America Has a Secret Police Problem
There’s a lot you don’t know about what the cops on your streets are doing—and they aim to keep it that way.
Matt Ford/June 27, 2020
America Has a Secret Police Problem
Members of the Federal Bureau of Prisons and other law enforcement patrol the streets of Washington, D.C., as protests over the death of George Floyd continue.
Earlier this month, I spent a Wednesday afternoon walking through downtown Washington, D.C., to see the aftermath of the recent protests and riots. Federal police had used force to clear peaceful demonstrators out of Lafayette Park next to the White House, to the nation’s stunned horror, only two days earlier. After two-and-a-half months in which the coronavirus pandemic had largely kept me confined to my apartment, it was a surreal experience: What had been a bustling city center before the lockdowns in March was now largely deserted, save for the occasional clusters of protesters and police.
As I made my way east from the White House, I struck up conversations with members of both groups. Many were cordial, including an Indiana National Guard squad on Pennsylvania Avenue and the uniformed police outside the Justice Department’s main headquarters. Then I came across a group of armed men standing outside a hotel near Union Station. They were gathered around buses, apparently waiting to be deployed to parts unknown. Each of them wore riot gear—helmets, batons, body armor, the works—and carried rifles. The only patches or identifying insignia that some of them wore said “DCT.”
There had been reports that Attorney General Bill Barr had deployed Bureau of Prisons personnel to the city, so I wondered if DCT meant Disturbance Control Team, the agency’s riot-control unit. Standing a safe distance away, I asked if they were affiliated with BOP. The nearest officer turned and looked, so I repeated my question. “Are you guys Bureau of Prisons?” I asked. “Maybe,” he replied indifferently. As he answered, one of the other men—a supervisor, I assume, since he wasn’t clad in full riot gear or wearing a mask—approached me and only stopped within inches of my face.
I backed away slightly to maintain social distancing, suddenly very cognizant of the Covid-19 outbreaks spreading through federal prisons. He asked who I was, voice raised for no apparent reason. I replied that I was a reporter with The New Republic, hoping that would defuse his concerns. It did not. He continued to try to loom over me, advancing even as I kept moving back. “Where’s your press pass?” he snarled. I figured I wouldn’t need it in broad daylight in the nation’s capital, so I’d left it at home. “Then how do I know you are who you say you are?” he replied with a sneer. Not wanting to risk violence or a coronavirus infection over the matter, I turned and left. They never answered my question.
It was, all things considered, a trivial encounter. But in the days that followed, I thought about how it could’ve become much worse. If that officer had attacked me—a common enough sight in major cities over the past month—without actually arresting me, what recourse would I have had? I had no clear way to identify him or even confirm where he worked. My best guess was an educated one that the average person might not have been able to make. Barr’s “little green men” were effectively unaccountable and perhaps the closest this country has come to secret police since the post-Watergate reforms of the FBI in the 1970s.
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