Total Lack of Professionalism

The U. S. Border Patrol responded quickly when confronted with the information that a Times reporter and two other journalists had witnessed an agent taunting hundreds of Mexicans with ethnic and sexual slurs over the loudspeaker of his vehicle.

A supervisor was put on administrative leave, and the investigation of the matter was turned over to the Inspector General’s office, an independent oversight body for the U. S. Department of Justice.

Such a flagrant disregard for policy and professionalism, not to mention decency, merits a strong response.

But the investigation needs to be broader than just ascertaining the guilty parties. The outrageousness of the agent’s behavior raises the question of whether this was an isolated incident or whether such contempt is prevalent among agents. Is there an attitude among the Border Patrol hierarchy that, perhaps subtly, nourishes such disrespect and might lead an agent to believe that he could get away with making such comments as “Your mothers are all whores” and “All Mexicans are whores,” along with more than an hour of intermittent vulgarities on a public-address system?

If such contempt is displayed by other agents, even in less extreme forms, it could help provoke the violent--and sometimes fatal--confrontations between agents and immigrants, as some Border Patrol critics contend. For instance, near where the agent taunted the crowds, and less than two hours later, an agent shot and wounded a 15-year-old boy who he said was threatening his partner with a rock.

We realize that it’s easy for law enforcement officers to become jaded when they work in such frustrating and dangerous circumstances as the border, where they are trying to halt thousands of desperately poor people trying to get to what they see as the land of opportunity, and hundreds of others trying to prey on their desperation.

But there’s no place in law enforcement--or any other profession--for the kind of vulgar conduct observed last Sunday.

The Border Patrol knows that, and its parent agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service knows that. We hope that, through the investigation and the actions that follow, the leadership of those agencies makes it clear that such attitudes and behaviors will not be tolerated.