Plainclothes ICE officers threaten the trust needed for the police to function

I read a magazine story a while ago about blood feuds in modern-day Albania. As I recall, the story went something like this: there were two neighboring families in Albania. They were friendly for a while, and then, at some point, there was a fight at a party between them. A member of the first family got killed by a member of the second family. So, the remaining first family members got together, formed a lynch mob, and killed a member of the second family in revenge. The second family members then, in outrage, got together and killed the ringleader of the lynch mob from the first family. And so on, and so forth, until the valley was soaked in the blood of both families.

What I remember most clearly from the story was the author’s interview of the remaining patriarch of one of the families (the old patriarch had been killed). The patriarch led a miserable existence. Not only had many of his loved ones been killed, but he lived in constant fear of being killed himself. He couldn’t venture outside his home; he slept in a windowless room with the door locked; and his only thoughts were fear and hatred towards the other family. This blood feud had completely ruined his life and he saw no way of undoing it.

We take for granted our criminal justice system in America. For the most part, we are a law-abiding society. We trust each other, which allows for nice things, like self-checkout at the grocery store. We are also, largely, a society that believes in the rule of law. When we get in accidents or we feel in danger, we call the police, and we trust that the police will do their best to help us and fix the issue.

I will be the first to admit that this system is imperfect. There are some things that police are willing to do that they should put more effort into, like help us recover stolen phones. The police occasionally abuse their authority, which is what a lot of the Black Lives Matter protests were about. There are also some sorts of wrongdoing that are inherently difficult for police to deal with and so often end up unpunished, like wage theft.

But, overall, it’s a pretty good system. It’s way better than blood feuds. It means that the sorts of frictions and wrongdoings that gum up the works of a complex society don’t spiral into multigenerational vortexes of misery and retaliation. They’re just dealt with and are, for the most part, forgotten.

The system only works because of trust, though. It only works because we mostly trust our neighbors to not treat us poorly, and we mostly trust the police to step in if our neighbors do treat us poorly. We don’t have to sleep in windowless rooms, worried that our neighbors from across the way will try to break in and kill us and that the only thing that can prevent that is the gun beneath our pillow.

Anything that threatens that trust, therefore, is a threat to this nice way of life. I felt that strongly a few years ago, when the Black Lives Matter movement morphed into a movement that celebrated criminals and demonized those that would punish them. This morph made people not trust the police at all, and, because they couldn’t trust the police to punish criminals, they also couldn’t trust that their neighbors were not criminals. It made us want to lock our doors again.

I also feel that strongly now. A few days ago, in Boston’s neighboring city of Somerville, a Turkish student was arrested by plainclothes immigration officers. In the video taken of the arrest, you can watch as, within a few minutes, she’s surrounded by masked men and women wearing street clothes who handcuff her and whisk her off into a van with darkened windows. These men and women do not identify themselves except to briefly say they are police (after they grab her). They do not tell her what she’s accused of or why they are abducting her.

From the video. Note: everyone surrounding the woman in white is a plainclothed police officer. They all appear from seemingly out of nowhere. Frightening, right? More details in this article.

According to subsequent news reports, the crime that she was arrested for was writing an op-ed critical of Israel’s foreign policy towards the Palestinians about a year ago. This, according to no less an august personage than Secretary of State Marco Rubio, warranted not just deportation, but immediate detention and deportation.

I have a lot of problems with this, but my biggest problem, by far, is how these officers’ actions threaten the trust between citizens (and non-citizens) and their police force. Police officers have special privileges in society. Unlike normal people, they have a lot of leeway to physically restrain, injure, or even kill their fellow citizens. They need to, in order to prevent the sort of blood feuds that Albania has.

In order to keep these lines of separation between police and ordinary people clear, police need to be clearly separate from other people. This is why they have special cars, special uniforms, and special titles. This demarcation is a crucial part of their role. It shows that they have accepted the privileges and responsibilities of law enforcers in society, and that they can be trusted.

For police officers to go plainclothes, therefore, should be done very rarely. If a police officer is plainclothed, neither I nor they are clear about what their privileges and responsibilities are. Do they still need to abide by a police officer’s code of conduct? Do they still need to offer help to people if they’re asked? It’s unclear. The line between “police officer” and “random violent guy with a gun and handcuffs” becomes blurred.

These blurred lines are incredibly important on both sides. It is not just frightening for people to watch an ordinary woman being abducted from the street by a group of armed thugs. More importantly, an ordinary police officer, in uniform with his name obviously displayed, would never arrest someone for writing an op-ed a year ago. That is not what a police officer does. They would sooner quit than do something so obviously unconstitutional.

But plain clothed, masked thugs can abduct someone for doing so. They do not have the accountability of their uniform or even of their face. There is nobody who can watch the watchman. If people cannot trust the police, then they will need to turn back to trusting themselves.

Below the paywall, literally just one paragraph of me ranting.