A Message to All The Good Cops, From a Career Cop

About Donald Trump and the destruction of public safety in America.

By Staff Inspector Thomas J. Cowper, New York State Police (Ret.)

“We don’t just go out and investigate every time an officer is forced to defend himself against somebody for putting his life in danger.” So said US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Donald Trump’s personal attorney, on Fox News on January 18, 2026.

I was in charge of the New York State Police Internal Bureau’s Northern Region for eight years. Every time a trooper uses physical force against a person that results in physical injury, we investigate. From simple bumps and bruises incurred during a physical arrest to shootings resulting in death, an investigation was conducted to determine whether the force used was legal and appropriate for the circumstances.

Every professional police agency does this in some manner. Large agencies have full-time Internal Affairs or Professional Standards units that conduct or oversee these investigations. Smaller agencies sometimes rely on larger agencies or the FBI to assist or to conduct independent investigations. Many localities have citizen review boards that either conduct their own independent investigations or review the investigation conducted by the department.

This is the way policing is conducted in the 21st century. No police department is perfect, and neither are their investigations. Sometimes these investigations are less than adequate for a variety of reasons. And sometimes those reasons are less than honorable. But I’ve never heard a state or local police executive or public official after a police shooting that resulted in death announce that no investigation was warranted because, as Todd Blanche put it, “What happened on that day has been reviewed by millions and millions of Americans because it was recorded on phones when it happened.”

This is obviously absurd. Nothing is as it seems in one or a hundred videos. Every action in a police-citizen confrontation has context, motivation, and perspective that frame the actions taken on both sides. There are legal issues and department policies that bear directly on the individual decisions that were made leading up to, and in the wake of, the event. And the only way to determine with reasonable certainty whether a shooting was justified is to try to precisely identify those factors and make the results public.

But you know who doesn’t investigate the killing of people by their government? Authoritarian governments that rule by force with no accountability to their citizens.

Whatever safety, security, and public tranquility we had in America, Trump and his administration are destroying it. If their wanton lawlessness, unconstitutional behavior, and mindless brutality haven’t impacted you or your community yet, I’m convinced that it will. The mechanisms of tyranny and oppression are being weaponized on our streets by the administration’s masked thugs in full combat kit, driving unmarked vehicles and carrying weapons of war under the pretense of fighting crime, while brazenly committing and fostering crimes themselves. This is not hyperbole. And this is not America’s police. At least not the vast majority of them.

To become a police officer in most states, a person must first be qualified. The vetting process varies from state to state, but most include minimum age, education, and physical fitness requirements, along with psychological evaluations to determine basic mental fitness for the job, and drug testing. A qualified applicant must pass a rigorous background investigation before starting a formal academy training program. Just to get in the door, most applicants spend months applying, processing, and waiting for a decision. Many do not make the cut. If selected, academy training in most states is roughly six months and consists of both academic and practical training. And just because you made it in the door does not guarantee you will ever become an officer. Many candidates voluntarily drop out or fail to meet requirements and are eliminated during training.

Modern policing is a complicated business requiring a comprehensive academic and practical approach to learning. Academy curricula include, among other things: Criminal, Civil, Vehicle & Traffic, and other areas of Law; Department Rules, Regulations, and Procedures; Police Theory and Community Relations; and Report Writing and Accountability. Practical Training typically includes: Firearms Training—Handgun, Shotgun, and Rifle; Emergency Vehicle Operation and Traffic Stops; Basic First Aid; and Specialized Policing Techniques such as de-escalation, Patrol Tactics, Domestic Violence, and Community Policing methodologies.

Graduation from the police academy does not guarantee a recruit will become an officer. Academy graduation is followed by field training, during which the new academy graduate rides with an experienced officer or officers for several weeks, who further train them in real police work in the real world. Standards vary from state to state, but all follow the same basic format: application in accordance with basic qualifications, background checks, months of formal academy training, followed by weeks of formal field training before an officer is qualified.

ICE and Border Patrol have never operated by those standards. Prior to Trump’s second term, ICE’s training was more extensive than it is today, but it is important to point out that ICE and Border Patrol agents are not police officers. They are hired and trained to find and detain undocumented migrants, usually at or near the border. That is all. And whatever training they had before 2025, the current ICE training is a mere 47 days. That is astonishingly brief. Very little of being a professional and competent law enforcement officer can be learned in six weeks.

There is nothing about ICE and Border Patrol under Trump that improves public safety and security on our streets. Masked federal agents cosplaying as elite military would be laughable if they weren’t such a grave threat to our collective safety and security. There is no justification for these ill-trained goons to be in our communities carrying suppressed M-4s while wearing camouflage uniforms, tactical helmets, plate carriers, and enough spare magazines to invade Iraq. None of that clownish buffoonery makes our communities safe. Just the opposite.

And none of it is required for their apparent mission of snatching every brown person they see off our streets and then dealing with the resulting peaceful protesters they’ve provoked. In fact, carrying a long gun of any kind while trying to physically subdue a person or conduct crowd control makes everyone, including the officers carrying them, less safe. The only purpose of dressing and arming themselves as they are is to intimidate and provoke US citizens.

Instead of improving public safety by reducing crime on our streets, it is the federal government under Donald Trump that is systematically dismantling the structures and components of America’s criminal justice system, and casting a dark shadow over honorable police officers. For decades, dedicated police professionals have been working with legal and academic experts to improve policing to make us all safer, more secure, and therefore more prosperous while maximizing our civil liberties.

To be sure, freedoms in America have never been equally distributed, and those of us behind efforts to improve policing have never rested on any notion that we had achieved equality. Systemic improvement, while always slow and methodical—sometimes to a fault—never stops. But today, the Trump administration seems hell-bent on turning the clock back to the dark ages of policing, when the use of force and intimidation was the first choice of most officers and not the last.

Many of the improvements within the field of policing over the last 50 years have been fostered and driven by the federal government. Consent decrees, crime bills, federal grants, and cooperation between federal law enforcement—particularly the FBI—and state and local agencies have been some of the most significant drivers of policing improvements in our nation in recent decades. Increasing standards and training, not reducing them, have also been foundational to achieving improvements on our streets. And Trump is dismantling and undermining all those efforts.

Today, Trump is again threatening to deploy the US military into our communities, this time via the Insurrection Act. This move, like the ICE/Border Patrol invasions in blue cities, has nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with bullying Americans into submission. But real Americans, true patriots, do not passively submit to leaders who demand obedience. And they do not act on their behalf to suppress the civil liberties of free people. Those that do—whether they be state or local police officers, or the masked men and women coming into our cities dressed for combat and carrying the weapons of war—are enabling a wannabe authoritarian.

A message to my fellow police officers: Remember your oath. Stand for what’s right. Defend the Constitution and the people of your communities who you are sworn to protect and serve. Refuse to work with or support masked thugs. Stand with us against tyranny.

Staff Inspector Thomas J. Cowper (Ret.) is a former New York State Police officer. He spent 33 years in law enforcement, including as a trooper, SWAT team member, sniper, and firearms and defensive tactics instructor. He was the Inspector in charge of the State Police Internal Affairs Bureau’s North Region for eight years. He was also a United States Marine Corps infantry officer.