Local Police Chief Says ICE Agents Drew Their Guns On One of His Officers: ‘It Has to Stop’
Mark Bruley, The police chief of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, spoke to the press on Tuesday and detailed how a group of ICE agents violated the civil rights of one of his officers, including knocking a phone from his hand to prevent him from recording the encounter.
“I have a group of great police chiefs behind me who are here to support a very short but very important message that we want to share with you,” Burley began.
What you won’t hear from any of us today is “abolish” rhetoric. ICE” or there should be no immigration enforcement. The truth is that immigration enforcement is necessary for national security and domestic security. But how it is done is extremely important. In fact, we have a long history of working extremely well with our federal partners, including ICE agents, and we have seen the best of them perform their jobs extremely well in the past.
However, lately, as has been the case for the past two weeks, we as the law enforcement community have been receiving endless complaints from U.S. citizens regarding civil rights violations on our streets. From what we hear, they are stopped at traffic stops or on the street for no reason and forced to produce paperwork to determine whether they are here legally. As this situation continued for the last two weeks, we started to hear the same complaints from our police officers because they, too, felt victimized while off duty. Each of these individuals are black people to whom this has happened.
Bruley She then told the story of the female officer’s disturbing encounter, “In Brooklyn Park, a police officer who shared her story with me was stopped while driving past ICE on the road. When they put her in a box, they asked for her paperwork, which she clearly was a US citizen, and she clearly didn’t have any paperwork.” He continued:
When he became concerned about the remarks and how he was being treated, he took out his phone to record the incident. The phone fell out of his hand and he was prevented from recording. The officers had their guns drawn during this interaction. After the officer became so concerned, he had to identify himself as a Brooklyn Park police officer in hopes of slowing down the incident and de-escalating the situation. After hearing this, the agents immediately got into their vehicles and left without making any further comments or apologies.
I wish I could say this was an isolated incident. In fact, many of the chiefs standing behind me have similar incidents with their off-duty officers. This isn’t a big deal because it only happens to off-duty police officers. But what he does is, we know that our officers know what the Constitution is, they know what right and wrong is, and they know when people are being targeted. And so were they. If this is happening to our officers, it pains me to think about how many of our community members are victimized by this every day. It needs to stop.
Burely’s words quickly went viral on social media, sparking outrage from viewers who were concerned about what they heard:
