from the pressing-the-accountability-reset-button dept
The DEA might not be an early adopter of forward-looking insurance policies, but it surely definitely leads the pack on the subject of shedding accountability like a teen ditching an ill-fitting sports activities coat the moment a household portrait session has wrapped up.
Federal legislation enforcement businesses undoubtedly trailed the developments when it got here to physique cam use by officers. For years, the DOJ forbade native cops from utilizing their physique cameras throughout joint process power operations involving federal officers. It wasn’t until November 2020 that it agreed native officers might use their cameras in joint operations, however provided that they agreed to play by the DOJ’s extraordinarily stringent guidelines.
It took nearly another year earlier than the DOJ agreed to begin outfitting its personal businesses with physique cameras — one thing undoubtedly provoked by a number of months of intense civil unrest following the murder of unarmed Black man George Floyd by Minneapolis (MN) police officer Derek Chauvin.
Now that Trump has undone something with Biden’s title on it, the DEA has knowledgeable its officers that physique cams are now not a part of the federal drug enforcement course of, as Mario Ariza reports for ProPublica:
The Drug Enforcement Administration has quietly ended its physique digital camera program barely 4 years after it started, based on an inner e-mail obtained by ProPublica.
On April 2, DEA headquarters emailed staff saying that this system had been terminated efficient the day earlier than. The DEA has not publicly introduced the coverage change, however by early April, links to pages about body camera policies on the DEA’s web site had been damaged.
The e-mail mentioned the company made the change to be “constant” with a Trump govt order rescinding the 2022 requirement that each one federal legislation enforcement brokers use physique cameras.
Additionally gone is its official body camera policy [PDF], which has been replaced with a 404 message. (Archived here and embedded beneath.)
The DEA advised its staff this vanishing was required to be “constant” with Trump’s repeal of a Biden police accountability executive order. However ProPublica studies at the very least two different federal legislation enforcement businesses are nonetheless requiring officers to put on physique cameras. One would assume the opposite businesses will observe the DEA’s lead and do the identical, even when there’s nothing in Trump’s Biden order rollback and even the president’s newer “GO POLICE STATE!” govt order that forbids using physique cameras by federal officers.
Whereas the DEA is taking the lead on the domestic-facing aspect on the subject of ditching the BWC-based pretense of accountability, it’s following the path set by one of many most-reviled federal businesses within the nation:
In early February, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is a part of the Division of Homeland Safety, was one of the first agencies to get rid of its body cameras. Subsequent movies present plainclothes immigration brokers making arrests with no seen physique cameras.
In fact it was. ICE doesn’t simply make insurance policies vanish. It makes human beings disappear. The very last thing DHS and ICE want are a bunch of unblinking eyes making a everlasting document of extrajudicial arrests and renditionings.
Federal legislation enforcement goes darkish once more, returning to its regular state of nigh-impenetrable opacity. Trump and his staff have reset the clock, rolling again probably the most minimal of positive factors in legislation enforcement accountability simply because he and his administration love authorities thuggery greater than they love this nation or the hundreds of thousands of normal folks they’re presupposed to be serving.
It took years for the federal authorities to interact in a particularly timid roll out of tech that common cops had been utilizing for a lot of the previous decade. It took only some weeks to undo three years of progress. And when businesses got the choice to shed themselves of gadgets officers typically contemplate to be impositions, they acted instantly, fully disregarding even the DOJ’s own assertions concerning the optimistic elements of body-worn cameras. It’s 2025, however the DOJ has been given permission to fake it’s 2015 all over again.
Filed Underneath: body cameras, dea, doj, donald trump, joe biden, police accountability
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