Border securityCBP unveils measures to address use of force along the border

Stung by criticism that its agents are using excessive force along the U.S.-Mexico border – including the conclusions of DHS IG that many CBP officers and Border Patrol agents do not understand their agency’s rules about the use lethal force — Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on Wednesday unveiled measures it said would address the problem.

AZCentral reports that these measures include improving training, giving agents more non-lethal weapons options, and — eventually — testing dashboard and lapel-mounted video cameras. Cameras record agents’ interactions and, it is hoped, would thus provide agents with an additional incentive to stay within the rules. The cameras would also help protect agents against false accusations of misconduct.

“The steps [CBP has] detailed are good steps forward, recognizing that this is an extremely thin

description of a plan that should be comprehensive,” Ruthie Epstein, a policy analyst in the ACLU’s Washington, D.C., office, told AZCentral. She said, however, that there is a widespread perception among border groups “that there’s a culture of impunity, so that when an agent uses force inappropriately, he or she will get away with it. You can’t address that without a clear, transparent mechanism for oversight and accountability … and that’s the key missing piece.”

The CBP said that in all it has received more than ninety recommendations from the DHS IG, CBP’s own internal review, and an independent review by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based policing research group. The recommendations were attached to the report released by CBP, but were blacked out.

CBP said it will make changes in four areas:

• Improving how it reviews and analyzes use-of-force incidents to improve its policies, training and equipment
• Identifying less-lethal weapons and equipment that agents can use to de-escalate confrontations
• Improving training and tactics to help officers better assess threats and how to respond to them
• Setting up a way for “stakeholders,” such as border groups and residents, to provide feedback on the CBP’s use-of-force training

CBP, in its statement Wednesday, said agents and officers should “use only the force that is objectively reasonable to affect an arrest” while protecting themselves or others from an imminent threat of death or serious injury.

The ACLU, while welcoming Wednesday report and CBP statement of intent, drew up its own list of recommendation for changes, but analysts who follow the agency say that going beyond the recommendations contained in the report release Wednesday would likely require a significant change in the culture at the Border Patrol and the CBP

Josiah Heyman, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who has studied the agency, told AZCentral that “Homeland Security cloaks itself with the mantle of national security and holds a lot of information back from the public…. We’re not actually talking about strategies or tactics, nor about intelligence or surveillance or anything that could really be construed as reasons for keeping secrets; but it has been difficult for anyone to get their use-of-force guidelines, their training materials” or other documents that other law-enforcement agencies routinely disclose.

“They should be transparent,” Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina, told the newspaper. “The use of force is a Fourth Amendment issue for any officer, federal or not, in dealing with any person in the U.S.”

Heyman, for his part, said the Border Patrol “has a long history of being secretive, of not being very accountable internally or externally, and of being resistant to outside control.”

Heyman noted that unlike many municipal police departments, the CBP and the Border Patrol have not developed training to give officers “very good skills for diagnosing problems and figuring out ways to solve problems without recourse to extreme force … their officers aren’t trained to make a judgment as to what would be the safest thing to do, as to whether it’s worth arresting someone if it involves risk to myself or killing someone.”

CBP Acting Commissioner Thomas Winkowski, in an e-mailed statement, told AZCentral that the “CBP will continue to evaluate the use of force program and practices to ensure the safety of our law-enforcement personnel and the public with whom we interact.”