Is ICE evolving into a masked domestic military force?

Six months into the second Trump administration, two things are becoming clear: First, the president remains a nearly entirely non-strategic actor, motivated only by an abiding desire to accumulate ever greater power, adulation, and wealth. And second, he’s fundamentally changing the nature of the United States in ways that threaten to bring an end to the nation’s 249 year old status as the world’s leading democracy, reported Public Notice.

Despite Trump’s consistently haphazard “governance” style, it’s becoming easy to foresee how his regime could effectively void our democracy. The now fully MAGA-fied GOP is increasingly likely to lose the next presidential election after incurring bracing losses in the midterms and other intervening state races. And as the nation learned before and following the 2020 election, Trumpists are more than willing to use force and other extra-legal actions to attempt to cling to power.

For Trump and his cronies, the prospect of losing power — or even sharing it with Democrats in the event control of the House shifts in 2026 — could prove to be catastrophic because of their reasonable fear of being held accountable for criminality that dwarfs Trump’s first term. And unlike January 2021 — when the Big Lie scheme failed — Trump and his cohorts will have new tools to carry out a coup, including a massive federal police force with a proven willingness to engage in systemic illegality.

Trump’s brownshirts

From its outset, Trump 2.0 has been grounded on systemic illegality and unilateral executive actions, a course of (mis)conduct the administration has succeeded in pursuing because of pliant GOP majorities in Congress the Supreme Court. It’s all but certain that the administration’s authoritarian conduct will grow in scope and intensity over the succeeding months, in no small part because the GOP reconciliation bill will hand over a staggering $170 billion to the Department of Homeland Security.

The bill includes nearly $30 billion in new “enforcement” funds. DHS boasts that it is already the largest federal law enforcement agency, with over 80,000 officers spread across nine organizations. But DHS says it plans to use the new funding to quickly hire 10,000 more more ICE thugs. And in recent months, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has systematically dismantled DHS’s oversight offices, thereby paving the way for a lot of corner cutting.

The bill also includes $45 billion for expanding detention facilities comprised of both government and privately contracted facilities, meaning DHS is working with a jail budget that far exceeds that of the federal prison system.

With this infusion of cash, the US for the first time will have a massive federal police force with its own rapidly growing concentration camp system, with a reach that extends directly into the nation’s largest states and municipalities, potentially displacing local governance in critical respects.

We do not have to wait to find out how ICE and other agencies will conduct themselves within the US, and particularly in blue states and municipalities with Democratic (and demographically diverse) populations. Just look at what began as a quasi occupation of LA County and has now expanded to encompass large swathes of the state of California. There, the new ICE is focused on creating a state of fear and uncertainty among entire communities, including with militarized assaults on workplaces, complete with chemical munitions.

Last week, for example, a phalanx of masked ICE thugs marched into LA’s MacArthur Park, smack in the middle of one of the city’s largest Hispanic communities, accompanied by California National Guard troops that Trump had dragooned over the governor’s objection.

After parading around MacArthur with assault rifles and other military paraphernalia that served no apparent purpose, the invading force retreated.

Also in recent days, masked and heavily armed thugs have descended upon such dangerous locations as farms at harvest time and car body shops, where they have used force, and in some cases beaten, immigrants and citizens alike.

With his mélange of ICE, FBI, DEA and — importantly — military agents and troops, Trump has finally succeeded in creating what he longed to establish during his first term: A huge, domestic militarized force answerable only to him and his cronies.

The nation has never had a national police force, let alone a lawless one that’s singularly committed to the political agenda of the president. While the rapidly growing ICE force is not yet operating as an authoritarian arm of a dictatorship, it is more than plausible that it could be transformed into that type of Gestapo-like “law enforcement” entity, as Thor Benson has argued.

In that regard, Trump has recently spoken about taking over one or more major cities, including New York, asserting that they need to be “straightened out.” While such Trumpian musings are dismissed by some, they must be viewed in the context of what amount to ongoing militarized invasions of several such municipalities.

Unpopular populism

Trump is frequently described as a “populist” leader, but few pundits address the definition of the term. Hitler and Mussolini were populists who took power without democratic mandates and quickly destroyed institutions. Likewise, there’s every reason to expect that Trump and his crew will attempt another coup given the increasing likelihood they’ll have a hard time winning again in free and fair elections.

While Trump did win the popular vote last year, his victory was narrow, and his popularity began to slide immediately after he took office. A current average of polls indicates he’s disapproved by around 52 percent of voters and approved by 44 percent. This is a near reversal of where Trump stood in January, when he (briefly) had net positive approval rating. Also, Trump’s approval on immigration, his signature issue in the 2024 race, has taken a huge tumble into negative territory, with as many as 51 percent of voters disapproving the gratuitous brutality and performative sadism they’ve witnessed in recent months.

Trump is losing the most ground with the independent voters who often determine the outcome of elections — his current disapproval rate among this critical cohort is nearly 61 percent. Likewise, his approval rating among Hispanic voters, who played a key role in the GOP’s success last year, has descended from negative two in February to as low as negative 26. All of this is predictably leading to a corresponding decline in Trump’s approval rating in several of the swing states that allowed him to prevail last year in the Electoral College.

Given that midterm elections are increasingly referendums on the party in power — and considering that the GOP has devolved into little more than a personality cult — it’s all but certain that the 2026 midterms (assuming they are remotely free and fair) will be determined by the electorate’s souring view of Trump’s governance. There’s also increasing reason to believe that voters’ opinions of Trump’s regime will be even more negative by November 2028, when the GOP presidential nominee will almost certainly run as Trump’s anointed successor. That’s because the policies Trump is pursuing are both increasingly unpopular and wildly destructive.

Trump talked a big game on the campaign trail about lowering costs for consumers. Instead, his economic “policies” have focused nearly exclusively on two areas: an increasingly irrational and likely illegal tariff regime, and the expansion of tax cuts heavily favoring the very rich (paid for in part by slashing healthcare coverage and food support for low-income people). Both of these were centerpieces of the regressive reconciliation bill he signed into law earlier this month.

A major midterm loss is hardly unusual for a president, particularly one in his final term in office. After Trump’s unpopular 2017 tax cuts and his failed effort to repeal the ACA the following year, the Republican Party (especially House Republicans) took a drubbing in the 2018 midterms. If, as seems increasingly likely, the economy is in a downturn a year from now, Republican losses in November 2026 could be even worse. Particularly if the midterms turn out badly for the GOP, Trump and his cronies will inevitably begin to fear the consequences of a loss at the polls in the next presidential election and to consider their options.

Given the already massive scale of criminality in the Trump regime from the White House on down, Trump and all of his cronies have even more reason to be concerned about the prospect of being held to account. Additionally, as Anne Applebaum recently observed, Trump’s massive expansion of executive powers will make the prospect of a Democratic president all the more frightening for the members of the administration. They will have every reason to expect that a Democratic successor to Trump in the White House will use the newly enhanced powers of the office to hold Trump and company accountable in ways they didn’t during the Biden years. Against that backdrop, Trumpers may consider ensuring the victory of Trump’s designated successor in 2028 to be essential as a matter of self-preservation.

As anyone who lived through January 6 remembers, Trump and his cronies have already shown themselves willing to attempt to hold on to power illegally. More recently, by pardoning the J6 insurrectionists en masse, Trump took a major step toward legitimizing right-wing coup schemes, much as Hitler rendered his failed Munich putsch into an event worthy of annual celebration.

 Therefore, it is not only possible, but must be viewed as likely that in the wake of an 2028 electoral loss, Trumpists will take every step available to them to maintain control of the White House — including, if necessary, illegal ones.

But by then, Trump and his crew will have new tools at their disposal, including a beefed up ICE that will include large phalanxes of masked thugs who are experienced in using violence at the president’s behest. Thus, if the time comes for Trumpers to effectuate yet another post-election coup, they will have a ready and willing militarized federal police force to back them up and will not have to rely on a ragtag array of right-wing tourists.

While many are currently rightly concerned about the impact Trump’s brutal “immigration crackdown” will have on undocumented persons, the danger of his creation of a massive, non-law-abiding federal police force could extend far beyond the immigration. Congress has just handed the coup leader in the White House new, dangerous tools that he and his cohorts could use in their next attempt to overturn the nation’s democracy once and for all.

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Balko: 'We're in dire times'

 RADLEY BALKO writes The Watch on substack.com:

Quaint disputes about the proper role of police and military have been superseded by a more urgent threat: Donald Trump is creating his own, personal paramilitary force.

One of [America’s] great strengths is that . . . we do not allow the Army, Navy, and the Marines and Air Force to be a police force. History is replete with countries that allowed that to happen. Disaster is the result.

— Marine Major General Stephen Olmstead, testifying before Congress in 1989

For about 40 years now, civil libertarians have been warning about the threat posed by police militarization. For the past 20 years, I’ve been one of them. My position has long been that a soldier is trained to annihilate a foreign enemy. A police officer’s job is to promote public safety while protecting our constitutional rights (or at least it’s supposed to be). These skills are not interchangeable. They are, in fact, often in direct contradiction to one another. And it’s dangerous to conflate the two.

There has long been an important and consequential discussion about the proper, constitutional role of police, the proper, constitutional role of the military, and the ramifications of blurring the lines between the two. In many ways, it’s a debate that dates back to the founding era, when British soldiers stationed in the streets of colonial American cities — Boston in particular — led to animosity, anger, and eventually violence. It was a precipitating factor in the Revolutionary War, it’s a big reason why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and it’s why the Founders were deeply distrustful of standing armies.

In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it.

We are now in territory so uncharted that the framing of the police militarization debate no longer works. Having that discussion requires at least a shared understanding that both police officers and soldiers are obligated to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. Over the years, I’ve had clear, often pointed disagreements with police officials and their supporters over how to balance police safety, public safety, and individual rights, and about whether we do a sufficient job holding cops accountable for abuse and misconduct.

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Balko: Elite police units are part of the problem

Radley Balko writes in The New York Times, "giving roving teams of police officers added authority, elite status, a long leash and a vague mandate is a formula for abuse."

The website of the Memphis Police Department includes an entire section called “Reimagine Policing.” The introduction emphasizes that trust is the key to effective law enforcement and proclaims the department’s participation in reform efforts such as President Barack Obama’s 21st Century Policing program, de-escalation training and the “8 Can’t Wait” reforms proposed by the group Campaign Zero.

Yet in 2021, as homicides in the city soared, the city announced the formation of the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, or SCORPION. The ‌teams, which included four groups of 10 officers each, would saturate crime hot spots in the city in unmarked cars and make pretextual traffic stops ‌to investigate homicides, aggravated assaults, robberies and carjackings.

Programs like SCORPION are a big part of the problem.

These units are typically touted as the best of the best — teams of highly experienced, carefully selected officers with stable temperaments, who have earned the right to work with less supervision. It isn’t difficult to see the dangers of telling police officers again and again that they are “elite,” but what’s really remarkable is how far that ideal is from the reality. As Stephen Downing, a retired Los Angeles deputy police chief and former SWAT officer, once told me, “The guys who really want to be on the SWAT team are the last people you should be putting on the SWAT team.” These units tend to attract aggressive, rules-skirting officers who then bring in like-minded colleagues to join them.

One former Memphis officer told CBS News that ‌SCORPION hired young and inexperienced officers with a propensity for aggression. Their “training” consisted of “three days of PowerPoint presentations, one day of criminal apprehension instruction and one day at the firing range.” One of the five officers indicted in Nichols’s murder had a prior complaint against him, and the civil rights attorney Ben Crump said he has already heard from other people who say they were abused by the unit.

The name of the team gives the game away. You call a unit SCORPION or Strike Force because you want to instill fear and because you want to attract police officers who enjoy being feared.

Memphis is hardly alone. In the early 1970s, Detroit officials responded to a surge in street violence with a program called Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets, or STRESS. Early on, the units — which often, like SCORPION, included Black officers — gave politicians bragging rights to a record of arrests and gun confiscations. But behind that record were rogue cops with a cowboy mentality. They were accused of planting evidence, physical abuse and corruption. Over a two-year period, the units killed at least 22 people, almost all of them Black. The city eventually ended the program after a STRESS unit raided an apartment where five Wayne County sheriff’s deputies — all Black — were playing poker. The resulting shootout left one deputy dead and another permanently disabled.

In the 50 years since, a similar story has played out in cities across the country, with remarkable consistency. Perhaps the most infamous was the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart scandal of the late 1990s, which involved a unit called Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums program, or CRASH. More than 70 officers were implicated in planting guns and drug evidence, selling narcotics themselves and shooting and beating people without provocation.

Around the same time, the results of an investigation into Los Angeles’s Special Investigations Section — which had killed so many people it earned the nickname “Death Squad” — caused the city to pay out about $125 million in settlements to victims and court costs.

A decade earlier, Chicago created the Special Operations Section, or S.O.S., in response to rising crime in that city. By the mid-2000s, whistle-blowers and official investigations accused S.O.S. officers of armed robbery, drug dealing, planting evidence, burglary, “taxing” drug dealers and kidnapping. One member, Keith Herrera, told “60 Minutes” that S.O.S. officers pulled over motorists without cause, confiscated their keys, then broke into their homes and stole from them. The head of the unit — only one of numerous scandal-plagued elite units in the city’s history — eventually pleaded guilty to hiring a hit man to kill Officer Herrera.

And it was officers from the N.Y.P.D.’s Street Crimes Unit — its motto: “We own the night” — who shot and killed an unarmed immigrant, Amadou Diallo, after mistaking his wallet for a gun. Though the unit was officially disbanded, later incarnations took the lead in the city’s notorious stop-and-frisk policy and were implicated in some of the city’s most notorious police killings, including the deaths of Eric Garner, Sean Bell and Kimani Gray. A 2018 investigation by The Intercept found that though these units account for just 6 percent of N.Y.P.D. officers, they were involved in more than 30 percent of fatal shootings by police officers. The street crimes units were again disbanded after the George Floyd protests in 2020. But last year, in response to a sharp rise in crime, Eric Adams restarted them.

Scandals involving elite police units have also hit Indianapolis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Newark, Pomona, Milwaukee, Greensboro and Fresno, among others. Most recently, eight officers from a unit in Baltimore were convicted and imprisoned after allegations that they robbed city residents, stole from local businesses, sold drugs and carried BB guns to plant on people.

The evidence is overwhelming: Giving roving teams of police officers added authority, elite status, a long leash and a vague mandate is a formula for abuse.

From STRESS to SCORPION, police and city officials have often claimed that these units helped reduce the crime rate. It’s hard to say if they’re right. Crime data is notoriously unreliable, and it’s all but impossible to isolate a rise or fall in crime in a specific city to a single variable. Violent crime did drop in Memphis last year, but it also dropped in most large cities, after a two-year spike.

But even if true, the implication ought to give us pause. It suggests that residents of the neighborhoods these units patrol must choose between living in fear of crime or living in fear of the police.

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Warrior Cop training and the militarization of law enforcement

Radley Balko exhaustively detailed the militarization of police in his 2013 book Rise of the Warrior Cop, which traced the proliferation of SWAT teams, the increased transfer of surplus military equipment from the United States military to police forces across the country, and the changes in police mentality that followed, reported The Bulwark. 

Where officers were once commonly armed only with .38 revolvers, police departments around the country now stock their armories with assault rifles, high-caliber sniper rifles, armored personnel carriers, grenade launchers, and even MRAPs—armored vehicles designed to withstand the blasts of IEDs and landmines. SWAT teams, once the purview of forces serving major population centers, have been adopted by departments even in small towns like Uvalde; in rural and urban settings alike, they are most often deployed to serve search or arrest warrants upon suspected drug users.

In the ten weeks since the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, each new disclosure has cast the responding officers in a worse light. First, police claimed that a school resource officer engaged the shooter before he entered the building; no such thing occurred. Then came the footage of parents being restrained by men in tactical gear outside as their children were killed within. Doors that were supposedly locked turned out to have been unlocked the whole time; requested firepower was on site sooner than spokespeople recollected. But the simplest distillation of the scandal is a matter of mathematics: It took 75 minutes for some of the 376 law enforcement officers who arrived at the scene to enter the classroom and kill the shooter, who had by that time murdered nineteen children and two teachers without being properly engaged by the police.

It’s not that American officers are gun-shy, exactly. Over 1,000 people have been shot and killed by police in the United States in the past year. Police forces across the country are being militarized—Uvalde, which is a town of 15,000, did much to advertise its own SWAT team—and new recruits are increasingly being trained into a violent paradigm that requires them to habituate themselves to the act of killing until they are ready to do so at a moment’s notice. Gone are the days of officers who aspire to resemble Mayberry’s Andy Taylor, the idealized small-town policeman who strolled his beat without so much as a holstered sidearm on his hip. Instead, we live in the age of the heavily armed and armored “warrior cop,” who may avail himself of virtually any pretense to end your life with impunity.

These two bodies of information—the calamitous failure of police to use force to end a mass killing in progress on one side, the rise of the warrior cop on the other—might initially appear to conflict with one another. But as we attempt to square the rise of the warrior cop with the utter failure of the police in Uvalde, what becomes clear is that Uvalde is not an outlier. Rather, the Uvalde tragedy is perfectly consistent with the warrior-cop ethos.

It is not clear at this time whether the Uvalde police specifically undertook warrior-cop training programs or overtly embraced its ethos in other ways, but the mindset is prevalent in officer training programs, police unions, and publications for cops all around the country; the federal government even makes grants available to fund warrior-cop training workshops, as detailed in a jointly published story by Slate and the Trace about the burgeoning warrior-cop industry. Whether or not Uvalde cops attended warrior-cop training in a formal context, the ideology is in the water; there is no escaping it.

Let’s get into what the “warrior cop” phenomenon entails. I use the term here to indicate two separate but related developments: first, the increased militarization of police culture and materiel, and second, the school of “warrior” or “sheepdog” philosophies being taught in police trainings.

Police training has also evolved to keep pace with this growing arsenal: Philosophies that emphasize the officer’s role as a warrior or “sheepdog” are ubiquitous in police academies and workshops. The work of David Grossman exemplifies this trend. A retired Army lieutenant colonel, he has been teaching “bulletproof warrior” and “killology” courses to police officers around the country for over two decades. Grossman teaches that police must develop a “will to kill” to perform their jobs well. (And when they do kill, their reward, he says, is to go home and enjoy the best sex they’ve ever had, post-killing coitus being one of the “perks that come with this job.”) Police departments often array themselves in symbols that reinforce the warrior-cop ideology: Officers decorate their equipment with the Punisher skull; they quote Bible verses about God’s righteous wrath, imagining themselves to be its instruments; and they proudly display the Thin Blue Line flag, which posits that law enforcement is the only thing standing between the law-abiding citizenry and anarchy—or worse.

And yet: Uvalde.

According to a timeline published last month by the Associated Press, the shooter arrived at Robb Elementary School at 11:28 a.m., and officers began arriving as soon as three minutes later. The shooter entered the building at 11:33; officers followed him inside at 11:35. At 11:37, the shooter shot at a few of them who had gathered outside the doors to rooms 111 and 112, where he had already fired over one hundred rounds at his victims. In response, officers retreated—and stayed retreated. Eleven minutes later, officer Ruben Ruiz attempted to enter the classroom after learning that his wife, teacher Eva Mireles, had been shot. He was detained, disarmed, and prevented from breaching the classroom by other officers who “escorted him from the scene,” in the words of Texas Department of Public Safety Director Col. Steve McCraw. Eva Mireles later died from her injuries.

Officers would not ultimately breach the classroom and confront the shooter until 12:50 p.m., approximately an hour and 15 minutes after law enforcement first entered the building. It is impossible to say how many lives could have been saved by more decisive action on the part of police. The shooter fired sporadically while the hundreds of law enforcement officers outside dithered.

This is not the first time that police have failed to respond adequately to a mass shooting. Law enforcement personnel failed to aggressively pursue mass shooters during the Columbine and Parkland shootings, and failures in intelligence and organization prolonged the Las Vegas and Orlando shootings, as well.

But most mass shootings aren’t stopped by police at all: According to the New York Times, out of a sample size of 433 “active shooter” events, fewer than half (184) were ended by police. Of those, 53 were ended by acts of the assailants after police arrived (i.e., suicide or surrender), meaning that only around 30 percent of active shooter attacks studied by the Times were ended by police using direct force against an armed attacker.

While it is not the case that police never respond quickly or well to mass shootings (see, for example the Dayton, Ohio shooting in 2019), there is a dissonance between the heroic warrior-cop persona and the realities of police intervention. Even the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety called Uvalde an “abject failure.”

There are always gaps between a persona and reality, between marketing and the truth of the thing being marketed. But this superficial inconsistency—between the warrior-cop persona and failures of police to apply appropriate force in situations that require it—masks a deeper and more troubling consistency: Failures of the type seen at Uvalde are a natural result of the warrior-cop ethos and paradigm.

In his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Man?,” Phil Christman characterizes the experience of masculinity as that of an “abstract rage to protect.” Christman’s prototypical example is the man who spends all his time worrying about how to protect his family from sudden, cinematic violence while often failing to protect them from life’s more mundane exigencies—the sort that require “holding down a hated but necessary job, cleaning the toilet,” and so forth. He demands honor and obeisance from his family out of respect for his calling to throw himself on a grenade or shoot a home intruder should the occasion arise, yet he never seems to help with the dishes. Call this, perhaps, the priority of the violent speculative.

I can think of no better definition for the warrior-cop ethos, unless it is perhaps to add the word “fearful” to Christman’s characterization. (And fear is a consistent presence in Christman’s account: In the next paragraph of his piece, he summarizes Norah Vincent’s findings after going around in drag for a year to experience male sociality firsthand: “Every social encounter between men is potentially a fistfight.”) More than anything else, the warrior-cop ethos teaches police officers to be afraid. Every traffic stop should be treated as an armed standoff because any person pulled over for a broken taillight could be packing an assault rifle and a longing for death, as a writer for one police industry website argues. Failure to exude a sufficient “command presence” can get an officer killed, argues another. The first rule of law enforcement is to “get home at the end of the shift,” and it is “better to be judged by 12 than carried by six.” Consider the “I feared for my life” language that follows nearly every police shooting. For the officer who aspires to be a warrior cop, Christman’s logic of masculinity takes a heightened form: Every social encounter is potentially a shootout.

Giving himself over to this “abstract, fearful rage to protect” changes the way an officer imagines the public he is meant to serve: It is now full of “predators” and “violent offenders,” bad actors who could be waiting in ambush behind any door or window. The warrior cop’s wars are defined abstractly—he is enlisted in a fight against “crime” and “drugs”—and this gives his beat a haunted quality. The tragic eventuality is that he shoots people who pose him no threat, like Philando Castile. (It’s no coincidence that the officer who killed Castile had spent dozens of hours in one of Dave Grossman’s trainings just a few years prior.)

In my time as a public defender in rural Minnesota, I have reviewed hundreds of hours of body-cam and dash-cam footage of police interactions with the public. Though I have not witnessed police responses to mass shootings, what I have seen are countless examples of officers mistreating the people they detain and then citing their fear of those people as justification for the mistreatment. I have seen officers cite personal safety concerns as a basis for warrantless searches of person, property, and vehicles. I have seen an officer pull a hyperventilating teenage shoplifter out of her car and gain “pain compliance” over her by squeezing her fingers together—citing her “verbal hostility” as proof of this act’s necessity. (The stolen property at issue in this case was a pack of Kraft singles.) I have seen officers breach a residence without a warrant to arrest a panicking, drunk, and mentally ill man, a figure well-known to the police, who was making ludicrous claims about having landmines on his property. I have seen police officers point Tasers at confused people simply because they did not immediately comply with all officer commands; their noncompliance raised a spectral fear of concealed weapons under their clothes.

All this is not to suggest that assaults on police never happen during traffic stops. I have had clients charged with assaulting a police officer. However, in all but one of those cases, the alleged assault consisted of spitting on the officer—by statute, a felony fourth-degree assault in Minnesota. In the remaining case, the alleged assault happened only after officers broke a window to bodily haul a woman out of her car; she allegedly kicked one of the officers in the ensuing struggle. (He’s fine.)

Real assaults on police do happen, though at vanishingly small rates. (One study suggests officers are feloniously killed in routine traffic stops at a rate of 1 in every 6.5 million stops and otherwise seriously injured at a rate of 1 in 361,111.) But the warrior-cop ethos takes the real risks of police work and stretches them into grotesque disproportion; the resulting fear primes officers to kill innocent civilians.

But while the warrior-cop ethos prepares police officers to be ready to kill their fellow citizens without hesitation if they feel threatened, it fails to produce the sort of courageous, battle-ready warriors who could actually make a difference during an episode of mass violence. Both critics and supporters of police would agree that the situation in Uvalde required trained officers to confront and subdue or kill the shooter as quickly as possible. The kitted-out, assault-weapon-wielding officers who swarmed Robb Elementary may have looked the part, but they waited in the wings instead of preventing the murder of children.

Again and again in his 2013 book, Balko quotes law enforcement officers talking about how much fun it is to play with military-grade hardware. Kicking down a door during a SWAT raid is a “huge rush.” Cops get “hooked on that jolt of energy” the raid provides. They seek military equipment to “look more fearsome.” “Why serve an arrest warrant to some crack dealer with a .38? With full armor, the right shit, and training, you can kick ass and have fun,” says a military officer training SWAT teams.

The sense of high-stakes fun is crucial to the warrior-cop paradigm’s appeal to actual cops. Look at the way the “killologist” Grossman and his ilk market their wares. A video trailer advertising Grossman’s “On Combat” course is filled with wartime imagery and authority-conferring references to Grossman’s military experience. A competitor, Pro Train Inc. (tagline: “Tactical Training for the Warrior Mindset”), offers a course called “Sun Tzu and the Warrior Resiliency Mindset.” Pro Train’s bombastic trailer is full of cinematic B-roll of samurai, knights, and Spartan warriors. (While most of the clips are taken from movies like 300 and 13 Assassins, at least one appears to come from the videogame Dark Souls.)

This is juvenile stuff, to be sure—but the silliness is not incidental. In fact, it’s central to the whole project.

Time and again, the abstract, fearful rage to protect generates fantasia of silliness. Christman mocks himself for fantasizing about fighting off terrorists so that his wife can get away, noting that “terrorist attacks are not frequent in Ann Arbor.” Meanwhile, the police department in Fargo—Fargo!—has an armored truck with a rotating turret. “If terrorists ever target Fargo, N.D., the local police will be ready,” the reporters write drily.

The idea of terrorism befalling Fargo may be grandiosely silly to us, but it’s a source of real worry—and personal justification—for the police officer driving the armored truck to serve a warrant to a suspected drug user. By inoculating against irony and critical self-awareness, the warrior-cop ethos achieves a secondary effect: After generalized fear comes unquestioning, self-serious fidelity. The emperor is always arrayed in beautiful clothes, and always will be. Be careful: Criticizing the emperor is an act of verbal hostility, which can only be corrected with pain compliance. Stop resisting.

The abuses I’ve seen all point to this aspect of the warrior-cop mentality, which is the source of its appeal and its fragility both. Instead of transforming police officers into soldiers—a task that would require an emphasis on discipline and the rules of engagement, as David French has repeatedly noted—the warrior-cop ethos is, primarily, about making police officers feel like badasses. A warrior cop can imagine that he is a samurai, a knight, a Spartan, vigilantly patrolling the bounds of his demesne. Pulling someone over for a broken taillight is boring; engaging the enemy in a controlled encounter is exciting. To adherents of the warrior-cop ideology, to point out the essential frivolity of these daydreams is to attack not only the warrior-cop ethos, but the idea of law and order itself. And only a hostile threat—a soldier belonging to the opposing army in the war against crime, a person who wants to kill cops—would do something like that.

The warrior cop is a tool for fascistic social control; a danger to the very people he is supposed to protect; and, too often, a failure in the rare instance—such as Uvalde—where a real warrior might be useful. The warrior-cop ethos is a cynical program of habituation to violence and an adolescent fantasy of power. Accepting its teachings for use in police department trainings amounts to a refusal to require those with the power of life and death in their hands to grow up. And because of this refusal, some Americans will never grow up.

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Police training trends toward the warrior not the community guardian

Despite this intense focus on the present and future of policing, one key component has remained woefully inadequate, according to a report from a prominent policing think tank: how new officers are trained, reports The Washington Post.

Training for recruits “presents an immediate crisis for policing,” according to the report from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post before its scheduled release Monday.

The report describes a system that, even after years of push and pull over change, is “built to train officers quickly and cheaply.” That system then hurries the new officers onto streets across the United States without helping them develop vital skills, including crisis intervention and communication, that they will need on the job, according to the report.

Police nationwide have faced criticism over how officers use force, with unrest and protests following cases in Cleveland, New York, Baton Rouge, Louisville, Atlanta and Ferguson, Mo., among other places. The new analysis of training is based in part on a survey of hundreds of law enforcement leaders conducted in 2020, during a period that encompassed the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic; the death of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of police in Minneapolis; and the ensuing wave of nationwide protests against police brutality amid a broader racial reckoning.

Policing has changed over the years, seizing on new technologies and adopting approaches including “community policing,” the report said, while officers are facing difficult challenges, among them increasingly powerful guns on the streets and people in crisis. But far too often, the report said, police are trained “to be warriors, even though their agencies and communities expect them also to be guardians, social workers, and community partners.”

Changing American policing, the report said, means starting with how new officers are instructed and embracing new approaches instead of holding on to outdated concepts.

“Do I think it’s changed in some places? Yes,” Chuck Wexler, the executive director of PERF, said of police training. “But do I think there’s been fundamental changes since the George Floyd murder? No.”

In a Washington Post-ABC News poll last year, more than half of respondents said they doubted police were adequately trained to avoid using excessive force. The new PERF report and some law enforcement experts say that training has improved in some ways, including an increase in how much time police are instructed, but that overall practices have not changed dramatically, owing to a combination of factors including a reliance on past practices and inertia.

Much like policing itself — which is scattered among more than 15,000 local departments and sheriff’s offices, most of them small agencies — training varies from place to place, with different requirements and obligations.

State commissions typically set their own standards for training, the report said, creating “vast differences” between the academies in different states, including how many hours they teach and the material presented. There are an estimated 700 or 800 police training academies nationwide, according to the PERF report, so “recruit training is splintered and inconsistent.” The report said nearly half of the academies are operated by colleges or technical schools, while a third are operated by local law enforcement agencies themselves.

In Dallas, the police academy lasts nine months and offers courses in interview techniques, asset forfeiture and foot pursuits; after the academy, the new officers spend six months in field training. Miami police undergo a six-month police academy program, while in Oklahoma City, the 28-week police academy includes instruction on constitutional law, self-defense and de-escalation, before recruits spend four to six months dispatched to field training.

In Atlanta, potential recruits are warned that the police academy could pose “the most challenging academic, emotional, physical and psychological undertaking you have ever experienced.”

The PERF report said police academies often devote a lot of time to preparing officers for dangerous encounters, including with armed people. While that is “critically important,” the report said, it is also vital for officers to learn skills such as how to communicate and engage with the community, things they will need “day-in and day-out for the routine encounters that will occupy the vast majority of their time.”

The report included other recommendations such as calling for a set of national standards and for departments to devote more money to training, which accounted for a fraction of the police budgets among agencies that responded to PERF’s survey. The report also calls for recruits to be taught more about the history of policing nationwide and locally “with a special emphasis on racial justice issues,” saying recruits need to learn how this history can “shape perceptions of the police today.”

Police instruction has changed over time, including the increase in hours spent in training, the report said. But that volume of training still falls short when compared with people in other jobs in the United States or police in other countries, the report said.

Police in the United States typically spend about 20 weeks in the academy, the report said, while recruits in Japan might spend up to 21 months training. Their peers in many European countries spend two to three years training.

“Look, it’s expensive to train someone for a year,” Wexler said. “But it’s far more expensive to not train them properly and see a situation handled badly. It can absolutely devastate a department and a city.”

Just ramping up the amount of training, Wexler said, is not the solution, even though that is often floated by officials amid controversies like uses of force.

“When police have faced a crisis, the conventional recommendation is inevitably more training,” Wexler said. “The reality is that more training may not necessarily be the answer to what the issue is.”

The report said there has not been enough research into what training actually works, calling on policing to invest in more to figure out “what works and what doesn’t in police recruit training.”

Ian Adams, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, said he believes the training offered today is better than it used to be, but he said it is important to understand what types of training work best.

“I know it’s tempting to say, well, if we just put officers through 10 more hours of X training, then we should get Y results,” said Adams, a former police officer.

But, he said, “the evidence doesn’t say that. Because we haven’t put the necessary resources into understanding what training would actually accomplish the outcomes we want.”

The PERF report said training academies should avoid taking a “paramilitary approach,” potentially merge with others to create consistency in what new officers are taught, and welcome input from members of the community, among other suggested changes.

The report also touches on why, despite all the pleas to rethink policing, training remains behind the times in many places. “At many academies,” the report said, instruction “is based largely on what has been taught in the past.” New laws, department policies and other practices in law enforcement, the report said, are not always added promptly to the instruction.

In many cases, the report continued, academies “seem to rely almost exclusively on current or retired law enforcement officers to develop their training curricula,” even though these people lack backgrounds in designing course instruction.

David J. Thomas, a retired Florida police officer, said he feels like “there’s still not enough” instruction for new officers. Police get trained in things like how to use firearms and defensive tactics, Thomas said, but the instruction falls short when it comes to things like how to treat members of the community or respond to people in crisis.

“I don’t think the curriculum’s changed enough to meet the needs of the people that we’re serving,” said Thomas, a professor at Florida Gulf Coast University.

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MCN/USATODAY NETWORK: ‘Goodbye and good luck’

Matthew T. Mangino
MCN/USATODAY NETWORK
May 24, 2021

Eight years ago I wrote my first column for what was GateHouse Media. Over those years, GateHouse expanded to include More Content Now and many more local newspapers. I have had the pleasure of writing 406 columns.

This is the end of the line - More Content Now ends its run this weekend. In this final column, I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned observing the criminal justice system over the years.

First, the criminal justice system is nuanced and complicated. It is also overused - from our schools to our homes and criminal statutes that don’t even require intent to get a conviction - people today are at the greatest risk in the history of this country to encounter the criminal justice system.

Unfortunately, there is little consistency in policy and lawmaking from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Unlike the medical profession where diagnostic and treatment procedures are very similar nationwide, no such national consensus exists in the criminal justice system.

This hodge-podge of lawmaking may be best exemplified by the death penalty. More than 23 states have abandoned the death penalty. Ten states never adopted state-sponsored death after 1976 in what has become known as the modern era of the death penalty. Since then, 13 more states have outlawed the death penalty and three states have in place moratoriums on executions.

Yet, the federal government which has the death penalty on the books, and hadn’t carried out and execution in 17 years prior to July 2020, executed 10 people right up to end of President Donald Trump’s term.

There are roughly 2,553 men and women on death row. In the last five years 91 people have been executed. The death penalty has become arbitrary in the way executions are carried out.

The militarization of the police has exploded into a serious problem in the United States. During the process of creating quasi-military police units, law enforcement officers have evolved from peacekeepers to warriors.

The mentality of “us vs. them” has created police officers who believe the end justifies the means. Claims of excessive force continue to rise; racial profiling is a statistical reality and police officers kill on average 1,000 civilians per year.

The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police office ignited the nation, and world for that matter, in a movement to hold bad cops accountable. There are efforts underway in countless states to reform things like limited immunity, monetary bail and mandatory minimum sentences.

Qualified immunity provides the often ridiculous barriers that litigants must get through to bring a civil rights action against a police officer. Monetary bail is a growing problem. Many men and women sit in jail awaiting trial simply because they cannot afford bond. This scenario often puts defendants in the unenviable position of taking a plea or continuing to sit in jail. Finally, mandatory minimum sentences, relics from the “tough on crime” era, don’t reduce recidivism and precludes judges from imposing mitigating sentences based on individual facts and circumstances.

We all need to be vigilant in the fight to abandon the policies of a generation of “lock’em up” politicos whose agenda has had a horrific impact on juveniles - often, underprivileged juveniles of color.

The “lock’em up” crusade of the 1990s has been slowly unraveling. Dating back to 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roper v. Simmons, outlawing the death penalty for juveniles, the Supreme Court has offered up a series of decisions limiting juvenile culpability. In Graham v. Florida, the court ruled that life without parole can only be imposed for a juvenile convicted of murder.

In Miller v. Alabama, the high court ruled states cannot sentence a juvenile to mandatory life without parole. In Montgomery v. Alabama the court went further and found that a trial judge may not sentence a juvenile to life without parole without a find of “incorrigibility.”

However, this past month, for the first time in 16 years the newly realigned U.S Supreme Court took a step backward on juvenile culpability. The court essentially reversed its finding in Montgomery and ruled that a judge need not find incorrigibility for a life sentence, the court judge need only consider sentences other than life without parole.

My admonishment to you: pay close attention. The tide may be turning in the judiciaries’ view of reform. Emphasizing punishment over rehabilitation will be bad news for those caught up in the criminal justice system and those who have to flip the tab - taxpayers.

Thanks for reading.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Opportunity for more Congressional oversight for DHS

Even before DHS deployed its military-styled law enforcement personnel into the streets of Portland, Oregon, more robust congressional oversight of the department was long overdue, reported Just Security. 

In the 18 years since its creation, DHS has ballooned: It operates with a $50 billion budget and has a workforce of more than 240,000 employees. It is also the country’s largest law enforcement agency, with over 60,000 law enforcement officers. And its activities have grown in parallel, so that they are now substantially out of sync with its statutory mandate. For instance, Homeland Security Investigations, a component of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), claims the authority to investigate literally any federal crime.

Oversight and accountability of this massive department have lagged far behind. The agency’s sheer size and its sprawling, diverse missions have hobbled effective internal oversight. The secretary’s office is too small (and, in the current administration, too politically pliable) to conduct adequate supervision. Internal controls, guidelines, and coordinating mechanisms are often lacking or woefully insufficient.

Oversight by congressional committees has also been difficult for two reasons. First, jurisdiction over the department is spread across more than 100 committees and subcommittees, creating competition, confusion, and gaps in coverage. That’s why consolidating congressional oversight of DHS remains the most important recommendation of the 9/11 Commission that has never been implemented. Second, the political dialogue concerning immigration and border security specifically has become so polarized that bipartisan cooperation on DHS oversight has been severely strained.

The DHS’ trend toward lawlessness is on full display in Portland. Videos captured by bystanders show unidentified federal agents, dressed in camouflage, conducting arrests and detentions that look more like kidnapping than law enforcement. Agents are routinely using tear gas and have fired rubber bullets at members of the press. And they appear to have gone far beyond their remit to protect federal facilities, encroaching on state police powers and the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Even the U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, an officer in Trump’s own Department of Justice, referred agents’ conduct for further investigation by the DHS Office of Inspector General.

Given this state of affairs, there is no excuse for Congress to rush through another multi-billion-dollar appropriation for the department. Before any funds are made available, Congress should conduct some of the oversight that’s been missing to date.

Congress should start by holding hearings to demand answers about the conduct of DHS agents in Portland (one such hearing is already scheduled for this Friday, but House leadership is still planning to move forward with DHS appropriations in the interim). But it should not stop there. Congress should insist that the president fulfill his constitutional responsibility to nominate a DHS secretary, a position that has been filled by “acting” secretaries since April 2019. It should require the department to develop, modernize and, to the extent consistent with national security, publish operational guidelines ensuring that the department’s law enforcement activities are conducted with appropriate care for constitutional rights and clear channels of accountability. It should commission a thorough outside review of the legal authorities and activities of Homeland Security Investigations. These actions can then inform, not only any conditions or limitations that Congress might want to place on funding, but additional legislative reforms to tackle the department’s many problems.

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GateHouse: Federal law enforcement exercising ‘proactive’ arrests

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

July 24, 2020

Where is the outrage? The federal government has assembled a secret police force to confront, attack and arrest people for exercising their First Amendment rights. Under the guise of protecting monuments, statues and federal property the White House has declared war on American citizens.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said his agents are now “proactively” arresting people. What? How do you proactively arrest someone? People who are accused of a crime have due process rights. What rights do people have who have been arrested without committing a crime? No one knows, because in this country - until now - people who have not been accused of a crime could not be “proactively” arrested. In other words, in America we don’t arrest people before they’ve done something wrong.

Even GOP Sen. Rand Paul has condemned the incursion of federal agents in Portland, Oregon. He wrote in an op-ed for Reason Magazine, “While I respect the determination to preserve law and order, sending in federal forces to quell civil unrest in Portland further distorts the boundaries, results in more aggression and has led to reports we should never hear in a free country: federal officials, dressed in camouflage, snatching protesters away in unmarked vehicles.”

Oregon’s governor and Portland’s mayor along with other state and local officials have demanded the federal government withdraw the unidentified officers, purportedly wearing military gear and using unmarked vehicles.

Protests in Portland have continued for more than 50 consecutive nights. According to the Washington Post, “Videos of federal officers pelting protesters with less-lethal impact munitions like rubber bullets and exploding pepper balls, shooting tear gas into city streets and launching stun grenades into crowds have captured millions of views on social media and incensed local lawmakers.”

Now, the president has sent federal law enforcement into Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico. As John L. Micek, editor-in-chief of the online Pennsylvania Capital-Star recently wrote, “That’s not what a democratically elected president does. Rather, they’re the thuggish tactics of a bargain basement Mussolini, a leader who doesn’t care how many of our institutions or norms he torches, just as long as he, and his spectacularly corrupt and incompetent clan, can cling to power.”

Harsh words, but who can argue? This isn’t about crime or unrest - it is about politics. As the White House laments the out-of-control violence, David Abrams, a University of Pennsylvania law and economics professor, told NPR that Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Chicago have all experienced a drop in crime of more than 30%. Violent crimes such as aggravated assaults and robberies also fell substantially.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, the nation’s first Secretary of Homeland Security and recipient of the Bronze Star in Vietnam - who also happens to be a Republican - said recently, “it would be a cold day in hell,” before he’d allow “uninvited” federal forces into one of his cities.

“Arrests require probable cause that a federal crime had been committed, that is, specific information indicating that the person likely committed a federal offense, or a fair probability that the person committed a federal offense,” Orin Kerr, a professor at University of California at Berkeley Law School, told The Post.

Protest, dissent, even raucous political rhetoric has never been probable cause for arrest - at least not in the United States of America.

Michael Dorf a professor at Cornell University told The Associated Press, ”(F)ederal authorities are going to swoop in and do whatever they want to do without any cooperation and coordination with state and local authorities is extraordinary outside the context of a civil war.”

A frightening thought, but again who can argue? With a void in leadership, millions of Americans out of work, an out-of-control pandemic and racial tensions not seen in half-a-century anything is possible.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.

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John Micek: Donald Trump has seen the enemy — and it is us

And on our streets, as they have for months, a multiracial, multigenerational, gender-spanning coalition of Americans have continued to march, calling for change, demanding better of a country whose status as a beacon of hope to the world is looking dimmer and dimmer all the time, writes John L. Micek for the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

Rather than move forward with the rest of the nation, President Donald Trump's White House is getting ready to expand its undeclared war against Americans to Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities -- all run by Democratic mayors, and over their objections -- in the supposed guise of restoring order and protecting federal property.

In reality, these federal officers yanking protesters off the street have exceeded their authority into blatantly unconstitutional territory. They're no longer protecting courthouses or federal buildings. In a campaign worthy of Pinochet's Chile, they're detaining people exercising their First Amendment rights.

Indeed, acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said his agents are now "proactively" arresting people, the Washington Post reported, sparing us such tedious notions as due process, or even probable cause. 

Those aren't the actions of a president boldly leading his people in the face of a shaky economy and the greatest public health threat in a century; one that has, without mercy or discrimination, claimed the lives of more than 140,000 Americans. They're the machinations of a coward who so disdains dissent; who so fears defeat, that he's turning the full strength and security apparatus of the state against his own people.

That's not what a democratically elected president does. Rather, they're the thuggish tactics of a bargain basement Mussolini, a leader who doesn't care how many of our institutions or norms he torches, just as long as he, and his spectacularly corrupt and incompetent clan, can cling to power.     

In Philadelphia, the cradle of American democracy, Black leaders said they fear that federal law enforcement will target the city's Black residents. That's not mere rhetoric. It's practically a statistical guarantee in a city that is overwhelmingly Black.

"These troops could be more useful finding the gun-runners that are flooding our community with guns, flooding our community with drugs, flooding our community with every other measure that makes our life chances diminished," Rodney Muhammad, the president of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP, said during a Wednesday news conference, according to our partners. at the Philadelphia Tribune.

That is now the ostensible purpose of the operations in Chicago and Albuquerque. But now, thanks to DHS's Wolf, we now know how these agents intend to operate.

And we've long known what Trump thinks of Black people.

In a dog whistle to his supporters that's actually a bullhorn, he's said Democrats and Joe Biden are intent on "destroying the suburbs." A campaign commercial featuring an elderly white woman fearfully calling 911 unsubtly hammers home the real message. She's not quaking because there are white kids at the front door.

And in separate news stories, we've learned that Trump's niece, Mary Trump and former lawyer Michael Cohen, in an unpublished manuscript, allege that President Trump used racial epithets. This isn't news coming from a president who thinks the developing world is filled with "s**thole" countries.

And by executive fiat, as the Capital-Star's Cassie Miller reported this week, the White House has said undocumented immigrants can't be used for congressional apportionment -- a move that serves the disgusting dual purpose of both marginalizing people of color and diminishing the representation of urban Americans in areas that tend to be Democratic strongholds.

At a news conference Wednesday, Trump said he might or might not wait for local officials to ask for help. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney has told him to stay away.

Former Gov. Tom Ridge, a former Homeland Security czar, has said "it'd be a cold day in hell," before he'd allow "uninvited" federal forces into one of his cities. Will Trump listen, and stick with the tradition of nonintervention without local invitation? The evidence is not encouraging.

Meanwhile, a record 69 percent of Americans say they believe Black and Brown Americans are denied equal treatment in the criminal justice system, and nearly an identical amount (63 percent) support Black Lives Matter, according to a new ABC News poll.

And a majority of Americans. (52 percent) support the removal of Confederate monuments, according to a June Quinnipiac University poll. Trump, meanwhile, remains a staunch defenders of the symbols of racism and treason.

The trend lines in both polls have moved in an upward trajectory, even as Trump and his supporters, with the silent acquiescence of Republicans on Capitol Hill, have tried to move the country ever backward, into a past where Blacks were discriminated against; LGBTQ Americans were rendered invisible, and women weren't supposed to work outside the home.

That America is gone. And no matter how many skulls Trump tries to crack, it's not coming back. America is leaving a sad and scared man behind.

But the fight isn't over. With Trump signaling that he may not accept the results of the November election, it will take all of us, rising up and speaking with one voice, that his time is gone. 

Because that's the way actual democracies work.

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