In my small town the police slogan, posted on the sides of their vehicles, is “Police and Community together.”
They do a good job of living up to it, interacting well and working with people in the community, focusing on problem solving where they can, de-escalating rather than escalating. It’s not that there isn’t crime to fight or arrests to make – there are; or cooperation with state and federal agencies – they do that too. But they’ve been able over the years to maintain a critical level of trust within the community.
What they understand is that no police force, however large or well-equipped, however well-trained, can get done the job of keeping the peace in a community without the active help and cooperation of the people who live there. If police are seen as an alien, invasive force, community cooperation will collapse.
With that in mind, what happened in Wilder last weekend should serve as a huge wakeup call for many law officers and agencies but most specifically and immediately those in Southwest Idaho.
Wilder, a city of about 1,600 in western Canyon County, is heavily Hispanic. One of the major civic weekend gathering points, for families with children as well as adults, is at a small local horse racetrack called La Cathedral Arena. On Sunday somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people (Governor Brad Little has estimated 400) were there peacefully socializing while horses ran.
That was disrupted when an army of about 200 federal, state and local law enforcement officials descended on them, with forces from (according to the FBI) the “Canyon County Sheriff’s Office; Homeland Security Investigations; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO); the Drug Enforcement Administration; Idaho State Police; Idaho Department of Corrections; Nampa Police Department; Caldwell Police Department; and FBI Seattle and Portland field offices.” That’s quite an array.
Hundreds of people were detained. Parents were separated from children, and some children were separated from their parents and according to numerous news reports zip-tied. The FBI initially denied reports that children were zip-tied or hit with rubber bullets, then retreated from that to limit the denial to “young children”; you can draw your own obvious conclusion. ICE grabbed 105 people present (some reports later put that at 50) presumably on immigration charges, though how many charges may actually stick (probably far fewer) will become clear only with time.
All of this was said to have been prompted by an FBI-led gambling inquiry; local law enforcement sharply denied that ICE led the operation, as it seems to have claimed.
And all of this – all these lives and activities disrupted and children terrorized – was in the service of what vital public safety and law enforcement goal? The ICE roundup aside, it amounted to this: Arrests of four men for gambling on horses.
An FBI agent noted, “Illegal gambling isn’t a victimless crime,” and I won’t argue that point. But this isn’t a question simply of going after a few small-bore gamblers, which could have been done with a few officers and scant uproar. The use of such nuclear weaponry to swat a fly, 200 law officers from a dozen or so federal, state and local agencies directed to a small, quiet town, has to be about something else.
This seems to be about terrorizing a community. (Could that be why ICE was so quick to try to claim a primary role?)
And when law enforcement does something like that, the message from it to the community, intended or not, is: We are on the other side, and we see you – all of you, whether law breakers or law abiders – as the enemy.
The opposite, in other words, of “police and community together.”
Actual enforcement of the laws will suffer, badly, if people start to absorb a lesson that law enforcement cannot be trusted. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but in Wilder, it may be too late.
Share on Facebook
