{"id":153274,"date":"2026-01-28T13:31:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T13:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/153274\/"},"modified":"2026-01-28T13:31:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T13:31:08","slug":"federal-agents-leaders-defy-practices-honed-by-police-for-decades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/153274\/","title":{"rendered":"Federal agents, leaders defy practices honed by police for decades"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Drawing on decades of experience after having dealt with the beating of Rodney King, the killing of George Floyd and more, American law enforcement leaders, civil rights advocates and other legal experts have honed best practices<\/a> for officers making street arrests, conducting crowd control and maintaining public safety amid mass protests.<\/p>\n

Officers are trained to not stand in front of or reach into moving vehicles, to never pull their firearms unless it is absolutely necessary, and to use force only in proportion to a corresponding threat. They are trained to clearly identify themselves, de-escalate tensions, respect the sanctity of life and quickly render aid to anyone they wound.<\/p>\n

When police shootings occur, leaders are trained to carefully protect evidence and immediately launch an investigation \u2014 or multiple ones \u2014 in order to assure the community that any potential wrongdoing by officers will be fairly assessed.<\/p>\n

According to many of those same leaders and experts, it has become increasingly clear in recent days that those standards have been disregarded \u2014 if not entirely tossed aside \u2014 by the federal immigration agents swarming into American cities on the orders of President Trump and administration officials tasked with overseeing the operations.<\/p>\n

In both small, increasingly routine ways and sudden, stunning bursts<\/a> \u2014 such as the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis \u2014 agents have badly breached those standards, the experts said, and without any apparent concern or investigative oversight from the administration.<\/p>\n

Agents are entering homes without warrants, swarming moving vehicles in the street and escalating standoffs with protesters using excessive force, while department leaders and administration officials justify their actions with simple, brash rhetoric rather than careful, sophisticated investigations.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a terrible disappointment,\u201d said former Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore. \u201cThese tactics \u2014 if you call them that \u2014 are far and away out of touch with contemporary policing standards.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis isn\u2019t law enforcement, this is terror enforcement,\u201d said Connie Rice, a longtime civil rights attorney who has worked on LAPD reforms for decades. \u201cThey\u2019re not following any laws, any training. This is just thuggery.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey use excessive force against suspects and protesters, they detain and arrest people without legal cause, they violate the 1st Amendment rights of protesters and observers,\u201d said Georgetown law professor Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese types of tactics end up hurting all of law enforcement, not just federal law enforcement, even though state and locals didn\u2019t ask for these types of tactics, and, frankly, have been moving away from them for years out of a recognition that they undermine trust in communities and ultimately hurt their public safety mission,\u201d said Vanita Gupta, associate attorney general under President Biden and head of the Justice Department\u2019s Civil Rights Division under President Obama.<\/p>\n

The White House said Trump does not \u201cwant any Americans to lose their lives in the streets,\u201d believes what happened to Pretti was \u201ca tragedy\u201d and has called for an \u201chonorable and honest investigation.\u201d But administration officials also have defended the immigration crackdown and the federal agents involved, blaming protesters for interfering with law enforcement operations and accusing critics of endangering agents. However, many of those critics said it is the tactics that are endangering officers.<\/p>\n

Gupta said Trump\u2019s immigration surge \u201cdeeply strains the critical partnerships\u201d that local, state and federal law enforcement agencies typically have with one another, and puts local leaders in an \u201cincredibly challenging position\u201d in their communities.<\/p>\n

\u201cState and local chiefs have to spend 365 days of the year building trust in their community and establishing legitimacy … and in comes this surge of federal agents who are acting out of control in their communities and creating very unsafe conditions on the ground,\u201d Gupta said. \u201cThat is why you\u2019re seeing more and more chiefs and former chiefs speaking out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moore said the tactics are \u201cunnecessarily exposing those agents to harm, physical harm, as well as driving an emotional response and losing legitimacy with the very public that, as an agency, they are saying they are there to protect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Issues on the ground<\/p>\n

Good was fatally shot as she tried to drive away from a chaotic scene involving federal agents. The Trump administration said the officer who shot her was in danger of being run over. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, without evidence, accused Good, 37, of being a \u201cdomestic terrorist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Experts questioned why the group of agents swarmed Good\u2019s vehicle, why the officer who fired positioned himself in front of it, and whether the officer was in fact in danger of being hit given Good was turning her wheel away from him. They especially questioned his later shots into the vehicle as it was passing him.<\/p>\n

Under best practices for policing, officers are never to shoot into moving vehicles except in exigent circumstances, and are trained to avoid placing themselves in harm\u2019s way. \u201cYou don\u2019t put yourself in that position because you have the option to just take down the license plate number and go arrest them later if you think they\u2019ve violated the law,\u201d said Carol Sobel, a Los Angeles civil rights attorney who has driven police reform for decades.<\/p>\n

Moore said he was trained in the 1980s to avoid engaging with moving vehicles, yet \u201c40 years later, you see not just one occasion but multiple occasions of those tactics\u201d from immigration agents.<\/p>\n

Pretti was fatally shot after trying to protect a woman who was violently shoved to the ground by an immigration agent also spraying chemical irritant. The Trump administration said that Pretti had a gun, and that the officers had acted in self-defense. Without evidence, Noem alleged Pretti, also 37, was \u201cattacking\u201d agents and \u201cbrandishing\u201d the gun, while White House advisor Stephen Miller<\/a> alleged that Pretti \u201ctried to murder federal agents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Experts questioned why the agents were being so aggressive with the woman Pretti was trying to help, and why they reacted so violently \u2014 with a burst of gunfire \u2014 when he was surrounded by agents, on the ground and already disarmed.<\/p>\n

Moore said that the officer who shoved the woman appeared to be using \u201cbrute force rather than efforts to create de-escalation,\u201d and that spraying irritants is never suitable for dealing with \u201cpassive resistance,\u201d which appeared to be what the woman and Pretti were involved in. <\/p>\n

In both shootings, experts also questioned why the agents were wearing masks<\/a> and failed to render aid, and lamented the immediate rush to judgment by Trump administration officials.<\/p>\n

Gupta said the immigration agents\u2019 tactics were \u201cout of line\u201d with local, state and federal policing standards and \u201coffensive to all of that work that has been done\u201d to establish those standards.<\/p>\n

Bernard Parks, another former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, said that videos from the two incidents and other recent immigration operations make it clear the agents are \u201ctotally untrained\u201d for the operation, which he called \u201cpoorly designed, poorly trained,\u201d with a \u201ctotal lack of common sense and decency.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ed Obayashi, an expert in police use of force, said that although the agents\u2019 actions in the two shootings are under investigation, it is \u201cobvious\u201d that Trump administration officials have not followed best practices for conducting those inquiries.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe scenes have been contaminated, I haven\u2019t seen any evidence or any what you would call standard investigative protocols, like freezing the scene, witness checks, canvassing the neighborhood, supervisors responding to try to determine what happened,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The path forward<\/p>\n

Last week, California joined other Democrat-led states in challenging the crackdown in Minneapolis in court, arguing that Noem\u2019s department \u201chas set in motion an extraordinary campaign of recklessness and disregard for norms of constitutional policing and the sanctity of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Sunday, the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, which has played a central role in establishing modern policing standards in the U.S., said it believes that \u201ceffective public safety depends on comprehensive training, investigative integrity, adherence to the rule of law, and strong coordination among federal, state, and local partners,\u201d and called on the White House to convene those partners for \u201cpolicy-level discussions aimed at identifying a constructive path forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta reminded California law enforcement that they have the right to investigate federal agents<\/a> for violating state law.<\/p>\n

Gupta said the Trump administration failing to investigate fatal shootings by federal agents while \u201cboxing out\u201d local and state officials suggests \u201cimpunity\u201d for the agents and \u201cputs the country in a very dangerous place\u201d \u2014 and state investigators must allowed in to investigate.<\/p>\n

Butler said that the situation would definitely be improved if agents started adhering to modern policing standards, but that problems will persist as long as Trump continues to demand that immigration agents arrest thousands of people per day.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s just no kind and gentle way,\u201d he said, \u201cto take thousands of people off the streets every day.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Drawing on decades of experience after having dealt with the beating of Rodney King, the killing of George…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":153275,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[43041,73654,179,9747,4082,9977,75503,48,52,51,734,47,50,49,2322,3020,11276,225,74032,75504,178],"class_list":["post-153274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-administration-official","tag-alex-pretti","tag-community","tag-decade","tag-expert","tag-federal-agent","tag-good-practice","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-law-enforcement","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-officer","tag-president-trump","tag-protester","tag-state","tag-tactic","tag-vanita-gupta","tag-vehicle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}