Speaking of federalizing local law enforcement, that's a huge problem in many ways. I don't think a lot of Americans are aware of how many so-called "task forces" federal law enforcement agencies establish for the purpose of deputizing local cops.
This creates a lot of problems, because as nominal federal agents, the local cops receive near total immunity from civil lawsuits. A much more unquestionable level of immunity than "qualified immunity." So, if they violate people's rights, those people have no effective remedy. It's bad enough that actual federal agents enjoy that sort of absolute immunity, but by deputizing so many local cops, they make the problem even worse.
Coincidentally, I watched a news report just last night about two local cops in small Ohio town who brutalized an immigrant.
The immigrant came here as a refuge from Eritrea about 15 years ago. He lives in Dallas and drives a long-haul truck for a living.
He arrived in Ohio with a delivery for Aldi, but he was a day or two early, so he parked his truck at Aldi, checked into a motel across the street, and then walked to a bar to watch TV and have a beer.
Two local cops, who were drunk and federally deputized, confronted him, interrogated him, confiscated his ID and phone, then threw him to the ground and assaulted him, claiming he was a terrorist.
Patrons of the bar called the local cops, who also treated the truck driver with sickening disrespect, berating him and forcing him to sit on the ground as they interrogated him further, without any reasonable suspicion that he was committing or was about to commit a crime, beyond the color of his skin and his heavily accented English.
Privately, they could be overheard on bodycam expressing incredulity that the federal "deputies" had tried to perform their duties while drunk and off duty. But they treated those two deputies politely and civilly, while they treated the truck driver like he was a criminal piece of shit.
Even after they had definitively established that the truck driver was an American citizen, they continued to treat him like shit and to treat the drunken federal deputies kindly and politely.
The kicker here is that even though those federal deputies violated the trucker's civil rights egregiously, he has no remedy at law.
As the Institute for Justice has taken as their tagline, "A right without a remedy is no right at all."
But that's where that trucker is stuck.
And the deputized cops?
One of them was dismissed as a federal deputy.
That's it, that's all. No other consequences. They're still out there "protecting" and "serving."
That's what it means to be an American these days, if you don't have white skin and a certain accent.
The cops can demand your papers, beat you up, and treat you like an animal even when you're a citizen with a critical job in transportation.
And you can't do anything about it at all.
I wish more people knew about how bad things are.
