New York Times
By Fernanda Santos
September 17, 2013
The inspectors who set out last year to review the use-of-force policies employed by the roughly 40,000 federal agents guarding the nation’s borders faced a significant obstacle from the get-go: Neither of two separate systems to track complaints of misconduct offered a clear way to link a specific accusation to the use of excessive force.
The systems — one operated by the Office of the Inspector General and the other run jointly by Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, all of them arms of the Department of Homeland Security — used different designations to categorize the complaints, making it impossible for the inspectors to determine the total number of excessive-force accusations and investigations against agents, according to a redacted version of their report, released Tuesday.
Although the discrepancy in the systems has been known at least since the inspectors finished their work in April, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement had yet to add use of force as an option to categorize complaints, the report said.
To civil rights groups, the shortcoming underlines one of the problems of having a fragmented mechanism to track misconduct that is partly under the authority of the agents’ employer. “At the heart of this report is a question about independence,” said Chris Rickerd, policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups that had pressed for the review.
Since January 2010, agents have killed at least 15 people, including a 16-year-old, along the border with Mexico, sometimes during confrontations set off by rock-throwing and other assaults, other times under less clear circumstances.
The report did not answer whether the agents were wrong in firing their weapons, frustrating the 16 members of Congress who demanded the review after a PBS documentary last year raised questions about the actions of Customs and Border Protection agents in San Diego in 2010, when a man in their custody died after being stunned several times by a Taser.
Using the abbreviation by which the agency is known, Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard, Democrat of California, said, “I once again call on C.B.P. to examine the best practices of the nation’s top police forces and take meaningful action to avert future cases of abuse and death at the hands of the federal border enforcement personnel.”
The report’s scope was limited to the effects the surge in the number of agents in the past six years has had on training and performance and whether reforms adopted by the agency could help avoid deadly encounters. The changes include audits of whether use-of-force policies learned in the academy were understood and correctly applied in the field.
Over all, the inspectors reviewed 21,000 records from 2007 to 2012, which yielded more than 2,000 allegations of abuse, excessive force or intentional discharge of a weapon. About 500 complaints could not be categorized because the records lacked enough information.
The findings were mixed. Between 2006 and 2009, when the Border Patrol grew by almost 65 percent, financing for use-of-force training quadrupled. Despite this and other budgetary increases, Customs and Border Protection has yet to build a mock border fence in one of its training centers to simulate the kinds of situations the agents are likely to face, the report found.
Several officials interviewed by the inspectors said that although border agents know the necessary tools and tactics of the job when they leave basic training, they are not fully prepared for some real-life situations, like the stress and fear they may face when rocks rain on them from the Mexican side of the fence.
During an internal review, Customs and Border Protection’s use-of-force division found that new border agents and customs officers were not trained on all of the less-lethal weapons available to them, like pepper spray and Tasers, or sufficiently trained on high-risk situations like rock assaults.
In one instance, an internal audit found that new agents simply did not understand the use-of-force policies when they entered the field. Customs and Border Protection officials said it was a single episode out of 32 audits performed.
In their response, enclosed in the report, the officials acknowledged the importance of having a mock border-fence area. They noted that while the agency had the building materials, it did not yet have money for construction, though they were working to incorporate at least one simulator in the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.
“We should continue to expand the use of scenario-based training and continue to pursue new technologies to ensure field agents have the right skills,” the response read.
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