Last week, the National Policing Institute, in cooperation with the Department of Justice division on Community Oriented Policing Services, issued guidance to state and local law enforcement agencies on specialized units. NPI’s first recommendation is for law enforcement agencies to question whether they should create specialized units, and there’s an easy answer: no.

Specialized units vary but, as relevant here, they are sub-divisions of police departments tasked with enforcement related to specific conditions in an aggressive manner. The NPI guidance begins with a recognition that specialized units “are often subject to relatively limited supervision and afforded immense discretion when carrying out their duties.” This combination can lead to “tragic consequences.”

Indeed, the guidance was animated in part by the killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis by officers from the Scorpion Unit — a specialized unit comprised of officers focused on crimes related to theft, gangs, and drugs. The Scorpion Unit stopped Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, for a traffic infraction. They then pepper sprayed him and shot him with a stun gun despite his offering no apparent resistance. After yelling for help, Nichols ran toward his mother’s house. It wasn’t far from there that the officers — who had gone after him — beat him for several minutes while he was on the ground. He died days later from blunt force trauma to the head. Nichols’s family got the Scorpion Unit disbanded, with help from civil rights lawyer Ben Crump.

The Scorpion Unit was no aberration. In introductory remarks to its guidelines, NPI mentions the CRASH scandal in Los Angeles in the 1990s, during which a specialized unit tasked with addressing gang activity was found to be engaged in criminal conduct. The unit had repeatedly used excessive and at times lethal force without provocation. Another high-profile example is from New York City in 1999, when a specialized unit of the NYPD killed Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old Black man. The unit — tasked with addressing gun violence — shot Diallo 41 times when he reached for his pocket to provide identification.

State and Local Governments Must Take Responsibility for Police Violence

It shouldn’t take a federal investigation to address violent and harmful practices.

Disbanding these units does not necessarily end the misconduct. In response to community outcry over the Diallo killing, the NYPD dismantled the responsible unit and created a new one — the Anti-Crime Unit — that supposedly had better training and oversight. The ACU went on to be a primary driver of unlawful stops in the early 2000s and, more recently, was found disproportionately responsible for shootings. Following the George Floyd protests in 2020, the ACU was disbanded only to be reconstituted in 2023 — again, with allegedly better training and oversight. Just a few months after the new rollout, however, a federal monitor found ACU to be unlawfully stopping Black and Latine people.

How, then, should police departments and communities decide whether forming a specialized unit is worth the risk? NPI recommends that law enforcement should consider a series of critical questions before deciding to create or continue a specialized unit. That’s the right starting point. And it’s also good that NPI’s list of key considerations includes whether the affected community prefers non-law enforcement alternatives. Yet this question is only meaningful if communities are given real alternatives, and they rarely are.

Asking communities to choose between a specialized unit or nothing is a false choice, and alternatives might not be viable without additional investments. Police departments often have a heavily resourced infrastructure with round-the-clock staffing. As NPI points out, this sometimes makes police a default candidate for addressing problems they are not suited to solve. While creating alternatives might require more time and money, we must build solutions that reduce mismatched reliance on police. Otherwise, we’re not actually improving safety in the long run.

Notably, determining community preferences should be a thoughtful and deliberate process that reflects an understanding that communities are not monolithic. We emphasize the need to seek input from people who have experienced police misconduct through forums police do not attend, which NPI also recommends. People who have been subjected to unfair policing — directly or as witnesses — have important insight into its manifestations and harms, and this insight is critical to designing effective solutions. Police attendance at forums soliciting input from this population might undermine participation, given mistrust and fear that result from oppressive policing.

We’re skeptical of specialized units because of their history of violence and abuse — a problem that has shown to persist despite improvements in training and oversight. Their vast discretion and the realistic limits of internal accountability mechanisms inures specialized units with too much power, which has proven too much risk to impacted communities. NPI’s guidelines offer important suggestions for limiting the harms caused by specialized units, and these recommendations should be followed if specialized units are to continue. If we want to keep people safe from both crime and police violence, though, we need to build something better.

Last year, Anadith Reyes Alvarez, a medically vulnerable 8-year-old girl, died in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention after contract medical staff failed to review her medical records or consult with a physician and refused her emergency medical transport and care. As a court monitor concluded, Anadith’s death was a “preventable tragedy” pointing to an “urgent need” to improve “CBP medical oversight.” Sadly, this kind of medical abuse and neglect is not an anomaly in CBP facilities. Last month, CBP employees blew the whistle, indicating that CBP’s contract oversight office has long been aware of serious violations in the provision of medical care at CBP detention facilities, including significant understaffing, and providing medical services without appropriate medical licenses.

In the midst of these disturbing developments, CBP has requested permission from the National Archives and Records Administration to destroy “medical case files of persons in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection” after 20 years.

The medical records slated for destruction by CBP have long-term value for legal, research, historical, and accountability purposes. That’s why the ACLU and 71 organizations, including the American Immigration Council and the Texas Civil Rights Project, as well as 165 academic scholars, filed a regulatory comment today to challenge CBP’s proposed destruction of these records.

The medical records in question are often the primary evidence of medical care (or lack thereof) received by people in CBP custody, and are key to government accountability efforts to address systemic medical neglect in CBP detention. These records are also critical to legal claims by individuals or their surviving family members — including people who may still have live legal challenges long after the incidents occurred, such as people with disabilities or those who were minors when the abuse or neglect occurred.

These medical records are also of significant historical importance: Historians have frequently turned to the National Archives for primary sources regarding the treatment of immigrants, including the use of health-based criteria as a basis for entry or exclusion, and access to medical care by migrants at the border. Scholars have also examined records from government agencies that provided medical care to immigrants, including the U.S. Public Health Service — a precursor to CBP’s current medical care providers.

Destruction of CBP’s medical records would eliminate an important primary source developed during CBP’s nascent period as an agency — from its establishment in 2003, to a time marked by policies of family separation, and the use of Title 42, a purported public health measure to expel millions of immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic.

CBP’s plans to destroy medical records will only serve to obscure its tragic record of medical neglect and inhibit efforts to hold the agency accountable. Each day, CBP holds approximately 15,000 migrants in short-term detention facilities while processing them at the border. CBP policy maintains that people should not be detained for longer than 72 hours in these facilities, often small, frigid holding cells commonly referred to as hieleras (“freezers” in Spanish). CBP, however, regularly detains people for as long as 10 days, and in many cases, for over 30 days. Government oversight agencies and advocates have detailed numerous incidents of negligent medical care to people in CBP custody, including denial of care to people with broken bones, a damaged testicle due to injury by a Border Patrol officer, and a ruptured appendix.

An ACLU investigation also highlighted multiple cases of medical neglect in CBP detention, including the denial of care to a pregnant person, which preceded a stillbirth; and withholding of prescription medication for a child detained after undergoing spinal surgery resulting from a car accident. At least five people died in CBP custody in FY 2021 after having a medical emergency.

CBP’s treatment of migrants in its custody needs more transparency and documentation — not less. Like former challenges to the destruction of documents related to immigration detention, government agencies should not be allowed to destroy the paper trail of their incompetence and wrongdoing.

%3Ciframe%20class%3D%22media-youtube-player%22%20width%3D%22580%22%20height%3D%22324%22%20title%3D%22Language%20Access%20is%20a%20Civil%20Right%2C%20For%20Both%20Children%20and%20Adults%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube-nocookie.com%2Fembed%2FsNgoupCsNP4%3Fwmode%3Dopaque%26amp%3Bcontrols%3D1%26amp%3Bmodestbranding%3D1%26amp%3Brel%3D0%26amp%3Bshowinfo%3D0%26amp%3Bcolor%3Dwhite%26autoplay%3D1%26version%3D3%26playsinline%3D1%22%20name%3D%22Language%20Access%20is%20a%20Civil%20Right%2C%20For%20Both%20Children%20and%20Adults%22%20frameborder%3D%220%22%20allowfullscreen%3D%22%22%20id%3D%22Language%20Access%20is%20a%20Civil%20Right%2C%20For%20Both%20Children%20and%20Adults%22%20allow%3D%22autoplay%22%3EVideo%20of%20Language%20Access%20is%20a%20Civil%20Right%2C%20For%20Both%20Children%20and%20Adults%3C%2Fiframe%3E

Privacy statement. This embed will serve content from youtube-nocookie.com.

For deaf people, language deprivation during early childhood represents the most significant threat to the exercise of their civil rights and liberties.

Not having adequate exposure to a language early in life has profound, lifelong consequences. Deaf students nationally graduate from high school and college at lower rates. They are among the many youth with disabilities who are disproportionately funneled into the criminal legal system. Long term negative outcomes span educational and employment contexts, and are especially bleak for deaf and hard of hearing children who also share marginalized racial identities, such as those who are Black.

In the ACLU’s ongoing work to affirm the civil rights of Deaf, DeafBlind, DeafDisabled, and Hard of Hearing people in prison and on supervision, including their right to access effective communication, many of our clients share one common trait: they experienced the permanent, detrimental effects of language deprivation in their early years.

Nearly all of our clients in these cases were among the 96 percent of deaf children born to hearing parents who did not know sign language. These parents love their children, but struggle to provide them with full access to language, signed or spoken.

Despite improvements in early intervention approaches, newborn hearing screenings, and advances in hearing technology, current research shows that deaf children often do not develop age-expected spoken language skills when they are only provided with spoken language. When kids don’t have full access to language, especially during the crucial years for early childhood development, they develop language deprivation syndrome — a neurodevelopmental disorder with negative and long-lasting effects on the deaf child’s language, cognitive, and socioemotional development.

Deaf education in the United States has historically been framed as a false dichotomy between bilingual Deaf schools where deaf children learn both American Sign Language (ASL) and English (spoken and/or written), and “mainstreamed” schools using an auditory-oral approach where deaf children only learn English (i.e., withholding ASL and other visual cues like lipreading).

The families of deaf children have, for generations, shared similar experiences: an overwhelming barrage of information, frequently biased towards the auditory-oral approach — giving their child auditory input while completely excluding signed language. Too often this is incorrectly presented as the most effective approach. But clear evidence demonstrates that deaf and hard of hearing children, even those with hearing parents, can effectively learn a sign language, and that doing so supports subsequent learning of spoken language.

• Education plans for deaf and hard of hearing children that meet the specific needs of the child.
• Education plans that include access to the full range of evidence-based instructional approaches and tools that can be used in various combinations to support language development and communication, including ASL-English bilingual education, Protactile, tactile signing systems, Cued Speech, augmentative and alternative communication, and auditory-oral education.
• Education plans that are accompanied by empirical evidence listing all possible outcomes, being clear which options will reliably lead to complete acquisition of at least one language, and which will not.
• Choice — and meaningful access to those choices — with the goal of successfully acquiring a language.

The ACLU considers the evidence-based “gold standard” approach to be providing access to a natural signed language during early infancy, in addition to support for learning English and other heritage languages desired by the family. Doing so positively impacts their language, cognition, socialization, and learning.

• The explicit withholding of access to sign language during early childhood, given the heightened risk of language deprivation that comes with such approaches.
• The false idea that learning sign language might harm a child’s ability to learn to speak and should be prohibited in the household.

In recent years, evidence-based grassroots legislative efforts to aid parents of deaf children in tracking their child’s language development during the first five years have made significant gains.

LEAD-K is a bill that has been passed in more than 20 states — some with the ACLU’s support. It empowers parents with balanced information about the languages, communication modes, and instructional approaches available to their deaf children. It also empowers states to track children’s progress with reliable data, identify when children are not getting sufficient support, and provide appropriate interventions as needed.

At the same time, we recognize a long history of choices being made for people with disabilities instead of by people with disabilities. Those choices can be rooted in eugenics, the medicalization of disability, or a parent’s desire to share their language with their child.

One argument often used to defend the choice to withhold ASL is that it should be the parents’ choice. The ACLU recognizes that sometimes arguments about parents’ right to choose can be weaponized in ways that endanger children — such as outing transgender students. Parents who choose only “listening and spoken language” options for their deaf or hard of hearing children choose that option because they want their child to function easily in society. But the science shows that exposing these children to only this form of communication can make it much harder for them to learn any language.

Arguments around parental choice can be used to deprive a child of a fully accessible language, despite risks of permanent cognitive and socioemotional harm, in hopes that the child will “overcome” their hearing disability. To that end, we encourage parents to learn about evidence-based language acquisition approaches and to be mindful of the legacies of ableism and audism when making choices for their children.

All students have the right to an equal and accessible education. We do not support the restriction of educational opportunities for deaf children, including the closure of schools for the deaf, which can be the best environment for some deaf children to learn in and support their language acquisition. The question of which setting is the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) is an individualized question, and the U.S. Department of Education confirms that the LRE is not automatically the provision of mainstream schools for deaf children. The primary goal of deaf education is to ensure deaf children can learn language, and learning language is easiest in immersive social environments with other language users.

We recognize that mainstream schools can often be under-resourced, lacking the full continuum of language supports that deaf schools can provide. The ACLU strongly supports increased resources for deaf children to acquire a signed language and for deaf adults to access services in their primary language.

At the ACLU, we’ve seen firsthand the adverse impacts of language deprivation. Access to language — through LEAD-K and through the availability of all educational methodologies as options individualized for each child — is a fundamental stepping stone to vindicating the civil rights and civil liberties of deaf and hard of hearing people and enabling the next generation of deaf children to become full, participating members of our democracy.