Customs and Border Employees as Criminals
The 68-page document covers disciplinary actions within US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the US Border Patrol for the federal government’s 2018 fiscal year, which ended Oct. 1, 2019. The unredacted data provides the most comprehensive look yet at the agency’s disciplinary apparatus.
The number of arrests of CBP officers and Border Patrol agents, according to the report, had been on a half-decade decline before leaping 11% between fiscal years 2017 and 2018. (Arrests of officers and agents increased annually starting in 2007 and hit a high of 348 in 2012 before going down again.)
“[A]n unacceptable number of CBP employees are arrested each year for violating federal, state, or local law,” the report says. Of 268 CBP employees arrested in fiscal 2018, 11 were arrested twice; one was arrested four times; and one was arrested five times, resulting in a total of 286 arrests.
That’s an arrest rate of about 0.5% of the overall CBP force, which numbers more than 60,000. While the percentage seems small, it is about five times that of other US law enforcement agencies. Arrests of state and local police, for example, occur at an average rate of about 0.1% of the force per year, according to the Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database.
