One answer to the National Drug Threat Assessment Report: It’s the human component, stupid // by Lee Maril
is not nearly enough time to learn basic Spanish, complex immigration laws, meet physical fitness standards, and pass firearms requirements. While an agent-mentoring program officially awaits graduates at their first postings, there are not enough experienced agents to teach the newly minted agents what they should have learned at the academy.
Most importantly, new BP recruits are not exposed to the bonding experience that only five and one-half months of academy training can provide. Former academy graduates were proud of their classes and often refer to the number of the class in which they graduated when discussing their academy training. But the new BP agents often fail to pass through a course of instruction that turns them into professional law enforcement officers with common goals, objectives, and pride in working for the common good of their law enforcement organization. Specific signs of this lack of professionalization are already evident. For example, the number of cases of corruption among agents has skyrocketed since the academy standards were lowered: new BP agents are much more vulnerable to corruption than their “legacy” counterparts.
If this were not enough, gender discrimination against female agents still prevails and remains a daily distraction on the line. Ten years ago, only 5 percent of all BP agents were female; in 2011 still only 5 percent of all agents are female. Border Patrol leadership cannot even admit there is a pervasive organizational culture providing for, even encouraging, a hostile working environment for female agents. This despite a legal record of discrimination, complaints, suits, and court settlements filed by female agents against their own agents, supervisors, and managers.
Both agent corruption and gender discrimination against fellow agents are just two examples of dysfunction within the Border Patrol directly impacting organizational efficiency and quality of the work accomplished on the line.
Finally, the Border Patrol sorely lags far behind other federal law enforcement agencies in promoting educational opportunities among its agents. While the Army, for example, encourages its middle and upper-level managers to attend both military colleges and private universities to earn advanced degrees, too often Border Patrol agents with degrees from Junior Colleges find themselves outgunned when at the same table with MBAs, J.D.s, and Ph.D.s.
A first step to directly addressing the recent National Drug Threat Assessment 2011 outlining challenges along the U.S.-Mexico border is to refrain from sending out a new batch of RFPs (request for proposal) to the usual defense contractors. The Border Patrol is broken. While it can be fixed, technological innovations alone cannot resolve organization problems affecting humans. Instead we need capable and innovative leaders and managers who realize that the answers to the challenges created by transnational criminal organizations lie not just in the next generation of sophisticated drones, but in the men and women themselves, in the human component of the Border Patrol.
Our Border Patrol can be much better than it is and, in becoming so, provide for a safer America.
Robert Lee Maril, a professor of Sociology at East Carolina University and founding director of the Center for Diversity and Inequality Research, is the author of The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.-Mexico Border. He blogs at leemaril.com.
