TITLE
Recommendation to request City Attorney to draft a resolution in support of the establishment of the Law Enforcement Work Inquiry System (LEWIS) Registry, and request City Manager to have the Long Beach Police Department partner with the LEWIS Registry at the University of Southern California Price Safe Communities Institute, to help in the development, pilot and Beta-testing of a unified national database that documents all officers who were terminated or resigned due to misconduct.
DISCUSSION
BACKGROUND:
Following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in May 2020, there were renewed calls for several police reforms, including creating a nationwide registry of law enforcement officers who had been fired for misconduct to curtail the ability of fired officers to be hired elsewhere.
A study published in the Yale Law Journal in April 2020 claimed to be the first systemic investigation of “wandering officers” who were fired by one department and hired elsewhere. In a study of 98,000 full-time law enforcement officers in Florida over 30 years, it found that in any given year, 3% of officers employed at agencies were previously fired.
The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, authored by Congresswoman Karen Bass, passed the U.S. House of Representatives in March 2021. Among its provisions, the act would create a nationwide police misconduct registry at the Justice Department. However, its prospects for passing the U.S. Senate and becoming law remain uncertain.
The USC Price Safe Communities Institute is working on establishing the first comprehensive, publicly available national catalog to collect data regarding officers fired or who resign because of misconduct. Law enforcement agencies will also be able to access crucial analytical data regarding trends and patterns of potential misconduct causalities.
The database, named for the late civil rights pioneer Rep. John Lewis, is called the Law Enforcement Work Inquiry System (LEWIS) Registry. T...
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