Resolved: The US will have to fire almost all Law Enforcement personnel

Great Debates
1

So, I was thinking about this today. With everything that is happening now, with ICE and other agencies taking people into custody while wearing masks and refusing to identify themselves, and then deporting them with little or no due process, and now arresting judges who oppose such activities, and all that, what happens in four years, if the US manages to actually get rid of Trump and the MAGA government?

Do you think that these federal agents will just say, “Oh, I guess we’re doing Due Process again, no problem!”? They’ll have years of practise to overcome, and that’s assuming they even want to overcome it. Far too many of them seem to actually agree that what they’re doing is The Right Thing.

And they’re actively recruiting local law enforcement into these practices.

As of Thursday afternoon, April 17, there were 456 active 287(g) agreements, or partnerships between ICE and local agencies — more than three times as many as there were in December 2024, according to data on ICE’s website. An additional 63 agreements were still pending.

That’s just what’s happened in the last four months or so. In another four years, how many more will be corrupted?

And every new agent or officer recruited over the next four years will be trained that this is just the way they do things. They’ll never have a chance to learn any other way.

So, how can you fix this? Law enforcement at every level - local, state and federal - will be compromised. Training to overcome this will be insanely difficult, and you’d never be quite sure if the people actually changed, or if they’re just waiting for the next opportunity to be corrupt.

So, will whoever is stuck with trying to clean up the US have to just fire almost every cop in the country?

Yes, that will be a mess, and we can discuss the implications of that, and ways to fix it, but the fundamental problem will exist - how can the US ever trust these people again?

2

It’s a valid concern. I think, though, that it would not be necessary to replace most law enforcement officers.

Assuming – hoping! – that the US restores democratic rule, you’d replace the senior law enforcement officials, retrain the rank-and-file, and (the tricky part even in democratic times) expel or prosecute those who continued to abuse their power.

Skeptical that it will work? Most Eastern European countries accomplished this after 1989. It took time, but they had far less of a democratic tradition than the US (obviously) and were emerging from fully totalitarian regimes.

3

The OP assumes American law enforcement could be trusted before Trump took off the procedural shackles. I question that assumption.

4

Well, not really. I did think about including the observation that this would make the 2020-era “Defund the police” look tame in comparison.

But it’s not really funding that’s the issue here. In fact, fixing this mess will probably require a hell of a lot more funding, since you’ll have to replace a lot of the cops who get fired, while at the same time completely redesigning the means by which you recruit and train cops.

I was thinking you’d need a Marshall-plan like operation, in which every major Western Democracy lends you a few thousand officers, to both engage in normal policing duties, while also recruiting and training new US officers.

5

I think we’ll need a truth and reconciliation commission.

6

I don’t see how a Truth and Reconciliation Commission is feasible in a fake news and a**ME!ME!ME!**rica first environement. But you must try, that much is clear. Good luck!

7

We’ve needed organizations dedicated to serving and protecting the people and upholding the rule of law for generations. We haven’t had them.

8

I hate to break it to you, but we all have problems with law enforcement standards and values, though granted, not so much with wholesale, systemic de-formation from the top.

9

I have had the same thought as the OP… but maybe this is less of a concern than it seems?

The enforcement class has always been made up of people who enjoy exercising power over others and people who feel a duty to their community or country (and there are those who fall into both categories).

For the former, they’ve always been abusers, and will always do whatever they can get away with. If the state lowers its tolerance for violence, they’ll go back to whatever level of thuggery they need to do to maintain their jobs.

For the latter, they’ve maintained their ability to do their jobs by absolving themselves of moral culpability in the face of “service” and order-following. They will easily slot back into following whatever protocols a new administration asks of them.

Yes, the balance of all these organizations will be tipping towards more violent and power hungry as the months go on, but I suspect that people will follow their orders to the best of their ability regardless of the morality of the job description of the moment.

10

But it’s not just the individuals you have to worry about; it’s the relationships. In order for the police to be able to do a good job at the job they’re actually supposed to do, they have to have the trust of the community. “It’s OK, that brute who abducted your cousin and murdered your neighbor is under new orders now” just isn’t going to cut it for that.

11

The new guy under new orders is still wearing the same uniform as the brute who abducted your cousin. That’s not going to cut it either.

12

Probably not even with new uniforms, and an entirely new organization from the ground up. But the new guy at least has a chance to eventually win that trust.

13

No - most of them will want to keep their jobs and their pensions and will therefore act in a way that won’t get them fired. Even if they don’t agree with it. Just like they are now acting in a way that will not get them fired - even if they don’t agree with it.

Think about it - most Federal law enforcement officers were not hired under Trump ( in either term) . And yet they are doing what this administration wants them to do even though they didn’t do it under Biden or Obama. Some of it they didn’t even do under Trump I.

14

There is really a long standing fundamental problem with the leadership in US policing (in addition to the general tension of ‘law enforcement’ versus ‘protecting and serving’ the public) that was exacerbated by the War on Drugs (co-opting municipal police and county sheriff departments into federal law enforcement) and the militarization of local law enforcement (literally by giving them surplus military equipment and arming and attiring them like paramilitary units) even before the current push to utilize state and local agencies in immigration enforcement (which is strictly a federal prerogative), and thence to co-opt agencies into enforcing whatever initiatives the federal executive deems necessary. That many agencies are significantly funded through ‘partnerships’ with federal law enforcement in executing asset forfeiture laws has strengthened these ties at the leadership level, and as a result there is often little independence of local law enforcement from federal management. This is quite distinct from ‘normal’ task forces used to address organized crimes that cross jurisdictions in that funding and direction comes from top down.

That a self-identified dictator (“Only on Day One,” he said, as if autocrats ever voluntarily give up power that they’ve acquired) swept into office and is now using all of this joint federal-local infrastructure, as well as organizations like the Department of Homeland Security that were specifically set up to be ‘flexible’ in their ability to follow Constitutional restrictions is really a consequence of this push of federalization and greater authority without oversight by supposed ‘conservatives’ for the last half-century that nobody involved really thought through at the time.

Stranger

15

Good point. And to be honest, in the near term it won’t matter who’s staffing them. Those orgs/institutions (along with gov’t as a whole) have destroyed or are at risk of destroying any faith that they exist to serve the people, as opposed to be an unquestioning enforcement arm to the whims of the powerful.

16

I’d like to offer a 23pp PDF that does a deep dive into this very issue, and concludes:

One of the most important findings in the study of political violence in recent years suggests that the adoption of transitional justice mechanisms to investigate, expose, and punish gross human rights violations perpetrated during a previous authoritarian era renders citizens less vulnerable to state repression in democracy (Sikkink, 2011; Dancy et al., 2015). In this article we have extended this finding to the sphere of criminal violence and have shown that the adoption of broad transitional justice processes can also make new democracies less vulnerable to large-scale criminal violence.

They based their study on datasets including 76 countries that transitioned from authoritarian rule to democracies between 1974 and 2005 (which I find to be minimally encouraging on its face).

17

I’ve always been told the reason women’s advocates stop pressing for laws that prohibit domestic abuse perps from owning firearms is because if that were to become law, half the police force and army would have to change jobs. Because they’d be prohibited from having access to guns!

18

You say that like it’s a bad thing. See thread title.

19

They have a choice of do it or be fired.

But only a handful of other police depts are going along with it-

Right, I think only a few ICE agents and most ICE supervisors- and all trump appointees.

20

Well, yes, that’s kind of my whole thesis. They won’t go along with it, so they’ll have to be fired.

I linked to similar information. I wouldn’t call several hundred police forces “a handful”, and also noted, this number has almost tripled in the last few months. Do you think they’ll stop tying to recruit more forces? Even though they’ve cut the training time needed to establish these connections, it still does take time to train people. They’ve still got almost four years to keep pushing this.