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The recent fatal shootings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Texas and Maine come right after ICE hired a huge number of officers in a very short period of time. Some law enforcement experts worry that kind of hiring spree can lead law enforcement agencies to cut corners in vetting new hires. NPR criminal justice correspondent Meg Anderson reports.
MEG ANDERSON, BYLINE: David Brouillette, the ICE officer who allegedly killed the man in Maine last week, had a history of domestic violence and a number of serious mental health issues. That's according to his ex-wife, who spoke with NPR last week. Those allegations raise serious red flags, says Gil Kerlikowske. He was the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection from 2014 to 2017.
GIL KERLIKOWSKE: This is a person that never should have been hired.
ANDERSON: Kerlikowske oversaw hiring at CBP and told NPR that a typical vetting process would have caught those warning signs. Kenneth Corey agrees. He spent more than three decades with the New York City Police. At one point, he oversaw the psychologists who evaluate recruits. He says when it comes to assessing an officer's mental well-being, hiring practices at police agencies very widely.
KENNETH COREY: There is no mandate that I'm aware of for any agency to do any kind of ongoing assessment.
ANDERSON: But he says more intensive vetting, like having candidates go through a psychological evaluation, has become more common in recent years. At the NYPD, for instance, recruits go through a background check and psychological tests and something called a character investigation. Corey says that can include interviews with neighbors, friends, former employers. They pull academic records and school disciplinary records.
COREY: You're contacting the police department in any jurisdiction where your candidate has ever lived. Do they have any reports on file with your name on it? And that would include domestic incident reports. It would also include things like cases where you were removed to a hospital for mental health issues.
ANDERSON: The process isn't perfect. For instance, Corey says at some agencies, if an officer is hired from a different police department, the new agency might assume the previous department did their due diligence. That can open the door for troubled cops to hop from place to place. But Corey says...
COREY: You want to make sure that the people that you're hiring have the temperament and disposition necessary to do the job. It's a difficult job. It's oftentimes extremely stressful. You want to make sure that you're hiring good quality people.
ANDERSON: He stressed that proper training is also key. All of that - making good hires and then setting them up for success - takes time. In the case of the recent ICE shooting in Maine, it's not clear if the agency didn't properly vet the officer or whether it overlooked warning signs. In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security says it applies all the, quote, "proper personnel vetting regulations" but did not provide specifics. But ICE says it has hired more than 12,000 officers in less than a year. Kerlikowske says when he ran Border Patrol, he had to resist pressure from Capitol Hill to move faster.
KERLIKOWSKE: You know, the complaints would always be like, wow, you still have a thousand agents you need to hire. And you could explain, though, to members of Congress, to the appropriators that, look, we don't want to rush the hiring process. The mistakes that are made are significant, and you pay a huge price later on.
ANDERSON: There are infamous examples of police departments hiring too fast with disastrous results. In 1989 and 1990, for instance, the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., rushed to hire hundreds of police officers. They cut corners on things like background checks, psychological testing and training. Members of that hiring class were disciplined, arrested, charged with crimes and fired in record numbers. Tanya Meisenholder spent nearly 20 years at the NYPD and oversaw hiring.
TANYA MEISENHOLDER: When you have pressure to hire a certain number of individuals during a certain time limit, that's where, sometimes, steps may be overlooked.
ANDERSON: She says after the latest ICE shootings, the agency should take a serious look at any changes it made to hiring practices in the last year and at any officers who were hired in that time.
Meg Anderson, NPR News.
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