Wandering cops: how communities handle new hires

By Stacy Gittleman

Andrew Lyon was hired by the East Lansing Police Department as an officer in 2024. By the time he resigned in April 2026, he was the subject of four internal department investigations. According to local reporting from WLNS-TV, in just two years on the job, Lyon was under investigation for speeding through red lights during a pursuit without lights and sirens, running red lights, and speeding in a personal vehicle. He had also ignored direct commands from his superiors not to discuss a federal civil rights lawsuit, which two black men filed against Lyons for using pepper spray on them when they were arrested for an alleged altercation outside a restaurant. Lyons claimed he was breaking up a fight, although video surveillance from the restaurant showed there was no fight. In reality, one of the men who was pepper-sprayed and arrested was trying to deter the other from getting involved in a potential fight.

Lyon resigned on April 26 after only 21 months on the job. At the time, he faced 14 policy violations from his commanding officers, 11 of which were sustained. City officials would not reveal to the public Lyon’s reason for resigning.

According to the state’s policy-making body that sets the rules and standards for all the state’s police officers, Lyon is still licensed to be a police officer in Michigan.

What is stopping a police officer like Lyons from picking themselves up and finding police work elsewhere?

The notion of the so-called “wandering cop,” when police officers bounce from job to job, either through an unwritten code of silence from their former places of employment or lack of scrutiny from short-staffed law enforcement departments eager to hire, has been a grave concern of groups of civil rights activists, journalists and data analysts around the country.

After a decade of research, the non-profit Chicago-based investigative journalism organization known as the Invisible Institute in February of 2026 launched the National Police Index (NPI). The NPI is a nationwide effort to compile a database that contains decades of work histories of the nation’s police officers. The NPI currently contains over one million records and aims to uncover acts of misconduct and where officers go after a problematic separation. According to the organization’s website, the database serves as a tool to help communities, journalists, researchers, and attorneys investigate the track records and possible on-the-job negligence of law enforcement officers.

The database website is searchable to the public by the officer’s name, agency, start and end dates of employment. Separate downloadable spreadsheets for participating states list reasons for leaving the job including retirement, firing, or resigning.

So far, the database has collected information from 24 states, though some state data sets are more robust than others. The NPI obtained records through petitions filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It was compiled by a team of journalists across the country and co-founded by the Louisiana Justice and Innocence Project.

Neither the Invisible Institute nor the Louisiana Justice and Innocence Project responded to multiple requests for comment.

Michigan is one of the states that has not disclosed its police records for the database, according to veteran Michigan journalist Steve Neavling. Neavling has been on the police beat for over 20 years. He is currently a reporter at the Detroit Metro Times, and before that wrote for the Detroit Free Press and was the creator of Motor City Muckraker. In his ongoing series on “wandering cops,” he uncovers what happens when police officers are fired for gross misconduct in one part of the state and then get hired to work again at another law enforcement agency. Neavling said that due to its heavily cloaked records, Michigan is one of the worst offenders in the country when it comes to this practice. Neavling said the information he and the Invisible Institute are trying to gather on the police for the database is not meant to benefit law enforcement departments in their screening practices. Rather, it is designed to serve the public who want to know who is policing their communities. He said including Michigan’s records in the NPI database would empower the public to track repeat offenders, and, if necessary, call to investigate certain hires with potential red flags.

“This database is for residents, residents who encounter police officers who can potentially mishandle them at traffic stops or verbally or physically harass them on the street,” Neavling said in an interview with Downtown. “Then, that resident can look up that officer on a database and could learn that they were fired from another department for similar behavior.”

Two years ago, the Invisible Project reached out to Neavling to help build the Michigan component of the database. The two organizations filed a FOIA request for the information, but the Michigan State Police (MSP) blocked the request.

In November of 2023, they filed a lawsuit against the state to obtain the records.

In 2024, State Attorney General Dana Nessel filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Detroit Metro Times and the Invisible Institute against the MSP, seeking more transparency and disclosure on the work histories of the state’s law enforcement officers. In a 2024 press release, Nessel’s office disclosed: “As the Department of Attorney General also represents the (MSP) in the lawsuit, the department erected a conflict wall within the office to allow the Attorney General to take the contrary position.”

Nessel stated that the plaintiffs are not seeking sensitive information, such as officers’ home addresses or the identification of officers serving in undercover roles. “Transparency is vital to accountability, and to law enforcement’s commitment to serving their communities. To that end, it’s important that the Michigan State Police are held to the same FOIA requirements as other state agencies,” said Nessel in the press release.

In May 2026, a judge ruled in favor of the MSP keeping the names and employment histories of its officers out of the NPI.

Currently, Detroit Metro Times and the Invisible Institute are working with the University of Michigan Law School’s Civil Rights Litigation Initiative (CRLI) to appeal the decision.

In a statement emailed to Downtown, Skylar Parpan, a student attorney with the CRLI working on the appeal, stressed the importance of transparency from the state and releasing the requested information from the state under FOIA to be included in the NPI.

“A secret police force is fundamentally incompatible with a fair and free democracy,” Parpan said. “There cannot be transparency and accountability in policing if law enforcement identities are kept hidden from public view.”

Neavling said that Michigan is only one of two states in the country that does not subject the governor and lawmakers to FOIA.

“This is what makes Michigan uniquely bad when it comes to FOIA requests,” Neavling said. “It can take weeks or even months for government entities to respond, if at all. There have been few efforts on behalf of state lawmakers to create more transparency especially on the topic of who is policing our communities and their work histories. Michigan has a serious transparency problem.”

Neavling said that the FOIA requests did not ask for personal information such as home addresses or family connections.

“We requested the most basic information, the names of current and formerly certified officers and their employment histories,” Neavling said. “This information can help detect wandering cops who leave one department after misconduct and may resurface at another agency.

Michigan has been very difficult to get records on these issues. While some states handed over some records, Michigan is the one state that said we are not going to hand over any at all.”

In his reporting, Neavling has unsuccessfully made FOIA requests for the names and employment histories of every officer with the Detroit police. He said there remains an unwritten, accepted rule that it is okay to hide the identities of Michigan’s police officers even though they are paid with the public’s taxes and are issued powerful tools such as weapons and patrol cars to do their work.

“It is a workforce that is cloaked in secrecy,” Neavling said.

Neavling admitted that smaller law enforcement departments, including those in readership area of Downtown, make announcements and take headshots of their new hires and post them openly on social media or their department websites. Neavling added that it is common practice for the MSP to take headshot photos of each graduate of its cadet program without listing names.

Downtown observed that the Detroit Police website lists the names of precinct captains and commanders but not the names of every patrol officer in its ranks. Outside of Detroit, Neavling said, Michigan, whose law enforcement entity is comprised of 83 sheriff’s offices and hundreds of smaller municipal police departments, makes it next to impossible to publicly access all the names and professional histories of every employed law enforcement officer in the state in one place.

Neavling said he has covered many stories where a police officer got into trouble at work, was dismissed from one department, only to find work in another.

Among the strangest is the story of Robert Priest.

Priest was an officer for the Warren Police Department for 25 years before he was fired in 2021. While on the job in Warren, Neavling reported he had interpersonal issues with a former Warren deputy police commissioner, Matt Nichols.

In late 2022, Priest was hired by the village of Romeo Police Department.

“When Priest received his patrol badge in Romeo, he conducted an illegal stakeout outside Nichol’s home in his patrol car, called it his ‘special project,’ waited for his ex-supervisor to leave his home, and then followed him in pursuit.”

Neavling said that through a FOIA request, he obtained a video of Priest pursuing Nichols in his patrol car after stalking him. Priest pulled Nichols over and issued him three traffic tickets. In the video, Neavling said Priest can be heard bragging about “three-banging” this officer, which he described as his “special project.” All the ticket issuances were later overturned in court.

Priest was fired from the Romeo Police Department in December 2023.

Neavling reported that the Warren Police Department then came under investigation because it failed to legally report to the Michigan Coalition Law Enforcement Standards (MCOLES), the overseeing government agency on policing, why officers such as Priest had been fired. In June of 2019, Nichols himself was terminated from the Warren Police Department under charges of alleged assault of a shoplifting suspect.

Many times, when a department wants to fire an officer, Neavling has learned that to avoid drawn-out lawsuits, a department, instead of properly filing a separation due to misconduct, will ask the officer to resign, provided it will not report any character or misconduct issues to the state. That is why, Neavling said, there are so few officers on the MCOLES website listed as decertified.

“What we are seeing is oftentimes when an officer gets in trouble, for something like domestic abuse, for example, they will strike a deal with the police chief to say that this officer just quit,” Neavling said. “If they don’t report any character issues, there’s nothing the state could really do to make this officer uncertified, and this has become a common practice. What makes matters worse is that there is such a huge police shortage right now that a fired officer, in this case, can potentially get hired in a different or smaller department in the state that has many open positions to fill. The police shortage makes this issue even more relevant.”

Of all the repeat offender police in the state, the most notorious is the case of officer William Melendez, otherwise known as the “Robocop” of Inkster. When police chiefs interviewed by Downtown were asked to give an example of a wandering cop, conversations alluded to Inkster and what happened there a decade ago.

Inkster is one of the poorest inner-ring suburbs of Detroit. It has had challenges with corrupt officers that date back over a decade. In 2015, The Detroit News reported that the city’s crumbling infrastructure had just quietly closed its school district, and its police force numbers dwindled from 60 officers in 2012 to only 24 in 2015. At the time, Inkster suffered a revolving door of chiefs of police, as a string of them stepped into the position and then soon resigned.

In January of 2015, Melendez was fired and charged with felonious assault after he was caught on video beating a motorist on the head and face after a traffic stop, punching his victim 16 times in the face.

In April 2015, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy charged Melendez with assault. According to reports from the The Detroit News, Melendez was a rogue Detroit cop whose reputation for excessive use of force cost the city at least $1 million in legal settlements. Melendez was tried on federal corruption charges in a 2004 trial that portrayed him as the ringleader of a virtual police gang that planted evidence and threatened suspects. He was acquitted, along with other defendants.

In November 2015, Melendez was sentenced by a Wayne County Judge to serve a prison sentence of a minimum of 13 months to 10 years for police brutality. He spent 14 months behind bars and was released in January 2017.

A decade later, the Inkster force is trying to recover its trust with the public. Its police force is back to deploying over 60 officers, back to numbers not seen since 2011. In late May, the department’s Facebook page photographed five newly hired officers, who were mostly black and two women, but did not reveal their names, and the department has open enrollment in seeking new officers to join its force.

Because of the visibility of this case, MCOLES in 2018 strengthened and tightened its police hiring regulations and procedures with a policy known as Public Act (PA) 128 which went into effect in January 2018.

PA 128 requires hiring agencies to request and review the reasons as to why an applicant left employment with a previous law enforcement agency. This record is required to be maintained in the Employment History Record kept by the state. Agencies receiving such a request to disclose the information must do so according to state law. The law provides liability protection from such disclosures for the former agency and allows an applicant due process to object to the information with an explanation.

Under PA 128, MCOLES on its public website also maintains records of police officers who have had their licenses revoked by the state. The site currently lists 20 officers and links to records listing their offenses, which range from ethnic intimidation, aggravated stalking, fleeing and eluding the scene of a crime, aggravated domestic assault or tax fraud.

MCOLES, each year under PA 128, puts 10 percent of the state’s law enforcement agencies under extra scrutiny in its hiring practices.

The policy states that simply obtaining these separation records only serves as a baseline for hiring agencies who must individually conduct comprehensive background evaluations, including fingerprint checks as well as psychological to determine if they are qualified to serve as officers.

Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard, who has been head of government affairs for Major County Sheriffs of America for 24 years, said when it comes to hiring practices, what is more important than a connected national database like NPI are hiring practices at the state level and how policies like PA 128 are enforced. For years, he has been pushing for more rigorous hiring practices that require a comprehensive background check for anyone who is hired to wear a law enforcement badge.

“I regret to say that this failure is happening more in-state than out of state,” admitted Bouchard. “Individual agencies are not doing their due diligence. I have been chasing this for many years.”

When it comes to screening practices conducted during police hiring, Bouchard has long maintained that he wishes to bring back the polygraph, or “lie detector test.”

Under the Michigan Polygraph Protect Act of 1981, however, using polygraphs to screen job candidates for police work is banned. According to the United States Department of Labor, the practice is widely used in Texas, California, Florida, Utah, Georgia

and Pennsylvania.

According to the United States Department of Labor, all 50 states allow law enforcement agencies to use polygraph tests for hiring police officers. While the Employee Polygraph Protection Act restricts private employers from using lie detectors, it exempts federal, state, and local government employers, including police departments. A handful of states — such as Michigan, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Oregon — have state-level laws that restrict or completely prohibit government agencies from forcing applicants to take polygraph tests for employment.

“I took a polygraph test when I was hired, but the state legislature decided it was too intrusive,” Bouchard said. “That’s not helpful to us, because some people are very good liars. We can ask them questions, such as if they have multiple social media accounts, we can investigate. But what’s to stop them from hiding the fact that they have a secret account where they post content that is racist and hateful, or that they have violent tendencies? We may never know about them, and if it ever comes to light, it can make our agencies and our hiring practices look bad.”

When it comes to nationalizing a police enforcement database, Bouchard said the NPI was examined by the Major County Sheriffs of America and viewed as unhelpful and unreliable for weeding out bad apples from a hiring pool. For starters, he said it had no precise definition of misconduct, which can range from missing multiple days of work to a major infraction of the law.

“So, for the officer that was reprimanded or fired for calling in sick too many days, as a hypothetical, does he deserve to wind up on a national database to make him unemployable?” Bouchard asked. “This database does not solve the problem. The problem is hiring people repeatedly who shouldn’t get hired, and only a full investigation will prevent that.”

Before he was chief of police in the City of Bloomfield Hills, Jeff King was chief of police for Farmington Hills for five years and has served in law enforcement for over 30 years.

Over his decades of service, he observed that fewer candidates are applying for vacant positions in law enforcement. Recruitment for new officers has been tough, and this places an even greater emphasis on scrutinizing potential hires.

Prior to speaking with Downtown, King checked out the NPI database. At a glance of the information contained within the databases of participating states, he said the information he reviewed was not robust enough to give a full picture of any of the hundreds of thousands of listed officers and certainly should not be relied upon for making a hiring decision.

King objected to what he described as vague record-keeping in the database. The term “misconduct” can mean many things if not specified.

For example, King said years ago he hired a young man as a law enforcement officer in Farmington Hills. As a teen, about four years and 350 days before the exact day he applied, he received a trespass citation on his record. At the time, the Farmington Hills Police Department said if a person had even a misdemeanor on their record within five years of applying, they were technically ineligible for employment.

“Basically, this was someone who, as a kid, went with some of his friends off-road on their ATVs and trespassed on someone’s property,” King recalled. “When the police were alerted, his friends took off. He stayed behind to be honest, and he was the one who got the ticket.”

King said when he entered the profession in 1995 the slightest infringement, including a teen driving violation, would keep you out of contention for an officer position in law enforcement. Back then, he recalled there were times when 650 applicants applied for six jobs. Now, King said that 15 jobs can be posted, but only five people might apply. This is even tougher in municipalities like Bloomfield Hills, where first responders must be certified in both law enforcement and firefighting.

“As chiefs of police, we are the leaders and we set the tone of our departments in motion,” King said when it comes to the standards he holds for background checks on new hires. “Farmington Hills Police Department is one of the 10 largest departments in the state, and Bloomfield Hills is far smaller. But no matter the size of the department I reside over, my standards are the same. No one gets hired as an officer without me investigating or speaking and approving them for hire.”

King said his departments have used the standards set in PA 128 as the starting ground, and then he added additional layers of screening, which include background checks and visits to their current and past communities.

“I am confident that in Bloomfield Hills we will not be hiring someone with a violent past on or off the job, and I am confident that this is also the case in the majority of law enforcement departments in the state.”

King said in a recent hire of a dispatcher from Traverse City, he sent investigators up north to speak with the applicant’s former supervisors. They also knocked on doors and met with an applicant’s neighbors and associates to get a thorough assessment of the person before they were hired.

“If you are interviewing at my department, I want to find the people you don’t want me talking to,” King asserted. “That’s how we can uncover the potential to see if an applicant has a history of abuse, financial fraud, lying, substance abuse, violent tendencies, or other integrity issues.”

Chief Ronald Wiles, director of the Michigan Chiefs of Police Association, said it is his job and the duty of his organization to provide professional development opportunities for the state’s law enforcement, enhance professionalism in the field, and advocate for legislation that affects public safety in the communities served.

In his position, he has had many discussions around the state with chiefs and sheriffs about the merits of including Michigan’s police in the NPI.

“It’s no secret that accountability and professionalism are essential to maintaining public trust in law enforcement, but we do believe that any system designed to ensure that agencies have that accurate information should be embarking on a thoughtful discussion on that topic,” Wiles said. “Whether or not Michigan’s law enforcement believes in having our records in the database is not as easy as a yes or no answer. In Michigan, we have multiple safeguards in place to try to prevent a repeat of what happened in Inkster. We have MCOLES and we now have PA 128.”

As he views the database now in its current form, Wiles said it can be potentially dangerous because even the data provided by the participating states lacks context.

“There is a big difference between an officer retiring or resigning for things that would not constitute a termination or a refusal to become an officer somewhere else,” Wiles said. “I think a database in that case can be somewhat problematic. It just lumps officers into this category that they were terminated or left a job under suspicion. Officers who separate from their agencies do so for many reasons, and most of them are not because they are a danger to the public.”

Wiles continued: “It’s dangerous just to have a database of officer names without having a further understanding of who those people are, what they represent, and why they are listed. If you have an officer who’s been retired for several years, should they be part of that database? It is unclear.”

Bloomfield Township Chief of Police James Gallagher examined the database. Generally speaking, from the states that included information on thousands of officers whose service dates back as early as the 1960s, he concluded that there is not enough information on officers to make it a valuable tool for any hiring or screening practices. Listing an officer’s hiring, termination, resignation, or retirement dates to suggest a work history is not enough. And given the “temperature” in the nation of hostility towards police, Gallagher said he would not want the names of his officers so readily available to the public for safety’s sake.

“At times, we may on our social media put out a name and a picture of an officer for a more positive story, but as a chief, I would not want the names of all my staff so accessible with just one click,” cautioned Gallagher. “Our officer families do not need people doxxing them or worse, just because they are a police officer found in some kind of database. The data I reviewed there does nothing for me from a police standpoint about hiring somebody. That all comes out during our thorough background investigations held under Michigan’s standards, and I cannot speak for what the standards are in other states.”

Gallagher believes PA 128 is an effective way to vet a law enforcement professional’s work history. He said that with this law in place, chiefs like himself are required to release to the state any reason why an officer was separated from their employment.

Gallagher continued: “Though I was not chief back then, I know the Robocop case in Inkster is what really pushed the state to pass PA 128, which requires a terminating law agency to report reasons for a termination, even if it is in the form of early retirement (in the case that an officer has done something that would make me no longer want to retain their services as a law enforcement officer). Even if we sign a non-disclosure agreement with a departing officer, the law requires my department to notify MCOLES through full written documentation the reason for that termination. I am required to let MCOLES know if that person either retired under investigation, resigned under investigation, or retired in good standing.”

Gallagher said before PA 128, an officer could quietly walk away from a termination due to misconduct, and an NDA would stick. If an officer gave their agency a problem, they could be fired quietly, saving the firing agency the hassle of the police union or litigation, apply for work at a different agency, and the one they left could not be transparent about the reason for separation.

“Then the next agency hires that individual and they might learn the hard way that they are a problem because the terminating agency did not have to reveal anything,” Gallagher said. “But with PA 128 in place, it is now a crime for me as a chief not to reveal an officer’s reason for termination if they apply elsewhere for a job at another agency.”

“Nobody dislikes a bad cop more than a good cop, but the lists of names of officers without any deeper context, as found on this database, are very dangerous,” Gallagher said. “My impression of the database is that it does not give me enough of the specifics of misconduct, what that specifically means. Now, if we are talking about wandering cops, that is an agency-specific problem, and some agencies, which I do not want to specify, have had a history of hiring wandering cops. Part of this problem can be attributed to shrinking hiring pools or lower wages that make it hard to attract people to the profession.”

In a statement released to Downtown, Troy Police Public Information Officer Edwin Julian said that his department has an extensive hiring and background investigation process, and it is extremely confident in the safeguards in place to thoroughly vet applicants before they are hired.

“Our background investigations are comprehensive and include a review of prior employment, criminal history, references, driving records, social media activity, and any other information relevant to an applicant’s suitability for a career in law enforcement,” Julian stated. “Applicants also undergo multiple interviews, psychological and medical evaluations, and additional screening before being considered for employment.”

Julian said as part of the process, the Troy department routinely contacts previous employers and law enforcement agencies where an applicant has worked. “We believe these measures provide a thorough assessment of an applicant’s character, integrity, professionalism, and overall fitness for the position.”

In the case of former employees, Julian said the Troy Police Department does not and would not agree to conceal substantiated misconduct or other relevant employment information as part of any separation agreement or negotiation. If contacted by another law enforcement agency conducting a background investigation, we provide truthful and accurate information consistent with applicable laws and employment practices.

“Ultimately, we place a significant emphasis on hiring the right people and have a robust process in place to identify candidates who meet the high standards expected of Troy police officers. We are very confident in that process.”

Julian said his department has reviewed the NPI and its goal of increasing transparency and helping agencies identify officers with a history of misconduct.

However, the Troy Police Departemtn maintains that Michigan already has an established system through PA 128 that oversees the licensing and certification of law enforcement officers and can act against an officer’s license when appropriate.

“We believe that (PA 128) already serves an important accountability function,” Julian wrote. “In addition, we place significant emphasis on thorough background investigations and are extremely confident in our hiring process.”

Scott Grewe, chief of police for Birmingham, echoed the sentiments of his colleagues.

In a written statement to Downtown, he said: “The Birmingham Police Department conducts extensive background checks on new officers, which always include reviewing personnel files from previous agencies, and we would find any negative information prior to hiring a new officer, whether or not they were on a database somewhere.”

But Ben Grunwald, a professor of Law at Yale University Law School who was the lead author on a 2020 study, “The Wandering Officer,” published in the Yale Law Journal, said that databases such as the NPI are useful to the general public.

In this study, the first of its kind, Grunwald and a team of researchers examined the employment records of all of Florida’s 98,000 full-time law-enforcement officers employed by about 500 agencies over 30 years. The research could be boiled down into three key findings: Each year, an average of around 1,100 officers who were previously fired — three percent of all officers in the state — worked for Florida agencies. Second, officers who were fired from their last job faced difficulty finding new work. Employment searches for them are longer and the work found is often at smaller law enforcement agencies with fewer resources located in communities with a large demographic of people of color. This is less common for those who were fired earlier in their careers.

Third, wandering officers are more likely than both officers hired as rookies or veterans who have never been fired to be fired from their next job or to receive a complaint for a “moral character violation.” The researchers could not determine the precise reasons for the firings, and the results suggest that wandering officers may pose serious risks, particularly given how difficult it is to fire a police officer.

Grunwald thinks that Michigan’s law officers should give the database a second look to see how the information is organized and how, with the right amount of digging, it can uncover red flags about the work histories of potentially troublesome officers.

“When we look at the National Police Index, all we may see is a list of officers and the dates that they started and ended jobs, and that may not be seen as super useful,” Grunwald said. “But perhaps the chiefs who looked at this database have not looked into the datasets that are more robust, and the depth and quality of the information, such as details on why an officer left one department to work at another, or revealing the reasons for dismissal, varies from state to state.”

And though law enforcement chiefs pointed to MCOLES and its list of revoked officers as proof of better transparency, Grunwald said there is a deeper kind of information that is lacking or blocked from Michigan’s screening protocols, and they are not getting the full picture.

“Many states post information about which officers get their licenses revoked, but that is different from the kind of information contained in the National Police Index,” Grunwald said. 
“That database lets the user know about the officers who have been fired and the reason they were fired. Very few officers get their licenses revoked and therefore can no longer work in the state. Many more get fired. “

Looking at the database from law enforcement’s perspective, Grunwald can see why they say it can be problematic.

“Some of the objections that the police chiefs have is that the databases don’t have much information in them, and that they don’t see much value in them, and they are right on one point, which is that posting this information online is not helpful for the police department,” Grunwald said. “When doing background checks on new job candidates, a police department already has access to this information, because the state policing agency is collecting it. So, police departments are not in any way benefiting from the data being posted online. They might be objecting to it, they might be saying, well, this is a lot of personal information being posted online, and that can be harmful for our officers.”

Ultimately, Grunwald said, having a national database on policing offers a cost-benefit paradox to the policing profession and the public they are sworn to serve and protect. The cost to police officers is the possibility of losing some of their privacy or more people knowing their work history, outweighs the benefits to the public of bringing more transparency to the profession to avoid rehiring problem officers until the unfortunate or unthinkable happens, such as a member falling victim to brutality, assault, or even death by someone who should have never repeatedly been given a police badge.

“On the benefit side of having such a database is basic public accountability,” Grunwald said. “When we have police officers who have an enormous amount of power, and frankly, not that much training, and not a lot of governing what they do and how they conduct themselves while on the job, we need to have an accountability mechanism, and we need to make sure their work histories are public information.”