Over my 42-year career in the legal profession, 28 of them as a judge, I came into contact with literally thousands of law enforcement officers, mostly city police and county sheriff, but also state troopers, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the FBI, DEA, the U.S. Marshall Service, the Secret Service, and even a few members of ICE’s predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS. I found that they fell into four general categories:

Exemplary cops
Good cops
Average cops
No-business-being-a-cop cops (a/k/a Bad cops)

From my experience with cops, I have determined that the Bad cops, thankfully the tiniest class of the four, possess one or more of the following traits:

1. They are racist, ranging from common prejudices to hatred.
2. They believe they have been unjustifiably cheated, disrespected, or degraded, either personally or institutionally, and that their grievances afford them some sense of entitlement.
3. They show disdain for norms, rules, and protocols.
4. They have quick, uncontrollable tempers.
5. They are prone to use unwarranted, unnecessary, or hasty use of force, while often deriving some sense of pleasure, amusement or achievement from it.
6. They are convinced they are always right, and that getting the results they want are always justified.
7. They lack empathy.
8. Some have experienced run-ins with the law during adolescence and early adulthood. No lie.
9. They lack the mental or physical fitness, the proper attitude or the requisite energy to do the mission all citizens have a right to expect. They either failed to benefit from training or were provided substandard training.

In a word, Bad cops are manifestly unqualified to be cops.

Here’s my theory about why we have Bad cops. First of all, Bad cops do not turn out to be that way after joining law enforcement. They come to the profession already predisposed to being a Bad cop, as the above list of traits would seem to obviously imply. They choose law enforcement, in part, because it affords them an opportunity, under color of law, to obtain retribution against people they do not like, perhaps even hate, or perceive to be their inferiors. They do them harm by the unlawful application of physical brutality; spitefully forcing innocent people into the criminal justice system, thus exposing them to unnecessary distress and expense; piling on unprovable charges and elevating true misdemeanors to bogus felonies; or giving false evidence or testimony. The Bad cops’ uniform, badge and gun clothe them with the appearance of having lawful authority to do unlawful deeds which they believe they can get away with by relying upon the doctrine of qualified immunity and by offering false excuses (e.g., “I believed my life was in danger”) to shield them from accountability.

All cops are capable of wrongful acts while on the job, but what separates the Bad cops from the others is intentionality and the frequency of their malfeasances.

All cops are capable of wrongful acts while on the job, but what separates the Bad cops from the others is intentionality and the frequency of their malfeasances. Other cops deserve reprimand or extra training. Bad cops deserve to be fired or prosecuted. Instead, they collect a paycheck.
I can honestly say that, in my 42-year career, I never encountered a federal law enforcement officer that I would rate as a Bad cop, but now we have ICE and CBP, the bottom-feeding members of the Bad cop species. Generally speaking, your local police department isn’t hiring Bad cops because it wants Bad cops. These guys (almost exclusively men) sneak in under the radar because of careless hiring (negligent vetting and evaluation), or by lying or misrepresentation on the applications.

On the other hand, Stephen Miller and the Department of Homeland Security seem to be actively recruiting applicants who possess multiple Bad cop traits. (In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some them have previously been fired from police departments because they were Bad cops.) Then they hurry them through poor training, outfit them as though they were going to war in the Middle East, and rush them out en masse to terrorize and deliberately deny the constitutional rights of citizens of cities which oppose the authoritarian regime in Washington.

Take your typical ICE officer, replace his weapons of war with normal police gear, take away all those cool SWAT-camo accessories, and remove their facemasks, and what do you have? A human being who is too unqualified and too cowardly to serve in the law enforcement profession. But gear them up and give them authority go out in roving bands onto normally peaceful city streets with orders to be wild, they become America’s premier domestic terrorist organization, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the post-Reconstruction era in the late 19th century. To our everlasting shame, ICE and CBP are become America’s first and only government-sponsored, government-equipped and government-controlled domestic terrorist organization.

In closing, ICE, CBP, DOJ, and DHS remind me of the following stanzas from the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil:

Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints,
As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer
‘Cause I’m in need of some restraint.

So if you meet me, have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste.
Use all your well-learned politeness
Or I’ll lay your soul to waste.

P.S. I stand with the courageous, righteous citizens of the Twin Cities for forcing ICE and CBP’s retreat from Minnesota. Minneapolitans are the model of what it means to be American. Stephen Miller, your replacement theory is failing. If anyone needs to be replaced, it’s you!

NOTE TO READER: I haven’t blogged in quite a while because I can’t write more eloquently about the American shitstorm which is the Trump administration than what is being written already. Also, I have trying to maintain sanity by been working on a novel (not about politics). I will soon share it with you on this blog as a chapter-by-chapter series. So, please stay tuned.