Amidst hiring push, police experts question ICE officer vetting : NPR

David Brouillette, the ICE officer who allegedly killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during a traffic stop in Maine last week, had a history of domestic violence and a number of serious mental health issues, his ex-wife told NPR.

The killing, along with a fatal ICE shooting in Texas the week before, comes on the heels of a rapid hiring spree at the federal agency: ICE says it has hired more than 12,000 officers in less than a year. That has prompted some law enforcement experts to worry that ICE is cutting corners in its hiring – a lesson police have learned the hard way over the years.

“This is a person that never should have been hired,” Gil Kerlikowske, a former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, says of Brouillette. A typical vetting process should have caught red flags in the ICE officer’s past, Kerlikowske told NPR.

When it comes to assessing an officer’s mental well-being, hiring practices at police agencies around the country vary widely. But Kenneth Corey, who spent more than three decades at the New York City Police Department, says more intensive vetting, such as mandatory psychological evaluations, is becoming more common.

Corey oversaw the NYPD’s medical division, including the psychologists who evaluated recruits. He says candidates there go through medical and psychological exams, and what is known as a background character investigation.

“If the investigation is done properly, you’re contacting former employers, you are getting records and not just academic records, but specifically disciplinary records from schools,” says Corey, who now leads the Policing Leadership Academy at the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

“You’re contacting the police departments in any jurisdiction where your candidate has ever lived. Do they have any reports on file with your name on it? That would include domestic incident reports. It would also include cases where you were moved to a hospital for mental health issues,” he says.

The process isn’t perfect. Corey says at some agencies, for instance, if an officer is hired from a different police department, the new agency might assume the previous department did its due diligence. That can open the door for troubled cops to hop from one police department to another.

The job itself can also exacerbate existing issues, and stigma may keep some officers from seeking help. The stress that police officers experience is associated with higher rates of divorce, alcohol abuse, heart disease, post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

“You want to make sure that the people you’re hiring have the temperament and disposition necessary to do the job. It’s a difficult job. It’s oftentimes extremely stressful,” Corey says. “You want to make sure you’re hiring good quality people.”

Corey stressed that proper officer 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 unclear whether the agency did not conduct proper vetting or overlooked warning signs. In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security says it applies all the “proper personnel vetting regulations” but did not provide specifics.

But the agency has hired a huge number of officers in a short time. Kerlikowske says when he ran Border Patrol, he had to resist pressure from Capitol Hill to move faster.

“The complaints would always be like, ‘Well, you still have a thousand agents you need to hire.’ You could explain, though, to members of Congress, to the appropriators, that, ‘Look, we don’t want to rush the hiring process,'” Kerlikowske says. “The mistakes that are made are significant. And you pay a huge price later on.”

There are infamous examples of police departments hiring too fast with disastrous results.

“What police departments have learned over the years is that one officer hired without a proper background investigation, including a thorough psychological examination, can severely damage a police department’s credibility with its community,” Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told NPR.

In 1989 and 1990, for instance, the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., rushed to hire hundreds of police officers, cutting corners on background checks, psychological testing and training. Members of that hiring class were disciplined, arrested, charged with crimes, and fired in record numbers.

In the 1980s, Miami doubled the size of its police force in less than two years in an effort to combat violent crime. Dozens of police officers, many of them recent recruits, were eventually disciplined for actions related to police corruption, and many were convicted of crimes related to stealing drugs from traffickers.

In the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, CBP, part of the newly created Department of Homeland Security, saw a massive hiring surge. Later, a former commissioner at the agency admitted that during its streamlining or elimination of vetting procedures, the agency had hired drug cartel members into its ranks.

“When you have pressure to hire a certain number of individuals during a certain time limit, then that’s where, sometimes, steps may be overlooked,” says Tanya Meisenholder, director of police research at New York University School of Law’s Policing Project.

Meisenholder, who spent nearly 20 years at the NYPD and oversaw its hiring, 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.