[cylinder]

Too late to edit so will reply again with an interesting NYT comment today:

>Cynthia New Hampshire 4 hours ago This behavior is actually the behavior that should be of serious concerns to Americans. I spent six years in the military, and I learned a lot about human nature during that time, and it boils down to this: there are some people who are suited for positions of authority and some people who are absolutely not. Those who are not are often drawn, for psychological reasons to complicated to describe here, to work in positions where they can exert their personal brand of control and authority with impunity. What prevents many of these folks, those in ICE, corrections, law enforcement, etc., from behaving in outright unacceptable manners is the fact that there is a mystique, or more accurately, a facade of controlled professionalism around them that serves to regulate their behaviors. That facade is eroding--rapidly--and what we're seeing is what happens when a society doesn't psychologically screen and train applicants fully. The culture of law enforcement is not a productive or healthy one as it exists today, and the deregulation (clinically) we see here will become more frequent and increasingly ugly. As the need for more ICE and law enforcement agents increases, the quality of those applicants will degrade. I fear that what we'll end up with is a Stanford Prison Experiment sort of free-for-all that we can't call off after six days.

I agree with this. My assessment of the situation has been that while there may not have been direct command from John Kelly et al to start being more aggressive, this can flow culturally through an organization without direct instruction very easily. Look at Uber's culture set from the top down.