Whether It Is ICE or Local Police, the U.S. Has Normalised Anti-Democratic Law Enforcement Practices

The Grotesque Excesses of ICE Sit Within the Broader Context of Police Brutality

If you are not feeling something close to heartbreak this week, you haven’t been paying attention. Trump’s illegal attack on Venezuela and then the killing in broad daylight of Renee Good https://www.startribune.com/she-was-an-amazing-human-being-mother-identifies-woman-shot-killed-by-ice-agent/601559922 , a 37 year-old mom by an ICE agent in Minneapolis are precisely the kind of “it will get worse before it gets better” events so many have warned about. We are not in a good place, and the feeling of it all at the start of a New Year is something like grief.

But many of us are also feeling something like anger and frustration too. Several weeks ago in my piece “Is It Too Late?” https://sherrilyn.substack.com/p/is-it-too-late I wrote about some of the frustration I and many others are feeling at watching the actions of ICE and Border Patrol. I wrote:

Black people warned of the dangers of law enforcement impunity, taking to the streets regularly between 2014 and 2020, relentlessly fighting for real change in policing. We were joined in 2020 by millions of young white people who marched with us. We warned of the dangers of militarized law enforcement in communities. But politicians weaponized calls to “defund the police” (police budgets actually increased in most places) to cow Democrats into abandoning police accountability as a critical issue.

Now the scourge of unaccountable, brutal, and racist law enforcement, armed for war, has metastasized into the creation of a militarized presidential police force that roams our cities targeting peaceful, hardworking residents at will.

Every inhumane and infuriating excess we see on videos today committed by ICE and border patrol agents, is mirrored in the hundreds of videos of police officers engaging in similar racial profiling, violent attacks, and unwarranted detention of Black people over the past 20 years.

I recount this not to press sour grapes. I raise all of this to warn us against the kind of thinking and discourse that has too often slowed us down, and that has diverted ordinary, democracy-committed Americans from fully understanding the nature of the danger our republic has long faced.

Yes, oppressive systems like authoritarianism and white supremacy slow us down by keeping us in an endless loop, never connecting the dots, resurfacing the same arguments and tropes, and treating each era, episode, or incident of oppression as independent and separate. In this way, we are always starting from the zero, and we never develop enough traction to effectively counter the weight of the oppressive tactics lodged against us.

The past few days I have engaged with people who have admonished me to refrain from referring to ICE as “law enforcement”; who have insisted that they are “not like police because they are not trained,”; who have insisted that the ICE officer who shot and killed Ms. Good in broad daylight, now identified as Jonathan Ross was “not trained” (in fact he was a highly-trained experienced officer). Others have suggested that Ross should not be held accountable for “a split-second decision.” Trump supporters have insisted that Ms. Good tried to “ram the officer with her car.” The Vice President of the United States called Good’s death “a tragedy of her own making.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem called the incident one of “domestic terrorism.”

This all felt mind-numbingly familiar. All of these arguments were deployed routinely in one form or another in the flurry of high-profile cases caught on video of police officers killing unarmed Black men from 2013-2020. Whether in the case of George Floyd, who was murdered not far from where Ms. Good was killed, or Philando Castile, who was also killed in the Twin Cities while sitting in his car with his fiancée’ and her four-year-old daughter, or Samuel DuBose, who was killed in his car in Cincinnati after being approached by an officer and then shot at point blank range as he attempted to drive away. The officer said he was being “dragged” when DuBose started to drive away. The video of the incident showed that the officer was not dragged, or Walter Scott who was pulled over in his car in North Charleston, South Carolina, and then shot five times in the back as he fled by Officer Michael Slager.

And there are others. Too many others.

The culture of deference to official police narratives, and the same structures of cruelty, of excess, and of impunity that have been allowed to flourish in so many police departments in Black and Latino communities, is the same cultural thread that allows ICE to behave the way they do. And we should confront it as a united front with all of the power and armed with the lessons we have learned from those longstanding struggles.

Allowing law enforcement officers to act with excessive force, brutality, disrespect for the community and, most of all, impunity is a threat to democracy. It was a threat to democracy when permitted by local law enforcement in Baltimore, and New York, and North Charleston. And it is a threat to democracy when committed by federal law enforcement agents in Minneapolis.

That so many failed to see the policing crisis when Black men and women were the victims as a democracy issue during the most volatile years of policing reform efforts is key to understanding what often slows down progressive strategy and alliances.

What I am saying is this: the opportunity of this terrible, terrible moment is the chance for us to see that in this country, to paraphrase Dr. King, we are knit together “in a single garment of destiny ” And that the threads that are first forcefully unraveled from this garment by those bent on oppression are those of the most marginalized among us, those for whom narratives that demonize can be easily made. Anti-democracy measures do not simply arrive and takeover healthy democracies. They are workshopped first – most often on the most vulnerable communities. In this country, with its unique history and the deep narratives of white supremacy that is part of our public discourse, this will almost always be Black communities first.

But the tactics used against Black communities can be transferred to other communities, often with slight modifications. Remember when the New York Times describing teenager Mike Brown who was killed in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 as “no angel”? Or when then-NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2000 released the sealed juvenile records of Patrick Dorismond, a 26 year-old Black man killed by police, saying of the victim “he was no altar boy.” (For good measure Dorismond, it turned out, had attended the same Catholic high school as Giuliani had in fact, once been an altar boy).

So it was no surprise that within an hour of Ms. Good’s killing, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem described the victim as a “domestic terrorist.” The disgraceful FOX News host Jesse Waters, smugly described Good as “a self-described poet, with pronouns in her bio...[who]… leaves behind a lesbian partner.” In MAGA world that is how they signal to their base to turn off the empathy - that this white woman is not worthy of your sympathy – not worthy of protection.

Sometimes no adjustments are necessary. In all cases when there’s video, you are asked to disbelieve what you can see with your own eyes.

That the brutality, excesses, mendacity, and impunity that have characterized much of law enforcement culture in Black communities for decades, created a set of cultural norms and an infrastructure around law enforcement that would be ripe for amplification simply did not occur to most white Americans. And now a demagogue, who believes that “nothing can stop him,” has come along and used the platform of that infrastructure to create his own super-funded national law enforcement strike force.

We have a systemic law enforcement problem in our country. Yes, of course - not every police officer. Not every ICE officer. But enough that our culture of deference to law enforcement narratives, our overreliance on the use of force to compel “compliance” from disfavored members of our population, the willingness to blur the line between law enforcement and military officers, and our failure to create real systems of screening, training, accountability, and punishment, constitute a serious threat to democracy. And they have for some time.

This country had a chance to check this and to begin a process of transformation in 2020. Sadly, it didn’t.

We develop and strengthen our power and our alliances when we make the connection between like things. That’s how we grow and strengthen our democracy movement. The work of being a civil rights lawyer I have often said is to reveal the “scaffolding” of oppression, the ladders and joints that are connected to create an infrastructure that remains in place and available to accommodate different forms of oppression. But there comes a time when the public must develop this knowledge as well.

We are near democratic collapse. It is past time to demand more from each of us. So I am asking every one of us to take responsibility for connecting the dots in your own mind. Understand that if they can keep you disconnecting the things that are of a piece, treating each injustice as its own separate and independent thing, they are winning. And you are wasting what precious little time we have, and missing the opportunity for deeper and more enduring alliances.