What ICE’s Recklessness Teaches Us About Real Policing

In 2017, when I was the chief of police of Burlington, Vermont, I gave our highest award for valor to an officer who had faced down a robbery suspect making his getaway in a Volkswagen. Cut off at an intersection, the suspect threw his car in reverse and barreled toward the officer, who was running up the narrow street in pursuit. Gun drawn and pointed, standing in the path of the car, the officer knew he had a split second to save his life.

He stepped to the side. The car passed inches from him, and he holstered his gun. He had a legal right to shoot, but he didn’t. Later, he told me even if he’d killed the driver, the car still wouldn’t have stopped. If he could save his life by getting out of the way, then there was no need to fire in the first place. Shooting, he concluded, wouldn’t help him; it would just make the situation worse. “I knew it would be dangerous and futile,” he told me. His medal of valor was for showing bravery and restraint.

This is the essence of American policing done right. The New York City Police Department prohibited shooting at people in cars in 1972, having realized that shooting a driver does nothing to stop the car and turns a guided missile into an unguided one. The number of police shootings soon plummeted, and officers were no less safe. Many cities followed suit, banning or strongly discouraging shooting at cars. Beyond all of this, officers with good judgment don’t need a policy to know when not to use reckless and counterproductive force, even if they are in danger. It is simply a hallmark of professionalism.

Contrast this with the work of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who killed Minneapolis resident Renée Good last January when one of them stepped in front of her car as she tried to drive away to avoid arrest. Instead of taking one quick step to his right and apprehending her the next day, the agent shot Good three times, twice after he’d already gotten out of the way and needed to fire through her driver’s side window. Good lost control of her vehicle, careened into a parked car and died. In response, the federal government called her a domestic terrorist and hailed the officer as a hero, while his colleagues warned other citizens that people who didn’t obey them could meet a similar fate. The Department of Justice ordered its prosecutors to see if they could dig up dirt about the political activities of Good and her wife. Six prosecutors resigned in protest; Good was a mother of three with no criminal record.

ICE is an agency that literally embodies everything the people who police a democracy should be against. It has low hiring standards, perfunctory screening and a 47-day training program that’s shorter than nearly all municipal police departments’ academies, and half the length of the training program for Minneapolis police. Its leadership imposes a deportation quota on employees that forces them to make bad decisions, petty arrests and alienate vast swaths of the public. Many of its agents wear masks out of a strange mix of cowardice, brazen unaccountability and perhaps a desire to menace the public. Their use of body cameras is spotty at best, and the agency is trying to roll back funding for the ones they do use. They use tear gas and pepper spray against protesters so capriciously that a federal judge had to order them to desist.

And ICE agents continue to shoot citizens who protest them. Last week, agents killed Alex Pretti, a Minneapolis ICU nurse who was lawfully carrying a holstered handgun. By all video accounts, including microsecond-by-microsecondbreakdowns by media outlets, ICE agents opened fire after they had pepper-sprayed Pretti, thrown him to the ground, punched him, kicked him and pulled his firearm out of his waistband. Nevertheless, ICE’s leadership and its federal overseers immediately demeaned the victim, spread lies about him, called the killing justified and obstructed the state of Minnesota from investigating the incident. In the view of many Americans, ICE is an agency that has lost its legitimate authority to govern us.

All of this presents American police departments with a tremendous opportunity. Never before in our lifetime have they had a better foil than they have in ICE. Emerging from years of turbulence between the police and many communities, Americans worry the agency is the new face of U.S. law enforcement, and are starving for reassurance that their own police can be professional, accountable and capable of effectively doing their jobs while respecting rights and liberties. 

This isn’t to say that critics of policing should feel lucky their home team isn’t as bad as ICE. This is where the opportunity arises: the nation’s attention is rightly focused on flagrant abuses at the federal level that constantly dominate the news and provide a clear moral compass for how police shouldn’t behave. In the meantime, the Department of Justice has explicitly said it will not investigate police departments for patterns of misconduct. In other words, hardly anyone is looking at our nation’s municipal police at the moment. Police departments that continue to engage, innovate and reform will be doing it because they ought to, not because anyone is breathing down their neck or protesting in front of headquarters. It will provide the ingredients they need to forge deep ties with their communities in good faith.

So it is critical for police to continue with the things that have shown promise, even if they don’t have to. Agencies should aggressively continue to target their city’s most violent offenders, since this small number of people account for an outsized share of any given community’s violence. They should train officers to keep themselves and the public safe while using an economy of force. Cities with subways should ensure they are places of fast and efficient transportation, not places for people to dwell or disrupt a commute. Simultaneously, police should implement or expand co-responder programs that bring clinicians to behavioral health crises rather than just police officers. They should explore ways for police and their counterparts to link people to housing, addiction treatment and social services as an alternative to defaulting to arrest as usual, since these measures reduce crime and disorder by better addressing the behavioral problems that can cause them. If police departments do these things with transparency and accountability, it will give millions of Americans a huge sense of relief at a time when many of them are watching the news and questioning the very legitimacy of the nation’s law enforcement.

The last embers of the ill-fated and infeasible police defunding and abolition movements have been extinguished, and not a moment too soon. Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York only after decisively distancing himself from previous commitments to defund the police; he even pledged to keep on his predecessor’s no-nonsense commissioner. Voters from Philadelphia to San Francisco have made it clear that public safety and quality of life matter greatly to them, and the police have a critical role in delivering these things. Amidst all this, we are witnessing a daily exhibit of some of the worst law enforcement practices in living memory. This mix of tragedy and opportunity has set the stage for a long-needed renaissance in American municipal policing. After spending 23 years in the profession and another six studying it, I am convinced there are more officers who would step out of the way of a car than shoot its driver. Americans need to know this, and they need to see it in practice.