Police experts question ICE hiring vetting after Maine officer's violent history surfaces

Police experts question ICE hiring vetting after Maine officer’s violent history surfaces

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who allegedly shot and killed a man during a traffic stop in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13 had a history of domestic violence and serious mental health issues, his ex-wife told NPR — a disclosure that has prompted law enforcement experts to question whether ICE is properly vetting its rapidly expanding workforce.

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

The officer, David Brouillette, is alleged to have killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during a traffic stop. The shooting, along with a fatal ICE shooting in Houston the week before, comes amid what ICE describes as a hiring surge of more than 12,000 officers in less than a year.

Kenneth Corey, who spent more than three decades at the New York City Police Department and now leads the Policing Leadership Academy at the University of Chicago Crime Lab, told NPR that thorough vetting involves multiple layers of scrutiny. Candidates at the NYPD go through medical and psychological exams and 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,” Corey said. “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.”

The process is not foolproof, Corey said. If an officer is hired from a different police department, the new agency might assume the previous department conducted proper due diligence, which can allow troubled officers to move from one department to another. The stress of the job itself — associated with higher rates of divorce, alcohol abuse, heart disease, post-traumatic stress disorder and depression — can also exacerbate existing issues, and stigma may keep officers from seeking help.

“You want to make sure that the people you’re hiring have the temperament and disposition necessary to do the job,” Corey said. “You want to make sure you’re hiring good quality people.”

In the case of the Maine shooting, it is unclear whether ICE did not conduct proper vetting or whether it overlooked warning signs. The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that it applies all “proper personnel vetting regulations” but did not provide specifics.

Kerlikowske said that when he ran Border Patrol, he had to resist pressure from Capitol Hill to move faster on hiring. “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,’” he said. “The mistakes that are made are significant. And you pay a huge price later on.”

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told NPR that police departments have learned over the years that one officer hired without a proper investigation can severely damage an agency’s credibility with its community. He pointed to what he described as infamous examples: the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., rushed to hire hundreds of officers in 1989 and 1990, and 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 to combat violent crime, and dozens of 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.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Customs and Border Protection experienced a massive hiring surge, and a former commissioner later admitted that during the 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,” said 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, said 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.