Abusing homeland authority: as it emerges as our country's first national police force, Michael Chertoff's Department of Homeland Security is becoming notorious for abuses of power--and even depraved crimes against children.

The school day had ended and the parking lot at Englewood Elementary was full of energetic kids eager to go home when Leander Pickett saw a late model car obstructing the school bus loading zone. Pickett, a teacher's assistant at the Jacksonville, Florida, grade school, strolled over to the car, which had made a wrong turn into an exit lane, and told its occupants they had to move.

Pickett's reward for looking after the safety of the schoolkids was to be thrown face-down onto the hood of the car, hand cuffed, and held for more than a half-hour as students, teachers, and parents looked on in horror.

"I walked up to [the driver] and said, 'Sir, you need to move,'" Pickett told a television reporter. "That's when he said 'I'm a police officer. I'm with Homeland Security. I'll move when I want to.' That's when he started grabbing me on my arm."

"Mr. Pickett asked the guy blocking the bus loading zone to move, and the guy told him he would move his car when he got ready to move it," confirmed eyewitness Alton Jackson, a coach at the school. A second eyewitness, school employee Terri Dreisonstok, added: "At that point I intervened, and I went up to the gentleman and said, 'Mr. Pickett is an employee here,' and they said it didn't matter."

At the time Pickett was assaulted by the Homeland Security agents, school principal Gail Brinson was in the cafeteria. Summoned by an anxious student, Brinson raced to the parking lot and found an agitated Pickett being yelled at by the Homeland Security officials.

"I told them Mr. Pickett was an employee, and asked what he had done," Brinson recalled to THE NEW AMERICAN. "One of them told me that he had been 'abusive, aggressive, and belligerent,' but wouldn't say what else he had done to deserve being handcuffed. They just insisted over and over that it was 'Homeland Security business.' As I looked at Leander standing there in handcuffs without being told what he had done wrong, I said to the agents, 'Well, if you had treated me like this I would be belligerent, too.'"

Brinson demanded names and badge numbers, but the agents refused to provide them.

"They told me they didn't have to give me anything," she recounts. "They said that they were 'bigger than the FBI' and that they wouldn't let [Mr. Pickett] go until they thought it was okay. And all the time we had teachers crying, children screaming--Leander is really popular with the kids--and parents shouting at us." Finally, after an anguished half-hour, Pickett was set free without any charges being filed against him, and the federal agents drove away.

"You know what I think happened?" Brinson said to THE NEW AMERICAN. "I think they simply got lost, made a wrong turn into our parking lot, and when Mr. Pickett exercised his proper authority by telling them to move, the two things the Devil likes most took over--pride and arrogance." With the help of an acquaintance who works for the federal government, Brinson pursued a complaint through the Homeland Security Department's civil liberties section, but it availed her nothing.

"You can't get anywhere with these people," she points out. "When something like this happens nobody [in the federal bureaucracy] will listen unless you have a connection. Well, I had a connection, and it still didn't help. I just kept getting transferred around from desk to desk, and finally I spoke with some official who just told me that they 'stand behind our men.'"

Leander Pickett hired a lawyer and prepared to file a civil rights ! lawsuit. "You know you hear these stories every day and say, 'This

will never happen to me,' but ... it happened to me," comments Pickett. "If this is Homeland Security, I think we ought to be a little afraid."

Corruption and Perversion 

When sheriffs or local police abuse their power, local remedies are available. But agents of the Department of Homeland Security are accountable only to the agency itself. As is shown by the incident at Englewood Elementary, the impunity enjoyed by Homeland Security agents can extend to the most obvious abuses of power committed for the pettiest reasons.

As a department fact sheet points out, the Homeland Security system "leverages resources within Federal, state, and local governments, coordinating the transition of multiple agencies and programs into a single, integrated agency.... More than 87,000 different governmental jurisdictions at the federal, state, and local level have homeland security responsibilities." The Constitution created a system in which law enforcement and internal security were almost exclusively state and local concern but the Department of Homeland Security is rapidly consolidating our once-independent law enforcement agencies into a single "integrated" system with a "national mission." The Framers of our republic understood that a "national" police force would soon consider itself above the law and immune to accountability.

The unprovoked assault on Leander Pickett by federal Homeland Security officers is not the only indication that our emerging nationalized police force is living down to the Founding Fathers' warnings.

Last February, according to a Washington Post report, patrons of the Little Falls Library in Bethesda, Maryland, were startled by the arrival of two stern-faced men wearing uniforms topped by baseball caps bearing the legend "Homeland Security." After loudly informing all present that the "viewing of Internet pornography was forbidden," they pounced on an individual at a local Internet computer and demanded that be step outside. A librarian, who saw nothing wrong with the patron's choice of web material, jumped into the fray and diverted the officers to a nearby room.

After a brief conversation, the officers--who were agents of the Montgomery County Homeland Security Department--left without the "suspect." While it's not clear that the Montgomery County affiliate of the DHS has jurisdiction over obscenity laws, it's worth asking if policing Internet use by visitors to public libraries is the sort of thing that justifies that county's $3.6 million annual DHS budget.

Ironically, it is possible that at the exact moment the Montgomery County Homeland Security squad was harassing a library patron for visiting questionable websites, Silver Spring, Maryland, resident J. Brian Doyle--a high-ranking official of the federal Homeland Security Department--was using company computers to surf the web for porn, or to make illicit overtures to underage girls.

Homeland Predators

Doyle, deputy press spokesman for the department, was arrested on April 4 and charged with "trying to 'seduce' a 14-year-old Polk County [Florida] girl over the Internet," reported the Lakeland, Florida, Ledger. That arrest, incidentally, occurred on the same day that Homeland Security officers roughed up Leander Pickett. Doyle "didn't know he was communicating with an undercover Polk County Sheriff's detective," noted the paper.

The detective involved in the sting posed as a 14-year-old girl recovering from leukemia. Doyle reportedly conducted sexually explicit conversations by e-mail with the "girl," some of which included clips from pornographic movies and photographs of Doyle's genitals. He now faces 16 counts of transmission of harmful material to a minor.

Many of Doyle's conversations were conducted on company time, using company computers and cellphones. He did nothing to disguise his identity, going so far as to use his position at the Homeland Security Department as a come-on. Although many of his friends and professional associates professed to be shocked by his conduct, Doyle had previously been disciplined for nearly identical behavior while he was an employee at Time magazine--a fact that should have been turned up in even a cursory background check.

James Bovard, author of Attention Deficit Democracy and several other valuable studies of abuse of power by government, points out that Doyle's recent arrest was not his first significant public exposure.

"After [Transportation Security Administration] air marshals gunned down Rigoberto Alpizar outside of a plane in Miami last December, Doyle justified the killing to the media: 'He threatened that he had a bomb in his backpack,'" Bovard recalled. "Other TSA spokesmen claimed that Alpizar had shouted that he had a bomb as he ran up and down the plane aisle. None of the passengers on the plane heard Alpizar say anything about a bomb."

According to his wife, the late Mr. Alpizar, a naturalized citizen from Costa Rica, suffered a panic attack and tried to flee from the plane. Chased out of the aircraft by air marshals, Alpizar was ordered to hit the deck and lie flat on his stomach. According to eyewitnesses, he was attempting to adjust his "fanny pack" in order to comply when he was fatally shot.

To date, no serious effort has been made by the DHS or any other branch of the federal government to determine exactly what Alpizar had done to justify the shooting. At the time, then-White House spokesman Scott McClellan commended the marshals for acting "in a way consistent with the training they received." However, as Joshua Kurlantzick pointed out in an investigation for American Prospect magazine, most air marshals have little or no training in dealing with passengers who suffer from psychological problems that may make them appear dangerous. Andrew Thomas, an aviation security expert at the University of Akron, told the magazine: "Of the 2,000 air marshals we have training today, most have almost no training with disruptive passengers, and aren't prepared to measure the risk" or make a reliable determination whether a given passenger is dangerous or merely disruptive. "The training has broken down," asserts Thomas.

The Homeland Security Department's large demand for air marshals has opened the gates to many ordinarily unsuitable applicants. "An internal report released in fall 2003 discovered some 600 reports of misconduct by marshals between October 2001 and July 2003, including losing 'government property' (i.e., their weapons), sleeping on duty, and 'abuse of government credit cards,'" reports the Prospect. "Internal investigators in a later report also examined 161 files of marshal applicants who'd been given top-secret security clearance. Roughly one-sixth had violated previous employer policies, while more than one-third had been arrested or faced 'allegations of misconduct,' including allegations of domestic violence or assault, in the past. This disturbing record led investigators to say that 'adjudication standards for air marshals are too lenient.'" (Emphasis added.)

Within hours of Alpizar's death at the hands of air marshals, the White House spokesman insisted that "we are very appreciative for all that the air marshals are doing to protect the American people." Nobody has yet explained who will protect air travelers from the air marshals, of course.

Doyle is just one of several Homeland Security officials arrested for preying on children since the beginning of the year.

On April 11, exactly one week after Doyle's arrest, an employee of the Transportation Security Administration identified as Robert Joe Harrison, Jr. was arrested on one count of second-degree kidnapping. The 49-year-old man, a resident of Ketchum, Idaho, was taken into custody by local police after he had brought home a 10-year-old boy whom he had enticed into his pickup truck.

The boy left and described the incident to his mother, who called the police. When the police searched the TSA employee's home, they "found four additional Social Security numbers and documents showing four other dates of birth," reported the Idaho Mountain Express of Sun Valley.

An April 13 report by KTVB, Boise's NBC affiliate, disclosed: "The TSA officer [referred to as Robert Harrison] has worked for the agency since its inception three years ago.... According to Ketchum Police Chief Cory Lyman, within an hour after their investigation started, information surfaced that has him believing that Harrison may have been involved in more criminal activity in other locations. Prior to moving to Ketchum Harrison previously worked in Walla Walla, Washington, where he was also employed by the TSA."

Which is to say that "Harrison" was hired by the federal government essentially sight-unseen, despite a questionable background that was exposed by a police department in a rural Idaho community in less than an hour.

Hundreds of armed federal air marshals, by the DHS's own accounting, have violent criminal histories. How many TSA screeners have backgrounds like "Harrison's"? Given the amount of money poured into the agency, its laxity in screening applicants, and the utter impunity most of its officials enjoy, this incident should be considered a harbinger of things to come, rather than an anomaly. That conclusion is buttressed by the exposure of other child predators in the ranks of Homeland Security.

Last February 3, another Homeland Security officer was exposed as a child predator on Dateline NBC. The newsmagazine chronicled a sting operation for sexual cyber-predators conducted by the program in conjunction with California's Riverside County Sheriff's Department and an activist group bearing the unfortunate name Perverted Justice.

As was the case with Brian Doyle, various men ranging in age from 19 to the mid-60s had conducted sexually explicit online conversations with what they believed to be boys or girls 12 or 13 years of age. They agreed to a rendezvous at a house in Southern California, where a Dateline correspondent and camera crew awaited them--as well as a contingent from the Sheriff's Department. Among those snagged was an officer of the Department of Homeland Security named Michael Burks.

"My father was a police officer." whines Burks as he is interrogated on-camera by detectives. "I was a police officer. I work for the Department of Homeland Security. I understand you guys have a job to do and I'm not trying to tell anything else other than that. I swear to God, as God is my witness, I'm wearing a St. Michael's medal right now, okay? I was not going to do anything with her."

The police detective interrogating Burks is understandably disgusted by both his behavior and the way it reflected on law enforcement personnel in general.

"In your position, you should have known better," declared the detective. "You know the law. That's even worse. You know what, that puts a bad mark on my job, on everybody. Every cop in this country you put a bad mark on."

This Is the A-Team?

As the Department of Homeland Security absorbs the powers of state and local law enforcement agencies, abuses of this sort will become increasingly common. There is a small but bright thread of optimism running through the scandals described above, however--the role played by responsible, conscientious state and local police in identifying and prosecuting corrupt federal agents.

Though the Homeland Security Department is eager to devour all of our local law enforcement bodies, many of them have yet to be digested. Our hope resides in the fact that at least some of them remain relatively independent, and worthy of our support and gratitude.