In a wave of criminal justice reforms passed after George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis, Alabama lawmakers created a secret statewide database to track misconduct and complaints against police officers.
The bill “gives us the tools and opportunity to ensure bad actors from community and state law enforcement agencies are held accountable and don’t end up hopping from one department to the next,” Rep. Neil Rafferty (D-Birmingham), one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said shortly after filing it.
This database was intended as a tool for local law enforcement agencies to track potential misconduct histories of officers they hired from other agencies, often known as lateral transfer officers. To that end, it collects information about some use of force complaints about them, and about officers who were fired or resigned while under investigation.
However, the bill made use of force and disciplinary data off-limits from public access, and it blocks Alabamians from being able to access even simpler data: the professional employment history of the police officers who are certified by the Alabama Peace Officers Standards & Training Commission (APOSTC). A national report found that Alabama’s was one of only two state-level police databases created as part of the post-George Floyd reforms that is entirely off-limits from public access.