The Trump Administration Is Losing The Support Of Local Law Enforcement

from the not-until-every-bridge-is-burned dept

The thing with an invasion is that it makes enemies of everyone being invaded, even those who may nominally support the end goal. Law enforcement officers and officials are no exception, especially when they see the invading force creating problems they shouldn’t be expected to solve.

Trump has treated multiple American cities like war zones. Of course, they’ve always been cities overseen by members of the Democratic party, which actually makes this a lot worse, since it shows everyone — including local law enforcement — that this isn’t actually about enforcing laws.

This dates all the way back to Trump sending National Guard troops to Los Angeles to assist with handling what the administration constantly referred to as “violent protests,” despite all evidence to the contrary. Law enforcement officials made it clear they could handle the protests that were happening and that adding National Guard units to the hundreds of federal officers would only make things worse.

And, of course, that’s exactly what happened. This has repeated itself in every city this regime has invaded. When local cops bristle at the incursion or officials make it clear they don’t feel obligated to finish the fights the fed’s roving gang of kidnappers pick, the administration claims the representatives of the cities it’s invaded just don’t love America enough.

None of that ultimately matters. The administration will continue to treat every complaint as sedition and every protester as a terrorist. Its officers will go far beyond what any pack of rogue cops would dare to do — past bending or breaking rules to simply acting as though there are no rules at all.

Here’s how that’s working out in the locales most recently invaded by federal forces:

Some local and state law-enforcement leaders who have seen the agency’s tactics up close are voicing concerns that agents have strayed from the administration’s stated focus on public-safety threats.

In Maine, Sheriff Kevin Joyce was among the local law-enforcement officials who met with border czar Tom Homan nearly a year ago to hear the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement priority: the removal of people with serious criminal records. 

It was a mission the 39-year law-enforcement veteran could support.

But on Thursday, Joyce publicly issued blistering criticism of federal agents, accusing ICE of “bush-league policing” after he said they detained one of his corrections officers, a migrant authorized to work in the U.S., on a roadside in Portland, Maine.

In Minnesota, it’s even worse. Federal officers have executed two Minneapolis residents in broad daylight (and wounded another). In both cases, local law enforcement was told it was not allowed to investigate these shootings.

After a federal agent shot and killed a man on Saturday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said he was told over the radio his local officers weren’t needed.

O’Hara ordered his officers not to leave the crime scene. He then requested the state’s top criminal investigators take the case, but when Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators arrived they were blocked by federal Homeland Security officers, the bureau said.

[…]

It was the first time Evans could recall state investigators with jurisdiction over a crime scene being denied access by federal officers.

“We’re in uncharted territory here,” he said. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

That’s fucked up. This isn’t any better:

Regular citizens aren’t the only ones complaining to police about ICE. On Tuesday, several police chiefs in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area held an unusual press conference: They said federal agents had stopped, along with local residents, some off-duty police officers “for no cause” and asked them to prove their citizenship.

Mark Bruley, the police chief of Brooklyn Park, a Minneapolis suburb, said chiefs had received “endless complaints” and that off-duty police officers—all people of color—had experienced the same treatment. In one case, he said, one of his officers was stopped as she drove past ICE. The agents boxed her in, knocked her phone from her hand when she tried to record them, and had their guns drawn, he said.

“If it’s happening to our officers, it pains me to think of how many of our community members it is happening to every day,” Bruley said.

Even if the administration can see what’s happening, it’s fifty-fifty whether it recognizes the danger of what it is and just doesn’t care or is simply too brutish to see the future it’s creating.

The administration complains about sanctuary cities and demands every law enforcement agency serve its needs, no matter what nastiness it chooses to engage in. But not every law enforcement official (along with many of the people who work for them) is interested in damaging whatever long-term relationships they might have built with the communities they serve just because the federal government wants some fuck buddies while it’s in town.

And none of this is going to go away, no matter how many times violent stooges like (suddenly former) Border Patrol head Greg Bovino says blatantly untrue things during press conferences:

“Everything we do every day is legal, ethical, moral, well-grounded in law.” 

Not a single word of that is true. And the cops you expect to back you up when you engage in illegal, immoral, or unethical actions aren’t interested in helping you dig yourself out of your own holes. DHS components no longer engage in good faith with law enforcement when hunting down migrants. Nor do they cooperate with the locals when they have questions about agents’ actions.

Administration leaders think the country serves the federal government, rather than the other way around. And as often as cops can be just as awful as these federal interlopers, at least there’s a modicum of oversight still in operation that might occasionally deter, if not actually punish, wrongdoing by officers. None of that exists at the federal level. Federal officers aren’t expected to answer to anyone and they know it. That much is obvious from their everyday behavior.

But the federal government needs the support of local law enforcement, especially one that thinks it’s going to be able to oppress its way out of any situation it puts itself in. Losing the rank-and-file is something a lot of GOP legislators can’t afford, not with the midterms coming up. This party is poison and even those you’d expect to have the administration’s back are beginning to back away from America’s most toxic asset as quickly as possible.

Filed Under: border patrol, cbp, dhs, gregory bovino, kristi noem, law enforcement, maine, mass deportation, minnesota, pam bondi, rights violations, trump administration