries from departments making hires.
But other key information isn’t available to the public or to public officials who want to know about their police departments’ hiring practices.
The Pennsylvania chapter of the ACLU, which supported the creation of the database, has since joined Rabb in flagging these weak spots as needing improvement.
Legislative Director Elizabeth Randol said when the bill first passed in the summer of 2020, it hadn’t been high up on the list of changes her organization thought were needed, like clarifying the commonwealth’s use-of-force law for officers.
Randol said she considered tracking police misconduct between departments to be a “no-brainer” in terms of best practices for hiring officers.
“It does sort of say something that the one thing that did emerge from [that period of action] was something that’s kind of intuitive,” she said. “I’m not shocked that it had loopholes, but perhaps more dismayed that this was the only thing that came of it, and the only thing that came of it was terribly imperfect.”
‘The political realities’
The political environment in which the database bill initially got moving was radically different from the one the state House operates in today.
At the time, Democrats were in the minority in both chambers of the Pennsylvania legislature. In the years before Floyd was murdered, the party pitched various policing reforms, but they never got much traction.
After Floyd’s murder, as protests broke out across the country, including in Pennsylvania, Democrats seized the moment.
Members took control of the state House rostrum during session and unfurled a Black Lives Matter banner, then called for a broad slate of changes.
These included banning police from using chokeholds, appointing a special prosecutor to oversee cases in which police used deadly force, making police body cameras more broadly accessible to the public and putting limits on the arbitration process that allows police and fire unions to bargain to save their members’ jobs.
Republican leaders in both chambers cooperated — to a point. Two bills emerged and passed into law. One was a requirement that officers get PTSD screening and a new slate of trainings, including on appropriate use of force on suspects. The other was the database.
That latter, much more sweeping bill had been Rabb’s initiative originally, though it ended up being sponsored by another member. As he told Spotlight PA several years ago, it changed significantly during those negotiations with Republicans. Limiting required reporting to only “final and binding” discipline “radically diluted” his original legislation, he said.
“Most transgressions do not get resolved, and so they are very rarely final and binding,” Rabb said in 2022, two years into use of the database.
At the time, Josh Shapiro, who was then serving as attorney general and running for governor, defended that particular limitation of the law. His office had been closely involved in putting together a coalition of law enforcement officials and stakeholders to back a version of Rabb’s bill.
Speaking in 2022, Shapiro said Rabb’s original language, which would have required a broader range of complaints against officers to be recorded in the database, would have been unfair because some might have been unfounded.
“I think everybody was very sensitive to making sure that you couldn’t just have somebody random file a complaint, get it in the database, and then a month later, it gets resolved, but it’s still in the database,” he told Spotlight PA.
In the years since, lawmakers have become even less focused on legislating changes to policing.
Randol of the ACLU said she sees a few reasons for this.
For one, there hasn’t been another incident of police violence that has captured public attention in the same way Floyd’s murder did. Additionally, there was significant backlash against the “defund the police” movement that sprang up in the summer of 2020, which she said has likely “caused a bit more reluctance to kind of address some of those issues head-on.”
And finally, she said, state House Democrats who championed police accountability in 2020 now hold a narrow one-vote majority in their chamber, and leaders are laser-focused on keeping their members unified. That means carefully balancing the priorities of progressives, like Rabb, and members who hold key seats in conservative areas.
“It’s hard to be in the majority,” Randol said. “You have to negotiate. And it’s not just necessarily internally in order to get stuff passed on the floor of the House. At some point, you’re gonna have to negotiate with the [Republican] majority in the Senate. Some of that is kind of a rude awakening.”
Last legislative session, Rabb sponsored a bill to fill in many of these gaps he and others identified in the database.
Among other things, the bill would have required departments to report disciplinary action that wasn’t final and binding, cut state funding for police departments that don’t use the database in a timely manner and mandated more public reporting of the database’s findings.
It passed the state House Judiciary Committee, but never moved any further.
Spokespeople for state House and Senate leaders — Democrats and Republicans, respectively — did not return requests for comment about whether they would support updates to the database law.
Rabb hasn’t tried again. He now thinks his best bet for making the database more effective lies outside of the legislative process.
He said Shapiro could expand the authority of the Citizen Law Enforcement Advisory and Review (CLEAR) Commission, which the governor created via executive order to conduct internal investigations and keep law enforcement agencies accountable.
“In light of the political realities and the one-vote majority in the House, another viable way of leveraging Act 57 would be to expand the authority of the CLEAR Commission to have the ability to request data that is not publicly available, to provide the type of accountability that was stripped from the original bill,” Rabb said.
A spokesperson for Shapiro did not return a request for comment about whether he could or would expand the CLEAR Commission’s authority, or if he would support updates to the database now.
Spotlight PA’s Danielle Ohl contributed reporting.
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