Federal agents, leaders defy practices honed by police for decades
Drawing on decades of experience after dealing with the beating of Rodney King, the killing of George Floyd and more, U.S. law enforcement officials, civil rights advocates and other legal experts have perfected best practices for officers making arrests on the street, controlling crowds and ensuring public safety in the midst of mass protests.
Officers are trained not to stand in front of or reach for moving vehicles, never draw their firearms unless absolutely necessary, and only use force proportionate to a corresponding threat. They are trained to identify themselves clearly, ease tensions, respect the sanctity of life and quickly come to the aid of any injured person.
When police shootings occur, leaders are trained to carefully protect evidence and immediately launch an investigation – or several – to assure the community that any potential wrongdoing by police officers will be fairly evaluated.
According to many of these same leaders and experts, it has become increasingly clear in recent days that these standards have been ignored – if not set aside entirely – by federal immigration agents who are invading American cities on orders from President Trump and the administration officials charged with overseeing the operations.
Whether in minor, increasingly routine ways, or in sudden, stunning bursts — like the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis — officers have seriously violated these standards, experts said, and without any apparent concern or investigative oversight from the administration.
Officers enter homes without warrants, swarm moving vehicles on the street, and escalate clashes with protesters using excessive force, while department heads and administration officials justify their actions with simple, brash rhetoric rather than careful, sophisticated investigations.
“It’s a terrible disappointment,” said former Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore. “These tactics – if you call them that – are far out of touch with contemporary policing standards. »
“This is not about law enforcement, it’s about terrorism enforcement,” said Connie Rice, a longtime civil rights attorney who has worked on LAPD reforms for decades. “They don’t respect any laws, any training. It’s just brutality.”
“They use excessive force against suspects and protesters, they detain and arrest people without lawful cause, they violate the 1st Amendment rights of protesters and observers,” said Paul Butler, a Georgetown law professor and former federal prosecutor.
“These types of tactics ultimately harm all law enforcement, not just federal law enforcement, even though states and local governments have not asked for and, frankly, moved away from these types of tactics for years, recognizing that they undermine trust in communities and ultimately harm their public safety mission,” said Vanita Gupta, associate attorney general under President Biden and head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under the president. Obama.
The White House said Trump “does not want any American to lose their life in the streets,” believes what happened to Pretti was “a tragedy” and called for an “honorable and honest investigation.” But administration officials also defended the immigration crackdown and the federal agents involved, accusing protesters of interfering with law enforcement operations and accusing critics of putting agents in danger. However, many of those critics said it’s the tactics that put officers in danger.
Gupta said Trump’s immigration surge “deeply tests the critical partnerships” that local, state and federal law enforcement agencies typically have with each other, and puts local leaders in an “incredibly difficult position” in their communities.
“State and local leaders need to spend 365 days a year building trust in their communities and establishing legitimacy…and along comes this wave of federal agents acting out of control in their communities and creating very dangerous conditions on the ground,” Gupta said. “That’s why you’re seeing more and more chefs and former chefs speaking out.”
Moore said these tactics “unnecessarily expose these officers to harm, physical harm, result in an emotional response and lose legitimacy with the very public that they claim to be there to protect as an agency.”
Problems on the ground
Good was fatally shot while trying to walk away from a chaotic scene involving federal agents. The Trump administration said the officer who shot him was at risk of being run over. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Good, 37, without evidence, of being a “domestic terrorist.”
Experts questioned why the group of officers swarmed Good’s vehicle, why the officer who fired positioned himself in front of him and whether the officer was actually at risk of being hit given that Good was turning his steering wheel away from him. They particularly questioned his subsequent shots into the vehicle as it passed him.
According to police best practices, officers should never shoot at moving vehicles except in urgent circumstances, and are trained to avoid putting themselves in harm’s way. “You don’t put yourself in that position because you have the option of just writing down the license plate number and going to arrest them later if you think they violated the law,” said Carol Sobel, a Los Angeles civil rights attorney who has led police reform for decades.
Moore said he was trained in the 1980s to avoid engaging in moving vehicles, but “40 years later you see not just one but multiple opportunities to resort to these tactics” from immigration agents.
Pretti was fatally shot after trying to protect a woman who was violently pushed to the ground by an immigration officer who was also spraying a chemical irritant. The Trump administration said Pretti owned a gun and the officers acted in self-defense. Without evidence, Noem claimed that Pretti, also 37, was “attacking” agents and “brandishing” the gun, while White House adviser Stephen Miller claimed that Pretti “attempted to assassinate federal agents.”
Experts questioned why the officers were so aggressive toward the woman Pretti was trying to help, and why they responded so violently — with a burst of gunfire — when he was surrounded by officers, on the ground and already unarmed.
Moore said the officer who shoved the woman appeared to be using “brute force rather than efforts to create de-escalation,” and that spraying irritants is never appropriate to deal with “passive resistance,” which appears to be what the woman and Pretti were involved in.
In both shootings, experts also questioned why officers wore masks and did not render aid, and lamented the immediate rush by Trump administration officials to judgment.
Gupta said the immigration officers’ tactics were “inconsistent” with local, state and federal policing standards and “offensive to all the work that has been done” to establish those standards.
Bernard Parks, another former Los Angeles police chief, said videos of the two incidents and other recent immigration raids clearly show that officers were “completely untrained” for the operation, which he called “ill-conceived, ill-trained” with a “complete lack of common sense and decency.”
Ed Obayashi, an expert on police use of force, said that while the officers’ actions in both shootings are under investigation, it is “obvious” that Trump administration officials did not follow best practices in conducting those investigations.
“The scenes were contaminated, I didn’t see any evidence or standard investigative protocols, like freezing the scene, checking witnesses, canvassing the neighborhood, responding to supervisors to try to determine what happened,” he said.
The way forward
Last week, California joined other Democratic-led states in challenging the crackdown in Minneapolis in court, arguing that Noem’s department “launched an extraordinary campaign of recklessness and disregard for the norms of constitutional policing and the sanctity of life.”
On Sunday, the Assn. International. of police chiefs, who played a central role in establishing modern policing standards in the United States, said she believes “effective public safety depends on comprehensive training, investigative integrity, respect for the rule of law, and strong coordination among federal, state, and local partners,” and called on the White House to convene those partners for “policy-level discussions aimed at identifying a constructive path forward.”
On Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta reminded California law enforcement that they have the right to investigate federal agents for violations of state law.
Gupta said the Trump administration failed to investigate fatal shootings by federal agents while “coaching” local and state officials, which suggested “impunity” for agents and “put the country in a very dangerous place” — and state investigators should be allowed to investigate.
Butler said the situation would certainly improve if agents began adhering to modern policing standards, but that problems would persist as long as Trump continued to require immigration agents to arrest thousands of people every day.
“There is simply no kind, gentle way,” he said, “to take thousands of people off the streets every day.” »
