About 2 AM On Saturday morning, the operators who manage emergency lines in the suburbs of Minneapolis de Champlin, according to a police report, received a call from someone who said that a masked man came to their homes “then shot their parents”. When the police and the doctors arrived, they discovered that the victims were a senator from the Democratic state appointed John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, who were alive but seriously injured. A “very intuitive” sergeant of the neighboring city of Brooklyn Park, who had helped answer the call, asked the agents of his jurisdiction to check the home of the legislator of the Democratic State Melissa Hortman, who was until recently the speaker of the Chamber of State. According to Brooklyn Park’s police chief Mark Bruley when the police arrived around 3:35 am AMThey saw something unexpected: a “vehicle that exactly looked like a SUV Squad car” in the aisle with its light emergency lights. The front door was open and the police saw a man dressed like a cop pulling into it; He killed Hortman and her husband, Mark. The police shot the shooter – at the time identified as Vance Boelter, an evangelical Christian of fifty -seven years (a website of his site said that he was an ordered minister) with dispersed work history, which had recently been employed by local funeral services companies – which went up to the room and, for a certain time, escaped. He was arrested on Sunday evening and was accused of federal murder, which carries the possibility of the death penalty.
The assassination of an elected official and the attempted assassination of another confirm the arrival of a new political era, in which the expectation and fear of political violence are endemic. But who is a boelter, and the exact nature of his objectives and his perceived grievances can ultimately be less salient than who he claimed to be. (Boelter’s motivations are not yet clear, although he had what the police had suggested may be a target list of about seventy individuals, many of whom are democratic politicians.) State legislator summoned to his door well after midnight can be wary of opening it, but a little less reluctant if the person passing by the walk is uniform. It turns out that Boelter led an SUV that he had probably equipped for a security company that had not taken off. But he made the deliberate decision to leave the emergency lights on.
It was very intelligent of the real police officers of Brooklyn Park to suspect what was going on, and their rapid reaction could have saved lives. (During a press conference on Monday, the Minnesota authorities revealed that Boelter had visited at least two other houses between Hoffman and Hortman, although nobody was at home at one, and he seemed to have been frightened to the other.) Their work could not have been helped by the fact that the last decade has experienced the rise of an environment of Janneau, when the law was celebrated the law when the law celebrated the world. was useless by Janned. The vigilants who stormed the Capitol and attacked his police forces as “warriors”, and later when he forgiveness for their decision to take the law in hand.
The politicization of the police has acquired a new dimension during immigration repression, when the administration has sometimes seemed to allow its agents to disguise their identities or affiliations so that it is often not clear for the detainees they are, or under authority. (If the vigilantes were encouraged to act as cops, the real cops were also encouraged to act a little more like vigilantes.) In Boston, in March, when federal agents arrested Rümeysa Öztürk, a student graduated from Tofts University who had co-written an OP-ED in a campus, they were in clothes for plains and masked. Sometimes the mission was blurred or hidden: shortly after the White House deployed seven hundred marine in Los Angeles, allegedly to help repress the demonstrations against immigration raids, photos that are distributed by holding a demonstrator. Catherine Rampell, from Washington JobReported last week on an immigration raid targeting a landscaper working outside a house design shop in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in which the agents presented themselves “in tactical masks and equipment and refused to show identifiers, mandates or even the names of all the criminals they chased”. In the room, Rampell spoke with the company’s co -owner, Linda Shafiroff, who said: “It could have been like a band of proud boys or something.”
In each of these circumstances, the federal government asks ordinary people to believe that those who wear uniforms act in the name of the public, while allowing them to style their identity and mission, and push the limits of what the police can do. It is difficult to imagine a more perfectly designed scenario for exploitation. In February, a man carrying a ICE Vest at the conservative political action conference, outside Washington, DC, admitted to a podcaster that he had no affiliation with the agency, but said about his jacket: “It’s $ 29.99 on Amazon. I recommend buying a small one, if you are my size.” In Philadelphia, the police looked for a man who had entered a car repair store with false security clothes; cried “Immigration!”, Which made certain employees disperse; Then bonded a worker and steal the business. At the end of March, the falseICE The situation had become sufficiently common in southern California that the Los Angeles Times Directed a feature film entitled “Imitators of ice and other crooks are increasing: how to protect yourself.”
Some of these imitators stop for money. But others, in particular these harassing migrants, can express a certain solidarity with the president’s political objectives. The fleeing membrane that Trump established between the police and his own program does not serve the officers, many of whom are simply trying to do their job. This can also make their work more dangerous. The more law without law, the easier it is for people without law to identify the officers, the more likely it is that citizens will doubt that real officers really represent legal authority.
Which is a generalized mistrust recipe. For citizens to know who really finds an armed federal agent and in which authority he operates should be part of the most fundamental commitment to transparency. At least the courts and politicians should put pressure on government agents to disclose their identities during raids and detentions, and to clarify where their authority begins and ends. If they do not do or cannot, a more dystopian path invites, endemic suspicion of authority. (In the California central valley, while the immigration raids culminated, the school attendance would have dropped by twenty-two percent.) On Saturday, during an anti-Trump no Kings demonstration in Salt Lake City, Utah, a man would have seemed crouching behind a wall, while transporting what looked like an AR-15-5-style rifle. (Open transport is mainly legal in UTAH, and it is not yet clear if he has supported or opposed the demonstrations.) Several armed persons whom the police have described as “peacetale soldiers” ensuring security for the demonstration-although this role is official or self-assisted either under investigation-brought his own weapons and he shouted. One shot the man, managed to disarm him but to kill a passer -by.
In Minnesota, the authorities said they were examining Boelter’s motivations and if it belonged to a wider network. In the meantime, nervousness has prevailed through the political class. THE Times suggested that political violence “becomes almost routine”; Greg Landsman, a member of the Ohio Democrat Congress, told the newspaper that for months, he considered an attempted assassination each time he speaks in public. “It’s always in my head. I don’t think it will disappear,” he said. “It’s just me on the ground.” These are the types of pressures that can dispel public service and disrupt a democracy. In the midst of all general calls to cool the animated rhetoric of partisan policy, a specific measure could be useful: more clarity on which represents the field of law application and where the limits of their mission are. Otherwise, it may become the summer when everyone – all the way to politicians – is feeling dangerous. ♦
