Art Acevedo is a name familiar to most Texans.
He served as Austin’s police chief for almost 10 years and held the same job in Houston before leaving for a short stint in Miami. He was later offered a job at Austin City Hall but turned it down after there was a community backlash over his handling of untested rape kits during his time at APD.
But Acevedo is not backing away from the public sphere.
He recently wrote an opinion piece in the Austin American-Statesman calling the immigration crackdown not policing, but theater. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: It seems from your essay that a big concern you have is over trust of law enforcement. Do you think immigration agents are giving every officer in uniform a bad name?
Art Acevedo: Yeah, and I think that’s a concern, quite honestly, that many law enforcement, police chiefs and sheriffs across the country are sharing.
You know, unfortunately, the public doesn’t, can’t distinguish sometimes between one badge and the other. And when they see “police” across the chest of the ICE agents, and they see those tactics, you know all that hard work that’s gone into since George Floyd to build and strengthen trust is really starting to go by the wayside.
I think it’s a concern for all Americans and, especially, law enforcement on the front lines.
It seems like a lot of this comes down to standards for training. Local police are trained on things like community engagement and crowd control.
To my knowledge, immigration enforcement agents are not getting that kind of training. Or do I misunderstand that?
If you look at their tactics, they’re clearly not normal tactics. And, quite honestly, the training that they have is either insufficient or, if they’re being properly trained, they’re not being properly supervised in terms of the tactics they’re using.
And as a result, what we’re seeing is use of force that, quite honestly, instead of deescalating, there’s escalation. With better tactics and a more traditional approach to enforcement, we would see a lot of this conflict go away.
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In places like Minneapolis, where local police have been told not to cooperate with ICE, what is the alternative when you have ICE agents trying to round up people that are on their list, their duties for that day, and then you have local protesters and activists trying to stop them, sometimes physically?
I mean, isn’t it in the community’s best interest to have police there – not to facilitate ICE, but to prevent things from escalating into physical confrontation?
I think that that’s a misnomer, that they’re not assisting.
The Minneapolis Police Department is, like a lot of agencies, very understaffed. And so they’re having to prioritize their requests for support from ICE.
And, quite honestly, when you see the dragnet, when ICE has over 3,000 officers between ICE and Border Patrol in Minneapolis, and that’s five times the number of officers that the Minneapolis Police Department has, they simply don’t have the operational bandwidth to be going all over the city trying to keep an eye on ICE and trying to help them out when they have their own mission, which is the safety of the people of Minneapolis.
So if ICE would go back to their tactics that were really intelligence-led and data-driven like they’ve done in the past… They need to go back to the border. And we need to bring some normalcy back to the operations that we’ve been witnessing across the country and get rid of this reported 3,000 arrests a day which, quite honestly, last time I checked, quotas are illegal in terms of law enforcement and ICE should be no different.
If you had the ear of the Minneapolis police chief, what would you say about how to navigate these times?
I know the chief very well. I’ve known him for many years. He’s a friend, he’s a colleague. And I would tell him, stay the course.
You’re doing a great job of balancing the needs and the safety of your community, your officers. And you’re helping to keep ICE and Border Patrol, when there’s conflict with the community, you’re done a good job of triaging those incidents when there is a request for assistance or request from your own community to respond.
So he’s in a tough spot. I feel for him. But I think that, based on everything that he and his men and women have been going through, that he has a lot to be proud of and we should support him and support the men and woman of ICE and demand that their leadership get back to what they know to be appropriate tactics and appropriate processes and focusing on dangerous criminals instead of going out and stopping everything that moves that has brown skin or might appear to be a person of color.
Say more about the tactics that you would like to see when it comes to immigration officers. What specifically would you like them to do differently?
I think that what we’d like to see is for them to go back to the way they’ve always operated, which is to not go out and racially profile, not go out and just stop people without cause. And then go back the days when they actually respected the rule of law and operated within the requirements of the Constitution.
So they know how to do the job. And I think with Tom Homan, who is a career ICE agent and a leader in that organization, at the helm, I am hopeful that he’ll go back to the methods that are appropriate, the methods that respect due process and the methods to respect the rule of law.
And, most importantly, methods that targeted, are deliberative and are not going out and just, you know, stopping people based on racial profiling and, quite honestly, with limited cause, probable cause or reasonable suspicion.
So, let’s see what happens. But I think with Tom in charge, I’m really hopeful we’re going to see a change, not just in Minneapolis, but across the country, where they’ll be doing things the appropriate way and not the theatrical way that we’ve been seeing and, quite honestly, the unconstitutional way that is really creating a lot of angst, I believe, amongst a lot the members of ICE and DHS and a lot distrust.
So let’s see what happens, but I’m hopeful that the ship will be turned around.
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You wrote in your opinion piece that when trust collapses, criminals win. Could you say more about that concern?
Absolutely. Look, our number one commodity that we have to build its emotional capital and that is trust.
And when the public does not trust law enforcement, people, whether they’re victims or they’re witnesses, they go back into the shadows. They don’t cooperate. They don’t call. And so that’s a loss for public safety. That’s a loss for all Americans. And that’s a loss for community safety.
And so let’s hope that we see a change in the tactics and let’s hope that we’ll see some more return to traditional law enforcement methodologies. And, with that, let’s just hope that we start seeing the distrust that is spreading stop and the wave of rebuilding trust start, which is in the best interest of all of us here in this country.
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