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Notes -
How much risk is reasonable risk. This idea is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but there’s just no definitive answer to “when does the risk get bad enough that cops or ICE or political figures are allowed to feel scared enough to protect themselves from said risk?” ICE is subject to serious doxxing and real-time tracking, they’re being shot at, their home addresses and thus their families’ locations are publicized thus meaning that a radicalized idiot with a gun could show up at their house, their kids’ school, or anywhere else they go. Police might get a guy they tried to arrest mad enough to try something, but it’s actually pretty rare and there are no databases or tracking apps telling people where law enforcement is at every moment. There are no public figures that refer to cops as Gestapo or quote Anne Frank every time the local beat officer arrests someone.
If ICE were treated like local cops and given the support given to cops, sure, I get the idea that you should accept risk, and that you should be able to be identified. In tge current circumstances, asking for that means that you want these agents and their families dead. Because in this particular environment, that’s tge clear and obvious result of demasking agents while they’re being shot at, doxxed with public databases, the rhetoric compares their work to Nazis rounding up Jews, and there are apps to real time track them still available for download.
"How much risk is reasonable" is a good question. I think a reasonable baseline to look at is private sector occupations. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the number of violent deaths broken down by industry (NAICS code, specifically), and the Census Bureau gives total numbers of employees by industry. Dividing the one by the other we find that the most dangerous "normal" occupation is NAICS 485 "transit and ground passenger transportation", with 392975 employees and 25 violent deaths (out of 72 total deaths on the job). I think if working on immigration enforcement at ICE is around the danger level of driving for Uber but your agents fear for their lives anyway, the problem is with the perception of danger rather than with the danger per se.
This is the wrong question to ask. Consider the following questions:
How I hope you answered all of these questions was "optimizing policy to address perceptions of danger is a fool's errand". This is particularly true in cases where triggering a destructive reaction is the point of the violence but even in cases where it's not, setting policy based of feelings of danger is still not productive.
That said, the US government should come down as hard as possible on people who attack law enforcement agents who are doing their job. The US government generally does a pretty good job of this already, I am not particularly worried there, but it's worth emphasizing that it is good and important.
That said, if someone is willing to take their own life to cause harm, we should go after those accomplices that actually exist and actually materially helped. Witch hunts for someone who is still alive who can be blamed, though, will not reduce the chances of further people looking to suicide-by-terrorism (and will likely hurt to the extent that the witch hunt increases the perceived glory of the person who wanted to be a martyr).
Side note, not important
Funny you should say that because just yesterday the top story on HN was find SF parking cops, which took advantage of the fact that all parking tickets in San Francisco were published online in real time to make a map of where parking tickets were being issued across the city, and who was issuing them, in real time. The site has been taken down but the city is still publishing that data.
Not really an important consideration, the set of people who want to suicide by cop and the set of people who are willing and able to go through the inconvenience of taking slightly complicated actions like "look at where parking tickets are being issued to find out where the officers writing the tickets are" (or the corresponding action for other agencies, which I will not elaborate on) is basically an empty set. I just thought it was funny timing.
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