On Thursday night, various left-wing activists and elected officials demanded the Civilian Office of Police Accountability and Chicago’s Office of Inspector General investigate the actions of the Chicago Police Department while agents from U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were causing havoc on the streets of Chicago.
We understand the boiling frustration following the fatal shooting on Wednesday of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE agent. These activists know they would not be taken seriously by the feds, so they are channeling their anger into a potentially more productive lane in a deep blue city: going after local cops, alleging cooperation with the hated federal agents.
Understandable, yes. Helpful, not at all.
Anyone who has watched the videos of the Minneapolis shooting with a clear head can see not just what happened but what did not happen: the intervention in, or at least the monitoring of, a dangerous situation by local police officers whose superior training and knowledge of their surrounding communities might well have prevented that killing from happening in the first place.
Minneapolis cops, who’ve suffered through all kinds of ill treatment from activists, were nowhere to be seen. Had they been the ones getting that vehicle to move, not the hyped-up paramilitary crew escalating everything, a person might still be alive and an agent might not have a shooting on his conscience. There was at least a chance of that.
We’ve said several times before that cops are in a near-impossible position when it comes to this wildly dysfunctional war between the federal government and local and state officials in Democratic cities. They’re typically prohibited from aiding in immigration enforcements by local and state laws and there are good reasons for that. But what has transpired in practice is that cops are sorely missed during ICE incursions.
That was the case on Wednesday, where the fatal shooting began as someone blocking a public road, generally an infraction of interest to police officers, who are trained to know the difference between impeding something and vociferously protesting against it.
More importantly, modern cops are trained to de-escalate matters and understand how people react under stress. Sure, the efficacy of that depends on the individual officer and Chicago has plenty of experience of that not happening as it should, but the training is there. Had the Minneapolis police been keeping order Wednesday, there might have been a better outcome.
Suffice to say, then, that the anger against the Chicago police over anything to do with ICE and the Border Patrol is misplaced and an act of projection. They were not the problem and were, depending on the moment, either hamstrung entirely or doing their best in difficult circumstances.
What happened Wednesday in Minneapolis merits a nonpartisan investigation that establishes all the facts of the matter, everything from the trajectory of the obstructive vehicle driven by the protester to the actions and statements of those public officials with higher rank than the agent who pulled the trigger.
The FBI has said it is investigating and we’re all for that. But given the chronic lack of trust here, we’d like to see federal and local officials standing together at a podium and announcing a joint investigation into what transpired on Wednesday.
We’re not holding our breath but at some point in this unannounced civil war, something like that will have to be done for it to end.
In the meantime and on this matter, our activist friends should leave our police officers alone.
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