Heisenberg

Yesterday I went to a charity golf outing for a kid with cancer who's father is a local police chief. While I was there I ran into a retired FBI SAC. He seemed to be a good enough guy and couldn't have been nicer when he found out I was an ATF Agent. He asked to be in my foursome and we spoke quite a bit. He told me that he was the former Assistant Director for Counter-Terrorism in the mid 2000s, who stepped down and retired as a SAC. I was floored. I thought that ATF was the only agency that permitted this and that everywhere else is was up and out.

He offered an opinion when I chatted with him on leadership problems in our agency. He said that from his perspective, the difference between ATF and FBI is that the FBI is run by processes and the ATF seems to be run by personalities. In his experience, he said that every time he saw an ATF SAC move on, the new SAC usually changed things quite a bit, but FBI SACs aren't really allowed to do this. Their HQ mandates that they adhere to certain criteria, so they can only make minimal changes.

Maybe that is something that we can learn from the Bureau. He also said that the grass isn't greener at FBI either. They are more HQ driven and their local investigations are highly micromanaged from DC. When I told him that I wondered if we'd get absorbed by the Bureay because of all of the stupidity and political BS that we've been caught up in, he stopped dead in his tracks and glared at me and said "be careful what you wish for. We had big problems too. We just do a better job of keeping them off the news."

It was a nice rouxnd of golf...

You're kidding right? ATF has no law enforcement role outside of the USA. These oversea posts are merely liaison spots for well connected GS-14 and GS-15 personnel. Now that we have e-Trace, there's hardly a need for an international presence. With cities inside of the USA falling apart and crime running rampant in some places like Detroit, Newark, East St. Louis and Baltimore, among DOZENS of others, I'd rather see our focus be directed to violent crime HERE. Enough overseas posting for supervisors when we hardly have 4 agents in some busy cities.

By the way- the safety of Americans overseas is State Department's lane- not ours. Grassley wont give 2 shits about us leaving Columbia. He'd probably be pissed that we're still in Lyon, The Hague and Canada.

Just my 2 cents.

Both the Times and the USA Today articles are off base and poorly researched.

If our case numbers are down, its probably due to losing people to retirement over the past few years and a drop in cases being accepted for prosecution by US Attorney's Offices. This administration has not exactly been hard on criminals. Look at their efforts to do away with mandatory minimums. Pathetic.

I also disagree quite a bit about the insinuation that ATF targets minorities in these stings. These stings are done in neighborhoods that warrant the use of the technique and those happen to be largely occupied by people of color. The intent is to make those neighborhoods safer. Having said that, I do agree that these techniques are over used. We used to reserve them for the worst offenders and now it seems that we are doing them way too often and the work has gotten sloppy. Whether or not that is because HQ is trying to push these cases to inflate numbers is another story and if that's the case then it is a problem.

We had a surge in my Post of Duty. It started and ended with an agent who was sent by headquarters who found pleasure in badmouthing the local agents to the local assistant US Attorneys, and bragging about how him and his team were not like the local "piece of shit" agents. Too bad he was too arrogant and stupid to realize that some of us had worked for years to actually build relationships with them and as soon as he finished running his big mouth, our phones were burning up with all of the lurid details of his smart assed commentary.

It certainly inspires trust in headquarters though, doesnt it?

Despite this Senator's attempt to pander to his pro-Second Amendment constituency, this bill will never make it past the House and Senate. The NRA will kill this bill dead. The last thing they want is for a fully staffed, funded, and well led agency that is actually capable of enforcing the nation's gun laws.