USA TODAY International Edition
US marshals act like police, but with less accountability
Agency’s looser rules lead to more fatal shootings, injuries
PHOENIX – Detective Michael Pezzelle spent his last seven years on a suburban police force here amassing a body count. He was involved in shootings that wounded two people and killed five, including a teenage girl who died when he fired into a car she was riding in.
Pezzelle faced no public consequences. He retired in 2018 and at age 47 started to collect a pension of $ 62,220 a year. Today, he trains police officers around the country to follow the kind of advice he shared on Instagram: “Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”
His record of five shooting incidents would raise alarms in many police departments; studies have found that only a quarter of officers reported ever firing their weapons, and just 5% of those who did were involved in more than one shooting.
But Pezzelle, who declined to comment, wasn’t just a regular cop with the police department in Mesa, Arizona. Most of the time he was assigned to task forces run by the U. S. Marshals Service, an arm of the federal Justice Department. The marshals describe their job as hunting down the most dangerous criminals in the country.
In recent years, however, marshals have been acting like local police – only with more violence and less accountability, according to an investigation by The Marshall Project and the USA TODAY Network.
Across the country, the Marshals Service has set up task forces largely staffed by local law enforcement officers who get deputized as federal agents. About two- thirds of the people the agency has arrested since 2014 were wanted on local warrants, not federal ones.
The Justice Department has refused to release information about marshalinvolved shootings. Our reporters used news articles, court documents and police records to compile that data from Jan. 1, 2015, to Sept. 10, 2020.
We found that at least 177 people were shot by a marshal, task force member or local police officer helping in a marshals arrest; 124 people – suspects and some bystanders – died of their injuries. In addition, seven died by suicide after being shot.
On average, they shot 31 people a year, killing 22. By comparison, Houston police reported shooting an average of 19 people a year, killing eight. Philadelphia officers shot an average of nine people a year, killing three. Both departments have roughly 6,000 officers; the Marshals Service employs about 3,600 and says more than 2,400 local officers work on its task forces.
The Marshals Service’s rules are looser than those of many major police departments. Marshals are not required to try to de- escalate situations or exhaust other remedies before using lethal force. Marshals are allowed to fire into cars and don’t wear body cameras.
“They are still policing like the way people policed in the 1990s – and we have moved so far beyond that,” said Kevin Hall, assistant chief of police in Tucson, Arizona. He said his department pulled out of a Marshals Service task force last year because of concerns about risky tactics and the lack of accountability; at least four other big cities have done the same in recent years.
Marshals and task force members are harder to hold accountable than average cops if something goes wrong. No marshal has ever been prosecuted after a shooting, the agency says. Task force members weren’t prosecuted either during the period we examined, the Justice Department said.
The marshals say they do vital work in dangerous circumstances.
“Given the nature of the criminals we pursue, and the specificity of our mission, there is a higher chance for violence than experienced by the ‘ normal cop on the beat,’ ” said Nikki CredicBarrett, an agency spokeswoman. “The U. S marshals have one of the most dangerous jobs in law enforcement.”
Fugitives are likely to carry guns and resist arrest, current and former marshals say. They say the agency’s shooting count is low considering marshals capture about 90,000 people a year.
“We are on the front lines every day in an environment that’s intense,” said Jason Wojdylo, a chief inspector with the Marshals Service and vice president of the Federal Managers Association.
Five marshals and task force members were killed while trying to make an arrest, our data shows, including one who died from friendly fire. Twenty- one were shot and injured, six because of friendly fire. Houston says one of its officers was shot and killed in that time frame; two Philadelphia officers died in shootings.
Unlike the FBI, the Marshals Service does not send a team to investigate its shootings, relying mainly on local agencies. Marshals officials review those investigations to recommend changes to policies and training.
“It is pretty remarkable that the feds aren’t policing their own,” said Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general for the Justice Department. Use of deadly force, he noted, “is a burning national issue right now.”
Marshals have helped capture some of the nation’s most wanted cop killers and drug lords. But we found that the agency focuses about half its firepower on low- level suspects.
Since our data was collected, there have been several cases involving marshals as shooters or victims. In one high- profile incident in December 2020, a member of a U. S. Marshals task force in Columbus, Ohio, shot Casey Goodson Jr. in the back. He wasn’t a target of the task force, and the family of the 23year- old man said he was killed on his doorstep while holding a bag of sandwiches. The task force member is on paid administrative leave while an investigation is conducted, according to the Columbus Dispatch, part of the USA TODAY Network.
Many police departments welcome the task forces, which bring with them federal funds for overtime pay, access to high- tech equipment, and the jurisdiction to chase suspects across state lines.
“With the marshals we get resources that help us with crime and finding bad people who need to be removed from our communities,” said Charles Kimble, chief of the police department in Killeen, Texas.
One of the big differences between marshals and regular police officers is when and how they can use force. Marshals are authorized to kill someone who poses an “imminent danger.” In California and New Jersey, for example, taking someone’s life is supposed to be a last resort.
A quarter of the shooting cases we compiled involved marshals or task force members firing into cars, a tactic many police departments no longer consider acceptable.
“You create this enormous danger by shooting at somebody who is driving a car down the road,” said Jonathan M. Smith, an official in the Obama Justice Department, which told police in Miami, New Orleans and Chicago to stop firing at vehicles.
Last month, the Major City Chiefs Association recommended policing reforms including encouraging officers to jump out of the way of a moving vehicle, not firing at it.
Marshals do the opposite, our analysis found. Many vehicle shootings occur after task force members in unmarked cars box- in suspects.
That’s what was happening when Pezzelle, the Mesa detective working as a task force member, fatally shot 17year- old Sariah Lane, according to police records. She was unknowingly riding in a car driven by a man wanted for probation violations, according to a lawsuit filed by her family.
Lane was hit in the back of the head; a ballistics report showed that the hollow- point bullet came from Pezzelle’s gun. The lawsuit claims that officers ignored risks to Lane and should have waited until their suspect was alone to arrest him.
Pezzelle and his lawyer declined to comment. But in court filings, lawyers said officers “used only reasonable and necessary force,” and were entitled to qualified immunity, which protects government workers doing their jobs. No trial date has been set.
Our data showed that marshals and task force members in Arizona shot suspects or bystanders more often than in any other state.
Local law enforcement agencies often turn to retired officers like Pezzelle to teach new recruits skills including how to arrest armed fugitives.
Pezzelle runs a consulting business, Five Eight Group. Until our reporters inquired about it, the company’s website and social media boasted about his shooting record and plugged coming classes.
It also sold $ 25 T- shirts with the company’s logo on the front. On the back is a quote written by Ernest Hemingway in 1936:
“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”