He asks the agents point blank: What makes you different?

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Ophelia Benson

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I did not know this.

https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/957432596832620544

Wow. So I looked for more. CNN in July 2014:

The FBI is well aware about the threat to your civil liberties — especially in an age of unwarranted, mass surveillance of our emails and video calls.

It’s why all FBI academy trainees learn about the rise of Nazi Germany and the transformation of law enforcement into a tool of oppression.

“We send every one of our agents to the Holocaust Museum before they’re agents to know and understand what happens when an agency goes rogue,” ex-FBI director Robert Mueller explained recently.

Agents take a private, guided tour of the museum. Then there’s a specialized class that highlights how everyday law enforcement played a key role in Germany’s descent into authoritarianism. It wasn’t only elite military units, like the infamous Schutzstaffel, or SS.

The presentation includes the slide below, which shows how German police accompanied Nazi bureaucrats as they compiled information about minorities who would later be hunted down and killed. That information was tabulated as punch cards by some of the earliest computers.

Very professional, very technologically sophisticated.

A portion of the class at the museum is led by the program’s creator, David Friedman, the Anti-Defamation League’s director of law enforcement initiatives. He asks the agents point blank: What makes you different? Pointing at the U.S. Constitution isn’t enough.

“Look, it’s an amazing document. But sometimes there’s a separation between the principles expressed and how law enforcement conducts itself at the street level,” Friedman said.

Then he brings up dark moments in American history. Japanese-Americans were sent to World War II internment camps. Civil Rights protestors were beaten by cops. And the FBI’s own covert surveillance program, COINTELPRO, targeted athletes, journalists, politicians and grassroots movements for being “subversive.”

Exactly, which is why many of us have very mixed feelings about the FBI’s role in the effort to keep Donald Trump from destroying everything. It’s good to know they’re thinking about it and including it in their training.

From the FBI archive 2010:

Every year, the FBI Training Academy graduates about 1,000 new special agents following 20 weeks of intense preparation. In countless tactical and analytical scenarios, the trainees learn how to respond appropriately under the most trying conditions.

But there is also a rigorous moral and ethical component to the training. In a poignant culmination of 21 hours spent defining the line between right and wrong, all new agents are escorted through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. to see in horrific detail what can happen when law enforcement loses sight of what is right. The program—called Law Enforcement and Society: Lessons of the Holocaust—is a joint partnership between the Anti-Defamation League and the museum.

“It makes our people think about morality, ethics, and how to maintain those during turbulent times,” said Special Agent Douglas B. Merel, who teaches the Academy’s ethical leadership course for new agents that includes the museum program. “It shows how important it is for law enforcement to maintain their core values.”

In one visit on a recent Friday morning, about 50 agents-to-be filed into the museum. Over the next four hours they toured the exhibits—led in some cases by Holocaust survivors—and discussed what separates them from the law enforcement officers in Germany who were systematically co-opted by the Nazis.

In a museum conference room, Elise Jarvis, associate director of Law Enforcement Outreach for the Anti-Defamation League, whose mission is in part to secure justice and fair treatment for all citizens, is purposefully blunt in her line of questions. “So the question I’m putting out there is: What makes you different?” Jarvis asked the class. “What, at the end of the day, is going to keep you all anchored? What keeps you from sliding down that slippery slope? What keeps you from abusing your power?”

As answers bubble up—the Constitution, personal morals, compassion, laws—instructors challenge the students to support and defend their positions.

“It’s really our hope that the law enforcement officers who come to the museum see this program, see this history, and really reflect on their professional core values and their role in society today,” said Marcus A. Appelbaum, who coordinates the museum’s community and leadership programs.

The law enforcement program was developed in 1999 after D.C. Metropolitan Police Chief Charles Ramsey toured the museum and recognized the value of teaching trainees about law enforcement’s integral role in the Nazis’ rise to power. In 2000, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh incorporated the tour into the Bureau’s new agent training. In 2005, Director Robert S. Mueller said the training has never been more relevant. “At a time when law enforcement must be aggressive in stopping terror, these classes provide powerful lessons on why we must always protect civil rights and uphold the rule of law,” he said.

So it was Freeh rather than Mueller who started it, but either way it’s good to know.

Comments

3 responses to “He asks the agents point blank: What makes you different?”

  1. Rob Avatar
    Rob

    That’s a great programme. Hopefully any agents-to-be identified as mocking or opposed to the message are failed.

  2. Dave Ricks Avatar
    Dave Ricks

    This point impressed me –

    The law enforcement program was developed in 1999 after D.C. Metropolitan Police Chief Charles Ramsey toured the museum and recognized the value of teaching trainees about law enforcement’s integral role in the Nazis’ rise to power.

    So I found Ramsey said this:

    What does it mean to be a police officer? What is it like to be a member of law enforcement in a democratic society, where you see your role as protecting the constitutional rights of people? And I don’t think most police officers see themselves as protectors of the Constitution. They just simply see themselves as law enforcement officers; but not all laws are legitimate. And those are the kinds of serious questions that are raised when you take a look at what happened in Germany during World War II.

    In 1998, when I took over as Police Chief in Washington D.C., I was invited to visit the U.S. Holocaust Museum. And I was haunted by some of the images that I saw, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was that really bothered me. And I came back a couple of days later, and when going through it a second time I quickly saw that it was the role of police in the Holocaust, which I was actually unaware of prior to my visit, that really was what was disturbing me. And the question then came: what it was that Germany, having been a democratic society, what happened? How did those police officers, that probably took an oath very similar to the one I took, how could they become part and parcel of something so horrible? And I thought then that if we brought police officers there, if we exposed them to what took place, if we had them see their role as protectors of constitutional rights of other individuals, that perhaps there are some valuable lessons that could be learned from the Holocaust experience. And we put together a curriculum that was later presented to recruits in the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington and has since expanded to more than 50,000 officers having gone through.

    Basically, what I did was I finished my tour of the Museum and I just kind of thought about some of the current issues that were being dealt with at the moment by members of law enforcement. Again, this is all pre-9/11, and racial profiling was certainly the hot topic in law enforcement at the time. And it struck me when I looked at another picture of a man who had just been, you know, “liberated” and he’s sitting outside of the barracks, and he’s got a bowl of food of some kind, and he’s looking at the camera. But when you looked at his eyes you could tell that he, you know, he didn’t feel liberated at all, and he didn’t really see the person taking the photograph as a protector. And what really struck me with that image was the fact that I’ve seen that look in the eyes of people in some communities that we serve; that as we drive through, we aren’t seen as protectors either. And why is that? So these are outstanding questions that I wanted to find an answer to.

    And I thought that a way of dealing with a very sensitive issue like racial profiling, like biased policing, would be coming at it from a real incident that took place, far enough away in history where the people in the room weren’t really a part of it, so you don’t have the immediate emotional defensiveness that takes place in a room when you start talking about current racial issues. By doing it this way, it catches everybody off guard. They’re a little confused as to why they’re there, but when we really start to get at the heart of the issues and start to see why people feel sometimes the way they feel—what the history of law enforcement, not just in America, is, but around the world, and some of the baggage that people carry with them when they look at us with some suspicion—then I think you can get legitimate dialogue without the confrontational incidents that may take place if you move too quickly into the topic.

    It is difficult for police officers to rid themselves of bias. I mean, we see things and deal with things on the street on a regular basis that most people are never exposed to, thank God. And it’s very difficult not to carry that around with you, but you have to fight against that. And that’s a day-to-day struggle in some cases. But you just can’t have a situation where you begin to label entire groups of individuals, or think that all young people are thugs and criminals, and make all these kinds of broad conclusions about individuals based on a few experiences that you’ve had. You just can’t afford to do that, because it’s very easy for your values to erode over time. And in a sense that’s what happened in Germany over about a ten-year period or so. You know, the values and the principles began to erode over time, and it led to the ultimate horror. Our oath has to stand for something, and if it doesn’t stand for anything then there are some severe consequences. And I think that officers need to understand why they exist as an organization, as a profession. And I can’t overstate that.

  3. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Wow, thanks for that, Dave. I’ll give Ramsey a post to say that in.

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