Cops Are Already Unleashed. Trump Is Telling Them to Run Wild.

Donald Trump holds an executive order on policing at the White House in Washington on June Photo Stefani Reynolds CNP Bloomberg via Getty Images Donald Trump says he wants to unleash the police This week Trump signed an executive order STRENGTHENING AND UNLEASHING AMERICA S LAW ENFORCEMENT TO PURSUE CRIMINALS AND PROTECT INNOCENT CITIZENS all caps in the original laying down a host of authoritarian diktats intended to make police officers more brutal more loyal to him and less accountable to anyone other than him The proclamation is more virtue signaling than strategy more an expression of Trump s mood than a serious proposal And when it comes to conventional crime Trump s mood is right where it s unfailingly been fearful demagogic and perpetually stuck in The proclamation is more an expression of Trump s mood than a serious proposal The thing that ties it all together is a word Trump uses often unleash and it s worth delving into The literal definition is to remove from a restraint In the context of law enforcement it conjures images of cops siccing police dogs on subjects or protesters Metaphorically we tend to associate the word with starker imagery We unleash fury wrath and retribution Trump wants to project both As for the executive order itself it is heavy on bluster and short on details like most of of Trump s orders Particular of the measures are nonsensical like indemnifying police from damages They re already indemnified by taxpayers in more than percent of such cases For others it isn t clear if he s referring to federal or state and local police Trump provides no funding for his demands Specific would violate the law such as charging progressive prosecutors for failing to prosecute a few crimes to Trump s satisfaction Others like directing law firms to do pro bono work defending cops accused of wrongdoing are unconstitutional on their own not to mention that they build on other directives from Trump that courts are also likely to find unconstitutional Still others would require approval from Congress How much of this agenda is really feasible depends on whether Trump is willing to push through these impediments and whether the federal courts are willing to stop him That however is true with or without an executive order What Leash During his run in presidential politics Trump has praised and encouraged police brutality He has applauded violent crackdowns on protests especially by authoritarian regimes He believes in projecting strength and believes strong leaders demonstrate strength with violence This is why he has often suggested that police officers will attack his enemies if called upon and why the Capitol Police who defended Congress from his supporters received so much of his wrath Yet you can t unleash something that has never been restrained in the first place And in the U S the police have never been restrained Last month an Oklahoma City news station broadcasted that a federal gang of law enforcement officers had battered down the door of a Latino woman and her three daughters The family was subjected to a terrifying raid in which agents held them at gunpoint forced them to stand in the rain then rifled through their home The agents were looking for undocumented immigrants Everyone in the home was a U S citizen The man they were looking for had moved out months earlier If it had all stopped there that would have been bad enough This was a violent volatile raid over an alleged immigration violation an extraordinarily disproportionate use of force After learning of their mistake however the agents weren t apologetic or contrite Instead they confiscated the family s computers cellphones and an undisclosed amount of cash The agents didn t identify themselves or which agency they were with and they left no contact information so the women could file a complaint or at the very least retrieve their property According to the victim one officer notified her as they left I know it was a little rough this morning After several days the Department of Homeland Precaution conclusively acknowledged a mistake This raid followed Trump s executive order but it s part of a much longer pattern of hyper-aggressive law enforcement These certainly weren t the actions of law officers who felt restrained And why would they Trump and his subordinates have made clear that one clear objective of his immigration protocol is to inflict pain It isn t just about removing undocumented people it s about making people who do come suffer as much as manageable to deter others Read Our Complete Coverage The War on Immigrants When U S Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents confronted -year-old Merwil Guti rrez in New York City they knew right away he wasn t the man they were looking for According to Guti rrez s cousin one agent declared No he s not the one Another replied Take him anyway Guti rrez has no criminal record He was in the country legally He doesn t even have tattoos Yet before his family could act he had been sent to a facility in Texas He was then among the first batch of people sent to El Salvador s Terrorism Confinement Center or CECOT prison a slave labor detention facility The ICE agents who arrested him haven t even been identified much less disciplined Immigration czar Tom Homan later referred to such wrongful arrests of legal residents as collateral These are just two of a growing number of horrifying incidents in which federal agents often concealing their identities with masks have snatched innocent people from the streets then whisked them off to to detention centers hundreds of miles away or worse yet all the way to CECOT None of this suggests police officers feel all that restrained The courts haven t restrained them either In the situation Egbert v Boulet the Supreme Court all but barred anyone from suing federal law enforcement officers for violating constitutional rights In so doing the court overturned a -year-old precedent arguing that the old ruling created a cause of action that had never been approved by Congress The court however has also been chipping away at Congress s attempts to hold bad cops accountable Incredibly constitutional lawyer Patrick Jaicomo first learned about the raid in Oklahoma City this week as he was leaving the Supreme Court Jaicomo who works for the libertarian nonprofit Institute for Justice had just given oral arguments for a development in which federal law enforcement officers had waged a violent drug raid on the wrong home holding an innocent family and -year-old child at gunpoint Because the court has already prevented casualties like Jaicomo s clients from suing under the Constitution he was left to argue that they should be able to sue under the Federal Tort Asserts Act the one less-than-ideal remedy still available to hold abusive federal cops accountable And in fact after a series of botched drugs raids on innocent people in the s Congress created an addition to that law specifically allowing for lawsuits in cases of botched raids Yet the lower courts have refused to allow the lawsuit to go forward and judging from oral arguments the Supreme Court doesn t seem eager to allow it either Congress also passed a law to give people a way to sue when state and local police violate their rights the KKK Act passed during Reconstruction The Supreme Court has been whittling that away too through the doctrine of qualified immunity a legal fiction the court invented from whole cloth Immune From Majority of Lawsuits The world in which police officers are hamstrung by overly restrictive rules and woke prosecutors exists only in the minds of Donald Trump and his followers In truth state and local police are protected by qualified immunity and in the tiny percentage of cases in which casualties can certainly get in front of a jury then convince that jury to convict and award damages the police are further shielded by indemnification Federal police and any state and local police who serve on federal drug gang or immigration task forces are all but immune from lawsuits Well from the greater part lawsuits There is at least one federal lawsuit that has a decent shot at a substantial settlement Last year Trump himself sued the FBI for million over the search of his Mar-a-Lago home Unlike the raids in Oklahoma City or Atlanta the FBI agents intentionally conducted the search of Trump s Florida estate while he was out of town to avoid embarrassing him It not only was not a no-knock raid they even gave Trump s assurance detail a heads-up that they were coming Trump is suing anyway despite declaring in his campaign that police should be immune from such lawsuits Among the abuses Trump states to have suffered FBI agents didn t remove their shoes before entering his bedroom The difference now is that Trump controls the Justice Department and the Supreme Court has given him the green light to exploit the department s power and information in whatever corrupt manner he pleases It wouldn t be at all surprising if Trump ordered the department to settle with him for million for the indignity of shoed FBI feet traipsing through his bedroom while simultaneously directing federal police to continue with warrantless raids on anyone who speaks with an accent In the end Trump doesn t really need to unleash the police He just wants to make sure he s the one holding the lead The post Cops Are Already Unleashed Trump Is Telling Them to Run Wild appeared first on The Intercept