US Marshals’ Office Has Credibility Problem

Last June when the US Marshal’s office raided Ed and Elaine Brown’s property they said they weren’t trying to make an arrest, that it was just surveillance, and no shots were fired.

Yesterday it was revealed that was this wasn’t true at all. It was an arrest attempt and shots were fired. The Marshal described his deception as being part of not giving away his advantage.

While that may be true, a “we don’t comment on ongoing operations” would have been sufficient to achieve the same goal. Deceiving the citizenry with misinformation is not part of a well-regulated government’s job.

In the future, we have no reason to believe any statements made by the US Marshal’s Office as we can assume that at least some of the time they won’t be telling the truth. That is to say we’re more likely now to believe others who are reporting on operations as they’ve proven to be accurate (at least in this case), even though we initially dismissed them. It does the Marshals no good for the citizenry to believe those who the Marshals are trying to apprehend over the Marshals themselves.

To regain our confidence they need to apologize for this incident, disclose other violations of the public’s trust, and demonstrate that they’ve put in place policies that will prevent this from happening again.