Call for Better Tracking of Cases of Excessive Force at US-Mexico Border Fernanda Santos - The New York Times
go to original September 18, 2013

PHOENIX — The inspectors who set out last year to review the use-of-force policies employed by the roughly 40,000 federal agents guarding the nation’s borders faced a significant obstacle from the get-go: Neither of two separate systems to track complaints of misconduct offered a clear way to link a specific accusation to the use of excessive force.

The systems — one operated by the Office of the Inspector General and the other run jointly by Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, all of them arms of the Department of Homeland Security — used different designations to categorize the complaints, making it impossible for the inspectors to determine the total number of excessive-force accusations and investigations against agents, according to a redacted version of their report, released Tuesday.

Although the discrepancy in the systems has been known at least since the inspectors finished their work in April, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement had yet to add use of force as an option to categorize complaints, the report said.

To civil rights groups, the shortcoming underlines one of the problems of having a fragmented mechanism to track misconduct that is partly under the authority of the agents’ employer. “At the heart of this report is a question about independence,” said Chris Rickerd, policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups that had pressed for the review.

Since January 2010, agents have killed at least 15 people, including a 16-year-old, along the border with Mexico, sometimes during confrontations set off by rock-throwing and other assaults, other times under less clear circumstances.

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