BRENTWOOD, N.Y. -- Talking tough on illegal immigration and violent crime, President Donald Trump appeared Friday to advocate rougher treatment of people in police custody, speaking dismissively of the police practice of shielding the heads of handcuffed suspects as they are being placed in patrol cars.
"Don't be too nice," Trump told law enforcement officers in Suffolk County, New York, during a visit to highlight his administration's efforts to crack down on the street gang known as MS-13. The violent international group has terrorized communities on Long Island and in other parts of the country.
The president urged Congress to find money to pay for 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers "so that we can eliminate MS-13."
Trump said his administration is removing these gang members from the United States but said, "We'd like to get them out a lot faster and when you see ... these thugs being thrown into the back of the paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, I said, 'Please don't be too nice."'
Trump then spoke dismissively of the practice by which arresting officers shield the heads of handcuffed suspects as they are placed in police cars.
"I said, 'You could take the hand away, OK,"' he said, drawing applause from many in the audience, which included federal and law enforcement personnel from the New York-New Jersey area.
The Suffolk County Police Department said in a statement after Trump's speech that it has strict rules and procedures about how prisoners should be handled. "Violations of those rules and procedures are treated extremely seriously. As a department, we do not and will not tolerate roughing up of prisoners."
The former chief of the Suffolk County Police Department, James Burke, was sentenced to nearly four years in prison last November for beating a handcuffed man in an interrogation room.
Trump talks regularly about cracking down on MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha. The gang is believed to have originated in immigrant communities in Los Angeles in the 1980s and then entrenched itself in Central America when its leaders were deported. It is known for violent tactics that include torturing victims and hacking them with machetes. Authorities estimate the group has tens of thousands of members across Central America and in many U.S. states.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has instructed the Justice Department's law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to prioritize the prosecution of MS-13 members, as directed by an executive order Trump signed in February.
Since the beginning of 2017, the Department of Homeland Security's investigative unit has arrested 3,311 gang members nationwide during targeted operations, said Tom Homan, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency could not provide similar numbers for 2016.
Trump's visit to his home state of New York came as Sessions was in El Salvador to increase international co-operation against the gang. But the president did not mention Sessions in his remarks -- his latest slight against the man he's been publicly fuming at for recusing himself from all matters related to Russian election meddling.
Trump's comments about the treatment of people in police custody resurrected memories of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Baltimore man who was shackled but alive when he was put into a Baltimore police van in April 2015. Gray left the vehicle with severe neck injuries, and his subsequent death spawned rioting. Six officers were charged initially, but prosecutors in July 2016 dropped all remaining charges after acquittals and a hung jury.
Grey's family agreed in September 2015 to a $6.4 million settlement with Baltimore.
Superville reported from Washington.
