Journalist Digs Into Years Of Corruption, Dysfunction At Border Protection Agency
Customs and Border Protection is the nation's largest law enforcement agency, with 45,000 gun-carrying officers and agents. That's larger than the NYPD. It's larger than the Coast Guard. And yet at the same time, it has been wracked by what is now really more than a decade of an epidemic of crime, and corruption and mismanagement that is unparalleled in American policing. From 2005 to 2012, there was one CBP officer or agent arrested every single day. And even today, there's an officer or agent arrested for misconduct or violence, drug smuggling, even murder, every 36 hours.
One former CBP commissioner actually told me on the record that they made mistakes and, in fact, hired cartel members. And what you began to see by late 2009, running through 2014, was both a huge rise in on-the-job excessive force complaints, shootings that fell far outside the protocols for modern policing, and also this incredible wave of crime and corruption of agents participating in drug smuggling and human trafficking themselves, of taking bribes, of looking past illegal immigrants crossing through their checkpoints.
Yup, these are just wonderful people.
It's inevitable, when you have a force specifically tasked with a politically controversial role, that those who seek to become recruits will be self-selected from the subsets of the population who either have a highly authoritarian response to that political controversy (ie political extremists), or who see an opportunity for corruption and abuse (ie criminals and sadists).
This is a fundamental issue for any police or military organisation, but it's far worse where that organisation has a very specific and politically controversial role, and where recruitment isn't explicitly and meticulously focussed on finding and rejecting any applicants with a hint of corruption or corruptibility.
One solution that, while less slow and expensive than meticulous vetting, is still moderately effective in keeping the cops honest, is to avoid specialisation and siloisation. It's harder for the traffic department to take bribes to waive tickets, if they share an office with forensics officers who will blow the whistle on their schemes - and likewise the forensics team are less able to collude to make evidence disappear, if the traffic cops are keeping an eye on them.
The 'who guards the guards' problem can be severely exacerbated by having a single purpose and single culture, isolated from the rest of enforcement (a similar effect allows corruption to become ingrained in the small, independent, police departments that are endemic in the US).
Far better to cut the number of enforcement agencies. The US could easily have fewer than fifty police and enforcement agencies: Roll all forces below the state level (city, county, and other departments such as campus and mall cops) into a single state police department, with shared resources and staff. For some lower population states, you could even combine two or more state forces into a single department (eg. one PD for Minnesota and the Dakotas). The ATF, FBI, ICE, CBP and the Secret Service can all be rolled into a single Federal Police.
That would help a lot. Currently, there are a total of 17,985 local and state law enforcement agencies in the United States that employ at least one permanent sworn officer. Of these, 12,501 are local police departments. (
source)
Another good move would be a return to the
Peelian Principles on which modern policing was founded.
Of course none of this will ever happen.