COMMENTARY: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) lacks transparency, a use-of-force policy that prioritizes human life, and adequate internal affairs staffing to prevent corruption and abuse.
Courtesy photo
Brian Erickson
These were the conclusions drawn in a Homeland Security Advisory Council report highlighted July 11 by the El Paso Times.
The most important takeaway from this report, however, should be that every time peer law enforcement experts get an inside look at CBP, the results are alarming.
The recommendations in this report — particularly reforms to uses of force — mirror recommendations made in February 2013 by another panel of police experts, the Police Executive Research Forum.
Why the resistance?
This begs the question: Why is our nation’s largest police force so resistant to implementing law enforcement best practices?
For example, CBP continues to provide its officers gaping exceptions to racially profile.
Border Patrol doesn’t document or publicly report any data, aggregated by demographics, on stops and searches not resulting in arrests. Doing so would bring CBP in line with a key recommendation from the Task Force on 21st Century Policing and restore community trust.
CBP’s lack of transparency extends to complaints, investigations and data regarding use of force.
Even after the agency promised greater transparency, it recently announced it would take no action against agents who used deadly force in nearly every single one of the 67 cases reviewed by PERF, which may include cases where PERF concluded that agents fired their weapons out of “frustration.”
CBP’s former head of internal affairs, James F. Tomsheck, called one-fourth of the 28 shooting deaths he reviewed since January 2010 “highly suspect” and added that CBP distorted facts to cover up wrongdoing.
Furthermore, data on uses of force and assaults often lack detail or definitions for meaningful analysis to check the accuracy of CBP claims.
The Arizona Republic’s analysis of existing data found in January 2015 that assaults against Border Patrol “fell sharply in fiscal 2014, for the sixth year in a row,” which is contrary to CBP’s claims.
In its January 2014 report, The Republic noted that Border Patrol agents in Arizona were far less likely than local police to be assaulted at all or with dangerous weapons.
There also can be no denying the seriousness of this advisory council’s conclusion that CBP arrests per capita for corruption exceed other federal agencies.
A Politico Magazine investigation in December 2014 found that “between 2005 and 2012, nearly one CBP officer was arrested for misconduct every single day.” By 2014, the FBI’s McAllen office saw Border Patrol agents as their number one priority for criminal investigations.
Implement best practices
To be clear, we want Border Patrol agents to go home to their families safe and uninjured after every shift. We agree that dialogue and engagement helps find common ground.
Since October 2012, the ACLU has urged CBP to adopt body-worn cameras, paired with privacy protections, as a win-win that helps protect the public from excessive use of force while also exonerating officers from false complaints.
We also believe, as does the advisory council’s report, that CBP must instill in officers the same level of reverence for life, human dignity, and its preservation when they view the community.
CBP should follow the lead of fellow law enforcement experts and implement police best practices: ban racial profiling, implement data collection, and transparently report to the public both the trends and their efforts to hold agents accountable in individual cases.
Anything short of embracing systemic police reforms would suggest our nation’s largest police force refuses to answer to anyone at a time when police departments nationwide are prioritizing trust and accountability to the communities they serve.