After years of criminal justice reform wins, Trump-era federal rollbacks are putting communities at risk
TheGrio...
OPINION: The Trump administration’s erasure of police accountability is an active threat to Black and Brown lives that we must fight against.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Breonna Taylor was asleep in her Louisville home when police burst through her door without knocking. She was 26 years old. She was innocent. She was killed. Her tragic death, along with the murders of George Floyd, Amir Locke, Botham Jean, and too many others, galvanized a generation of advocates, organizers, researchers, community members, and mothers who refused to accept that state-sanctioned violence was simply the price of living while Black or Brown in America. They pushed. They organized. They won. Those hard-fought wins are now being systematically dismantled.
In the span of sixteen months, the Trump administration has: scrapped the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), a centralized system tracking federal officer misconduct, on the first day back in office; rescinded Biden-era restrictions on no-knock warrants in March, the same dangerous tactic used to kill Breonna Taylor; and in April 2025, terminated more than 370 Department of Justice grants totaling over $800 million for community violence intervention, gun violence prevention, victim services, and evidence-based crime reduction programs. Each action, taken alone, is alarming. Together, they represent a deliberate effort to erase accountability and return to an era of unchecked, militarized policing, one that history has already proven does not make communities safer.
The safest communities don’t have more police. They have more resources.
Communities must understand what NLEAD was. It was a database containing nearly 5,000 records of documented misconduct by federal officers, suspensions, terminations, and criminal convictions, designed to stop officers fired for abuse in one agency from quietly being rehired in another. The International Association of Chiefs of Police supported it. Even the first Trump administration had called for something like it. Its elimination was so abrupt and irregular that the watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint alleging the shutdown may have violated federal records law. The danger of eliminating NLEAD isn’t abstract. Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014, was fired in 2017 for falsifying his application, then hired by a police department in Tioga, Pennsylvania. Only sustained public outcry forced his resignation. He had wandered from one department to another with his record intact and his badge restored. That is exactly the problem a national accountability database was built to prevent. Without it, nothing stops the next Loehmann from finding a new department and a new community to police. With no database, bad actors with badges can wander freely. The public has neither recourse nor information.
Tamir Rice was a child playing in a park, and the cop who killed him was handed a badge in another state. Without NLEAD, cops who kill don’t face consequences. They just move on, while families are left to pick up the pieces.
The no-knock warrant rescission isn’t just incredibly dangerous; it’s also a clear return to state violence. Research from the Center for Justice Research and public health scholars is unambiguous: no-knock raids are disproportionately deployed against Black and Brown households, frequently based on faulty intelligence, and deadly for both residents and officers. The Biden restrictions required law enforcement to exhaust safer alternatives before executing such raids. Eliminating those guardrails is not a law enforcement policy; it is a public health crisis.And then there are the community investments, the ones that actually worked. According to the Council on Criminal Justice, roughly half of the federal government’s $300 million investment in community violence intervention (CVI) programs was wiped out. These weren’t feel-good programs. A Johns Hopkins study found that $1 invested in violence prevention yields $7 to $19 in community benefit. Newark saw violent crime drop by 49% year-over-year while its CVI programs were funded. In Detroit, reductions in shootings in 2023-24 saved an estimated $31.3 million in taxpayer costs. These numbers represent lives. The cuts will cost lives, and researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are already saying so publicly.
These rollbacks are not happening in a vacuum. They are taking place alongside ICE operations that Human Rights Watch has documented as violent, racially targeted, and carried out with blatant disregard for due process. 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detention in decades, with at least 32 people dying in federal custody, according to HIAS and NPR reporting. U.S. citizens, including Renee Good, a mother of three who was shot and killed by an ICE agent, have been killed in the chaos of these operations. Over 70% of people currently held in ICE detention have no criminal record. Federal judges have ruled at least 4,421 times that ICE is holding people illegally. When federal agents operate above the law, and when the administration simultaneously eliminates every accountability tool designed to check them, we are no longer talking about policy disagreements; we are talking about the conditions for systemic violence against communities of color.
The data doesn’t lie, and it’s clear about what prevents harm: investing in community care, not more state violence.
Some will argue that strong policing is what keeps communities safe. The data simply does not support it. Decades of public health research demonstrate that violence is driven by poverty, lack of opportunity, trauma, housing instability, and disinvestment, not by insufficient police presence. The communities with the lowest rates of violence are not the ones with the largest police forces. They are the ones with the most resources: stable housing, quality schools, accessible healthcare, and trusted community organizations. Criminalization is not a substitute for investment, and it never has been.
New York’s own movement history proves this point. Communities United for Police Reform (CPR), which recently concluded its groundbreaking work after more than a decade of campaigns in New York City, helped win critical accountability reforms, expose patterns of police sexual violence, and build a body of research, including the 2025 report We Deserve to Be Safe, grounding New York’s public safety debate in community truth rather than fear and politics. Their legacy, and the organizing legacies of dozens of organizations across the five boroughs, have proven that a different model is possible. The BREATHE Act, introduced by the Movement for Black Lives and championed in Congress by Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, offers a federal framework for that model: divesting from incarceration and policing, investing in community safety, and building the healthy, equitable neighborhoods where violence cannot take root. That vision is not utopian. It is achievable. New York State has the resources, the legal authority, and the political will, particularly with new leadership at City Hall, to implement a genuine community safety agenda right now.
What that requires is this: Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the City Council must resist the impulse to expand the NYPD budget as a political reflex and instead fund the community-based infrastructure, violence interrupters, mental health crisis response, youth programming, re-entry support, and housing that the research shows actually prevents violence. Albany must codify state-level restrictions on no-knock warrants that cannot be undone by federal rollback. And New York must become a model for the country: demonstrating that you can make a city safer by investing in communities, not by criminalizing them.
And then there is the counterargument. Critics will say that any reduction in police presence will lead to more crime, that the declining crime rates of recent years are a result of policing, not community investment. But crime rates declined most sharply in the cities that invested most aggressively in community violence intervention and social support, often in tandem with reformed police practices, not instead of them. The question is never police versus no police; it is whether we are willing to fund the conditions under which communities can truly be safe, or whether we will keep pouring billions into a system that data consistently shows fails the communities it purports to serve.
“The ‘Police or No Police’ debate is a distraction. The real question is why we keep eliminating the things that actually save lives.
Breonna Taylor’s name should not have become a symbol of what happens when law enforcement goes unchecked. But it did. Now, five years later, the administration has eliminated the very restrictions her death helped inspire. We owe it to her, and to every community that has buried someone killed by a force that was supposed to protect them, to demand something better.
This is the moment: build the community safety we deserve, or inherit the shame of explaining our failure to the next generation of grieving mothers.
beatriz beckford* is a multidisciplinary artist, community organizer, and philanthropic strategist working at the intersection of advocacy, community organizing, and justice policy across the country. She organizes with organizations including MXGM, People’s Advocacy Institute, MomsRising, and the Community Safety Working Group.