BATFE gone rogue?

[BaiHu]

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/09/atf-reportedly-used-rogue-tactics-in-half-dozen-cities/

A teaser:

"Federal ATF agents in cities across the country reportedly used rogue tactics to go after guns on the street -- allegedly exploiting the mentally ill, buying up weapons for way more than they're worth and letting minors smoke pot and drink."

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

[TGS]

http://i1357.photobucket.com/albums/q758/Finkerfuggles/cartoon-atf-job-interview_zps4e157943.jpg (http://s1357.photobucket.com/user/Finkerfuggles/media/cartoon-atf-job-interview_zps4e157943.jpg.html)

[RoyGBiv]

Now we know what Al was trying to buy when this photo was taken.

http://carolynyeager.net/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/holder-sharpton.jpg

http://patdollard.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Holder-brainwash-e1357853885112.jpg

[Joseph B.]

Kind of hard to be shocked about anything that agency does after the Ruby Ridge incident.

[Ray Keith]

http://m.jsonline.com/more/news/watchdog/watchdogreports/atf-uses-rogue-tactics-in-storefront-stings-across-the-nation-b99146765z1-234916641.html#continue_reading

[TCinVA]

I'll say it:

Managers/supervisors in law enforcement agencies sometimes have a bad habit of looking only at results, preferring not to look too deeply on how things are being run. Putting aside all the press stuff which might be making bad guys look sympathetic (I can point you to a "mentally challenged" individual who certainly has deficits, but not so severe that it stops him from enjoying rape) and taking the report as if it's 100% factual with no additional story (which there probably is), I can see how this might happen. Supervisors/managers who play the results game allow things to happen by just being willfully ignorant about how business is getting done, reporting up the chain only successes and then if blowback happens due to breach of ethics, policy, or even the law...acting shocked and horrified as if they had no idea.

Lack of proactive, effective supervision isn't just incompetence. Sometimes it's a deliberate tactic.

These little eruptions from time to time give insight into some problems that run pretty deep in law enforcement. Certainly not in every single agency or with every single officer, but in enough agencies with enough officers that it shakes faith in the entire criminal justice system. And it happens all over the place ranging from big organizations like NYPD Narc unit detectives fabricating charges and planting evidence, to podunk PD's abuse of forfeiture laws based on some pretty specious "War on drugs!" theories of law enforcement.

If these allegations are true, it's not surprising in the least given that we have pretty solid evidence that the BATFE has had severe leadership issues for quite some time. There are good people doing honest work in the agency, but they always seem to be overruled by leadership that is just ridiculous. And when people within the organization speak up to stop something stupid or wrong from going on, the organization seems to attack them rather than taking their input to heart and changing things.

...and don't think that the politicians and political appointees play no role in this. Putting certifiable idiots like Eric Holder and Jamie Gorelick in charge of agencies with guns and arrest powers, allowing them the power to structure leadership and have their way in the organization is going to have a severe impact on the culture and long term behavior of the organization.

Bush wasn't terribly proactive in fixing the damage done to the BATFE by Clinton...and after him we've got Obama who is as hostile to gun rights as any president in history and isn't the least bit bashful about abuse of executive authority.

[Joseph B.]

I get that you shouldn't broad stroke the ATF, or all of the employees. But it just always seems that when things are way wrong, dirty cop work, setups and crazy stories that you would think only Hollywood could make up, the ATF seems to be the agency in the spot light.

I've thought the ATF should be deactivated for 20+ years, do a case by case evaluation on the agents and place them in other agencies and just do away with ATF all together. The FBI can handle the background checks and a combination of federal, state and local LEAs can handle enforcement.

[GardoneVT]

I have to ask, as the ignorant civvie, just what GOOD has the ATF concretely done to justify its existence?

I don't say that sarcastically-the press hates it when government does it's job right. There's no agenda in reporting a gang having their bomb factory get shut down. So we, the public, never hear when Federal agencies do the right thing. But let someone @#@ up, and every outlet is blaring "government corruption!"

For all the stuff BATFE did during Fast and Furious, more then a few agents have risked their behinds to testify why it was jacked up. That takes stones, given modern sensibilities.

[TCinVA]

I get that you shouldn't broad stroke the ATF, or all of the employees. But it just always seems that when things are way wrong, dirty cop work, setups and crazy stories that you would think only Hollywood could make up, the ATF seems to be the agency in the spot light.


...because you're a firearms enthusiast and you look at informational resources frequented by firearms enthusiasts and we all have a weak spot for the BATFE because they're the agency that is in charge of the stuff we care about.

Our ears are carefully attuned to BATFE screwups, where other agencies who do the same or worse tend not to draw our notice or ire as much. The BATFE gets watched like a hawk. The NYPD Narc unit that had detectives planting evidence and fabricating charges didn't get as much notice on gun boards as BATFE excesses do.

That being said, the BATFE seems particularly susceptible to these sorts of issues because it seems that other federal agencies with a more independent streak can better resist being politically directed and maybe pay more attention to people within the organization who sound alarm over potentially stupid practices. Emphasis on seems, there.

[TCinVA]

I have to ask, as the ignorant civvie, just what GOOD has the ATF concretely done to justify its existence?

I don't say that sarcastically-the press hates it when government does it's job right. There's no agenda in reporting a gang having their bomb factory get shut down .So we, the public, never hear when Federal agencies do the right thing.But let someone @#@ up, and every outlet is blaring "government corruption!"

For all the stuff BATFE did during Fast and Furious, more then a few agents have risked their behinds to testify why it was jacked up.That takes stones ,given modern sensibilities.

Agents embedded in gang taskforces have done lots of good by going after gangbangers running guns and contraband across state lines and national borders, helping hand out some serious big-boy jail time to a lot of dudes who should be in a cage rather than roaming free.

The problem with BATFE is that it's made up of people. Any group of people doing anything is going to have bad apples in it, whether that's law enforcement or medicine or the priesthood. The problem comes when an organization lets the bad apples stay in positions of power and do messed up things, covering up the problems until there's a big public blowup like this story or Paterno at Penn State or a bunch of people who were molested as children bring suit against the church in court.

Every organization has bad apples, and every organization is natured to try and ignore the problem and cover it up rather than deal with it head on. The difference is the people. In some organizations the people who take their oaths seriously and strive to hold themselves and their coworkers to a high standard are in positions of power where they can accomplish something. Trouble is that those people tend to be outspoken early on in their career and get deliberately excluded from positions where they can impact the dysfunction within an organization because they aren't a "team player". Nobody likes the guy in the room who says they're heading for disaster even if he's right and by screaming at the top of his lungs he causes a course correction that avoids a serious problem. He's not remembered for being the guy that saved them from an iceberg, he's remembered for being the guy who makes too much noise and harshes everyone's mellow. So they're often out on the margins where they may do great work against the bad guys on the street but have zero power to do anything about the bad guys in the organization. That is by design.

Throw in perverse incentives, poor supervision, and inappropriate focus on results while ignoring methodology and you get these sorts of issues.

If I were king tomorrow I'd restrict the BATFE to ministerial duties and I'd feel good about that for a month or two...but the enforcement and regulatory work they do is going to be done by somebody in government somewhere and given what we've seen from a number of different organizations recently I don't have much faith that it would be much different if a different acronym was on the building performing the same function.

[TheTrevor]

I have to ask, as the ignorant civvie, just what GOOD has the ATF concretely done to justify its existence?

I don't say that sarcastically-the press hates it when government does it's job right. There's no agenda in reporting a gang having their bomb factory get shut down. So we, the public, never hear when Federal agencies do the right thing. But let someone @#@ up, and every outlet is blaring "government corruption!"

For all the stuff BATFE did during Fast and Furious, more then a few agents have risked their behinds to testify why it was jacked up. That takes stones, given modern sensibilities.

I agree with everything that TC said, with one thing to add: to borrow a term from the tech industry, I think the ATF has a scalability problem.

Any organization, at a given level of scale, has a range of stuff that it's good at, plus some stuff that it can do but has difficulty sustaining competency at doing. As a specific example, it's my belief that the ATF simply doesn't have the institutional scale necessary to consistently set up and run sting operations in a repeatable and correct fashion across all of their offices. Because they're very substantially smaller than, say, the FBI, they struggle to execute these complex operations correctly, much less learn from and improve on the outcomes and handle the un-sexy after-action cleanup work well.

Personally, I'd like to see the ATF cleanly split along administrative/LE lines, and the entire LE force merged into the FBI. It would deconflict the LE mission (and I've heard some epic ATF-vs-FBI stories) and bring a much stronger institutional support structure for the investigative work.

[Chuck Haggard]

In talking to a friend a couple of weeks ago about a particularly troubling string of local issues, he noted that some of the problems I have directly stem from the fact that ethical people can not be controlled.

When I said "Wut?", he noted that ethical people will always do the right thing, whether you want them to or not. Thus, he opines, why I continue to have issues in dealing with certain folks.

I've been mulling that over for a bit.



That the ATF, and many of the other Federal agencies, get political appointees that the current POTUS approves of, means said agencies are in a constant state of being redirected, and often being run by people completely unqualified to do so.

I got to sit in on a debrief of the Waco mess that was warts and all. The lead up to that fiasco was a train wreck in progress from the very get-go, with culpability going up to the POTUS level.

[TCinVA]

I got to sit in on a debrief of the Waco mess that was warts and all. The lead up to that fiasco was a train wreck in progress from the very get-go, with culpability going up to the POTUS level.

To put it in tech terms, political leadership of law enforcement agencies is often as competent and well thought out as the Healthcare website rollout has been. The end product is different, but the defects in the process that produces the end result are all the same, beginning with people in charge of things who don't know what they don't know and yet aren't the least bit bashful about trying to structure initiatives that they don't even understand.