High capacity pepper spray guns.
The federal agency in charge of U.S. border security on Friday issued a revised handbook on when its agents may use lethal force, adopting changes aimed at reducing dozens of killings that have generated a handful of lawsuits and cast agents as quick to pull their triggers.
Customs and Border Protection Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske also released a blistering report that had been kept secret for more than a year that lays out how some agents had taken actions to justify firing their weapons, including placing themselves in the path of moving cars or failing to retreat from rock throwers.
Kerlikowske released the revised handbook and the once-secret report in a move he said would address the “need for openness and transparency” at his agency — the largest federal law enforcement arm — and bring about “better public trust.”
But he declined say when his office would release the names of agents or officers involved in fatal shootings or the records relating to any possible previous instances of lethal force. Such a practice is common among city and state law enforcement agencies.
Nor would he say if the department would ever release surveillance video that might clear up cases in which agents had drawn their weapons and fired at migrants or U.S. citizens, sometimes through a border fence.
He said agents of the U.S. Border Patrol and officers of Customs and Border Protection must comply with revised policies that call for use of less lethal force whenever possible.
He also said the agencies, which are part of the Department of Homeland Security, no longer will end probes into cases of lethal force prematurely or drag them out over years.
A recent report by the American Immigration Council, an immigration watchdog, found that 97 percent of abuse complaints lodged against Border Patrol agents and Customs and Border Protection officers resulted in no disciplinary action once an investigation had been completed. Many cases were unresolved after as many as five years, the report said.
“We will hold people accountable. We will do investigations,” he said.
Kerlikowske refused, however, to set any rules about when agents can use deadly force against rock throwers, saying that after he had visited the scene of one killing near San Diego earlier this year, he came away believing agents needed some flexibility.
“To have a hard and fast rule that would ban the use of deadly force for them to protect themselves against rock throwing, I did not think would be appropriate,” Kerlikowske said.
Border Patrol chief Michael J. Fisher said March 7 that rock throwers had pelted agents 1,713 times since 2010, causing them to fire their service weapons 43 times, killing 10 people.
The American Civil Liberties Union says that “at least 28 people” have died since January 2010 after lethal encounters with Customs and Border Protection officers or Border Patrol agents. At least 10 victims were U.S. citizens, and three were minors.
In six cases, Border Patrol agents fired through the border fence and killed people standing on Mexican soil, the ACLU says, a practice that was explored in depth in a McClatchy report on one of those killings, that of 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena ,who was shot repeatedly in the back through the border fence that divides Nogales, Ariz., from its like-named twin on the Mexican side in October 2012.