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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30590 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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Police officers are, I imagine, more likely to be targeted for their work than ICE agents are, and police officers do not wear masks.

I've heard of two recent attacks on ICE, for a group of 6500 agents. There are about 850k police officers in the US, and I suppose there might have been 260 attacks on police officers that I haven't heard of in the same period, but that seems really high.

Even aside from those numbers, I'd suspect that ICE gets all the generic "fuck the police" in addition to the ICE-specific hate.

FBI claims 79091 assaults on police officers and 60 officers killed in 2023. I expect most of those "assaults" are highly noncentral examples of "assault" but I'd expect the median ICE agent is at less personal risk than the median police officer in Baltimore (but probably much more risk than the median police officer in Boise).

Were any of those assault victims targeted for their work, or was it simply because the perpetrators didn't want to get arrested? The July 4 ambush, the recent convoy attack, and the firebombing in LA all involve the perpetrators seeking out ICE and attacking them. The traffic-stops-turned-fights later in the linked article feel like a more typical story of assault on an officer.

Protecting your identity protects you from people who want to track you down and kill you. It won't help you against people who would rather not go to jail right now. I don't think those two categories of assaults are evenly split between ICE and regular police officers.

Do you know if there are a couple hundred examples of people going out of their way to attack police officers in that 79k, or are they ~all done by people fighting whoever happens to be right in front of them?

July 4 ambush, the recent convoy attack, and the firebombing in LA all involve the perpetrators seeking out ICE and attacking them.

None of these could have been prevented by masks or anonymity of the ICE officer; they weren't attacking particular people they knew to be ICE, they were attacking people known to be ICE (because they were attacking a detention facility, in the July 4 case).

But this is broadly what we would expect, in a world where ICE anonymizes themselves: when people want to attack ICE, they need to do it while they're on their official duties, because they don't know which people at home are ICE agents. Attacks that are prevented by anonymizing ICE don't happen, because ICE anonymized and thus the attacks were prevented.

We can't examine the counterfactual world where attacking ICE agents at home is easier, since we're not living in it. Conceivably some of these attacks could have been replaced by attacking agents at home, if it were easier to do so.

Lots of people at ICE proudly post that on their LinkedIn.

Yeah, that's a fair point: there might be some difficulty finding people from nothing, but I absolutely believe motivated extremely-online people could compile a list of ICE agents who were willing to state it on Linkedin.

Trivial inconveniences might matter there, but it's clearly something that's doable.

Off the top of my head, thé Dallas police shootings indicate that violent attacks on police as police tend to be a major news article.

I expect most of those "assaults" are highly noncentral examples of "assault"

I expect the exact opposite, I just don't think they're political, at least beyond "I don't want to go to prison".

I vaguely expect that a central example of "assault" would have a >0.1% lethality rate, I could be wrong about that though. Humans are pretty resilient.

Not against an armed, trained officer, who's braced for a fight.

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