ProPublica looks at patterns of deaths and injuries in high-speed chases by the Border Patrol. Over the last four years, at least 22, and at least 250, respectively. And their methodology can only count those where someone survives to get arrested. Otherwise, there is no public record for ProPublica investigators to sieve through, to extract this information.
ProPublica knows how to write. Me, not so much. As the pinch-hitting horse said in that old baseball joke, “If I could run, I’d be at the track!” So check out the original source:
ProPublica on the Border Patrol and high-speed chases
But here are some of the highlights.
At speeds deemed by experts to be wildly unsafe, agents box in moving vehicles, puncture tires and employ tactics intended to spin cars off the road.
They initiate dangerous chases after noting that cars are carrying unrestrained children or are packed so far beyond capacity that the weight makes them “ride low.” They catch up to find people screaming and banging from the insides of trunks.
Counting three deaths from the incident that starts the article understates the damage. They visit one surviving passenger, and the family caring for him. He has constant pain, facial paralysis, spinal damage from multiple fractures. Can’t come up with the word for rice.
One chase in three results in a crash, rather than, say, the driver being forces to simply stop the vehicle. Techniques such as deliberately blowing out the tires of vehicles going 90 to 100 mph contribute to these crashes.
Helicopters can be called, for better controlled and less dangerous pursuits, but seldom are.
A note on the non-profit newsroom ProPublica. Good information is scarce. The evening news, as I’ve said before, is hail storms, returning soldiers surprising their daughters at school, would-be snuff films of police with push bumpers sending vehicles flying, and repetitive “Trump insulted X; X disagrees” video without a hint of deeper analysis. Watch PBS news instead. For excellent quality, deep, original reporting in written form (although too few stories per week), check out ProPublica, where donor-supported investigations, often partnered with newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, throw early sunlight on the stories we Kossacks work to promote, circulate, and build into broader narratives.
Now for the spin.
Last year brought the most pursuits in every district in the period examined, even as apprehensions for illegal border crossings did not increase significantly over prior years.
It’s not that the Border Patrol’s methods are dangerous here, unseemly, yet sadly necessary. Boxing a vehicle in might be justifiable, but spinning it off the road into a multi-fatality crash has a different purpose. As Adam Serwer developed the concept for The Atlantic, The Cruelty Is the Point.
President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.
The current administration says, “We’re defunding Special Olympics!” And then they say “Never mind!” A win for them, or a loss? On our side, the “We don’t hear any high-pitched noise” side, the reaction is, “Hey, we can relax, guys, we won this round.” But for Trump’s base, it’s a dog whistle win. It’s the declaration, “Hey, we’d cancel the damn Special Olympics, if the whiners weren’t whining even in soy-boy wing of our own party. Because that’s the kind of take-no-prisoners strength that made you love the MAGA hats in the first place!”
So we don’t beat them by saying that fatalities from unnecessary crashes mean the administration is handling border issues stupidly, wastefully, ineffectively, as one item in isolation. We beat them by hammering out the message that the broader pattern means they are coming after all of us. Their Cruelty Is An Ideology approach is our clear warning that they are coming after all of us. They are coming for anyone who can’t afford Mar-a-Lago membership, or who has ever hated the tyrannies of gerrymandered red state majorities. Maximizing their cruelty will be how they clap each other on the back and celebrate the fact that they are winning. We have to fight them, everywhere, federal, state, and local, and we can do it only by getting souls to the polls.
So, new slogan for the (progressive wing of) the Democratic Party, borrowed from about half of all post-apocalyptic small band of survivors action movie ever.
Come with us if you want to live!