I don’t really look anything much like Alvin Scott, the man pictured just below here. But a general description of Scott would also apply to me. He’s a tall, slender, white male with gray hair and a prominent nose.
Have you seen this man?
I’m younger, taller, and skinnier than Scott. He’s now 75 years old, six-foot even, and about 170 pounds. And I don’t have the mustache he used to wear — although he likely has shaved that mustache by now. But still, if police were on the lookout for a tall, skinny white guy with gray hair and a big nose, they’d probably take a second look in my direction.
Why am I talking about Alvin Scott? Because he might be anywhere.
And so, if you’re a local police officer in — I don’t know, let’s say Worcester, Massachusetts — you might at any moment have a very good, official reason to drop whatever else it was you were doing and head out to investigate the possi9ble sighting of this Most Wanted Fugitive.
Say you’re a local police officer currently tasked with something lower-priority — like accompanying some functionaries from another agency who are attempting a civil arrest over which you, as a police officer, have no direct jurisdiction. This is something that police officers are sometimes asked to do. Police in places like — oh, again, let’s say Worcester, Massachusetts — do not and legally cannot make civil detention arrests of people with alleged civil immigration violations. They have no jurisdiction for that. It’s not their job or their business or their concern. But they’re sometimes asked to accompany the hirelings of the agencies that do have that jurisdiction, not to assist them with their business — that would be both inappropriate and illegal — but to be present to ensure that no one else interferes with those hirelings in their attempt to carry out their business.
Like, the police do not and cannot be asked to go out and deliver eviction notices. But they can be asked to accompany the process-servers responsible for that task just to hang out and be present in case anyone else might attempt to interfere with the work of those process servers. It’s a fine distinction, and a kind of subtle one, but it winds up sometimes creating a role for local police in activities that would not and should not otherwise be any of their business.*
“We do not do civil detention arrests,” Police Chief Paul Saucier said [at a city council meeting in January] reassuring them that they wouldn’t be party to the ICE assault Trump was about to unleash. The police, he said, “do not have the authority to affect a civil arrest.”
What he didn’t say is that if you try to stop the civil arrest, the police will stop you from stopping it.
This morning a few dozen of us here in Worcester, Massachusetts, got to see that unstated fine print in action firsthand. A woman was led by federal agents in cuffs away from her family, through a throng of community organizers trying to stop it, and into an unmarked car. The local police arrived to prevent the community from protecting their neighbor from an unlawful kidnapping. They succeeded, and in the process arrested two of the people who tried to stop it.
I encourage you to read Shaner’s entire first-hand account of this kidnapping and of the arrests made by Worcester police of those trying to prevent the kidnapping. And you should watch the video Shaner recorded. It’s appalling and infuriating and yet, also inspiring and galvanizing.
The people of Worcester — its residents, citizens, civilians, and neighbors — acquit themselves admirably. These are good people doing what good people do in the face of injustice and lawlessness. The masked, badgeless alleged ICE agents do not have a warrant and do not acknowledge the existence of any law or Constitution requiring them to produce one. They are kidnappers, and the good people of Worcester treat them as such.
The police officers of Worcester behave shamefully. They mostly appear to be amoral windsocks, shrugging off any personal, ethical, or legal agency because they’re “just following orders” and find it easier to reassure themselves that they don’t have any choice about what actions to take despite the presence of an infant torn from the hands of its mother and of a daughter sobbing and shrieking uncontrollably. It’s ugly and shameful behavior for everyone in uniform there.
Here is Shaner’s account:
“This is ICE. This is federal,” one of the WPD officers explains, as if a suitable explanation. Case closed.
The 1850s are back.
A woman says, “They don’t have a warrant.” Another says, “They’re trying to kidnap someone.”
As the local cops are clearing the road for ICE’s unmarked SUV, community organizer Maydee Morales confronts them. “Worcester police are not supposed to be involved in this.”
In the background, a Worcester police officer looks at the desperate woman holding her baby trying to stop the agents from taking her mother and says “Do you want to stay with your baby?” The tacit threat of separation for her protestation of another separation. Later he would complain “She’s putting the baby in harm’s way.” A classic move: “harm” goes undefined because the harm is him.
Maydee, still confronting the officers, says, “Where is the warrant?” Officer Lugo, according to his nameplate, says, “Ma’am we are trying our best but they are federal.”
Morales again asks for the warrant.
“They’re federal.”
“They still need a warrant.”
Another officer, frustrated, says, “They don’t need a warrant.” Finally, one of them tells the truth. Due process is not a matter they’re concerned with. The deportation must proceed. Trying to stop it is the unlawful thing.
And so I recommend that local police officers in Worcester and everywhere else in America familiarize themselves with Alvin Scott, FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitive on the loose.
Surely a potential sighting of this Most Wanted Fugitive would be a higher priority for any local officer than any indirect request for assistance from another agency conducting warrantless operations that are explicitly outside of your department’s jurisdiction. After all, Scott is wanted for murder, not for some penny-ante BS involving, as Shaner puts it, “… the usual package job: disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, unlawful assembly. The charges they throw on anyone they want to arrest for the sake of arresting them, knowing they’re unlikely to stick.”
It seems to me that any local police officer who wishes to be honorable and decent and lawful has the opportunity to make a choice. The next time they receive a call asking them to come to some street where neighbors are defending a mother and an infant and a teenage girl, knowing that they’re being asked to come and arrest those neighbors and that traumatized child and to disgrace themselves by assisting a bunch of lawless, masked thugs who refuse to produce warrants and who seem to relish the child’s anguished screams, they could choose, instead, to delay that response because they are currently pursuing a hot tip about a much higher-priority case that falls directly — and not elliptically and indirectly and tangentially — within their jurisdiction.
A possible Alvin Scott sighting surely outweighs racing off to fabricate a handful of sham-charges against good neighbors for pseudo-misdemeanors.
So here it is, a hot tip for the next time Worcester Police officers are called to rush over to provide assistance for ICE agents. That assistance is going to have to wait until after you’ve first rushed over to the opposite side of town to investigate witness accounts of a tall, skinny white guy with gray hair and a big nose. That could be a murderer! That could be a Most Wanted Fugitive! You can’t ignore that.
The ICE agents will just have to wait until every possible Alvin Scott sighting has been thoroughly investigated.
* This same issue of police jurisdiction over civil matters also comes up in another recent story involving ICE’s outrageously, extravagantly lawless behavior, the agency’s violent detention of the mayor of Newark, New Jersey. (This is often referred to as their “arrest” of Mayor Ras Baraka, but that’s ludicrous when you consider ICE’s own jurisdiction.)
Baraka was present outside the agency’s detention center in his city because that center had refused access to fire and code investigators from the city and was (is) therefore in violation of city ordinances. City inspectors denied access to the property could have asked local police to accompany them, but instead they aimed even higher — sending the mayor himself and several members of Congress to the facility.
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