Around 2 A.M. on Saturday morning, operators manning emergency lines in the Minneapolis suburb of Champlin, according to a police report, got a call from someone who said that a masked man had come to their home “and then shot their parents.” When police and medics arrived, they discovered that the victims were a Democratic state senator named John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, who were alive but badly injured. A “very intuitive” sergeant from the nearby city of Brooklyn Park, who had helped respond to the call, asked officers from his jurisdiction to check on the home of the Democratic state legislator Melissa Hortman, who was until recently the state House speaker. According to the Brooklyn Park police chief, Mark Bruley, when the officers arrived, at about 3:35 A.M., they saw something unexpected: a “vehicle that looked exactly like an S.U.V. squad car” in the driveway with its emergency lights on. The front door was open, and the officers saw a man dressed like a cop firing into it; he killed Hortman and her husband, Mark. The officers fired at the shooter—since identified as Vance Boelter, a fifty-seven-year-old evangelical Christian (a website of his said that he is an ordained minister) with a scattered work history, who had recently been employed by local funeral-service companies—who ran back into the house and, for a time, escaped. He was arrested on Sunday evening and has been charged with federal murder, which carries the possibility of the death penalty.

The assassination of one elected official, and the attempted assassination of another, confirm the arrival of a new political era, in which the expectation and the fear of political violence are endemic. But who Boelter is, and the exact nature of his objectives and perceived grievances, may ultimately be less salient than whom he pretended to be. (Boelter’s motives aren’t yet clear, though he possessed what police have suggested may have been a target list of about seventy individuals, many of whom are Democratic politicians.) A state legislator summoned to his or her door well after midnight may be wary about opening it, but somewhat less reluctant if the person on the step is uniformed and there’s a cop car parked on the street. As it turns out, Boelter was driving an S.U.V. that he had presumably outfitted for a security business that hadn’t taken off. But he made the deliberate decision to leave the emergency lights on.

It was very smart of the real Brooklyn Park police officers to suspect what was happening, and their quick reaction might well have saved lives. (At a news conference on Monday, authorities in Minnesota revealed that Boelter had visited at least two other homes between Hoffman’s and Hortman’s, though no one was home at one, and he seemed to have been scared away at the other.) Their job could not have been helped by the fact that the past decade has seen the rise of an unstable environment around politics and law enforcement—one that arguably worsened around January 6th, when Donald Trump celebrated the vigilantes who stormed the Capitol and attacked its police force as “warriors,” and later when he pardoned them for their decision to take the law into their own hands.

The politicization of law enforcement has acquired a new dimension during the ongoing immigration crackdowns, when the Administration has sometimes seemed to allow its agents to disguise their identities or affiliations so that it is often unclear to detainees whose custody they are in, or under what authority. (If the vigilantes have been encouraged to act as cops, the actual cops have also been encouraged to act a bit more like vigilantes.) In Boston, in March, when federal agents arrested Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University graduate student who had co-written a pro-Palestine op-ed in a campus newspaper, they were in plain clothes and masked. Sometimes the mission has been fuzzy or concealed: not long after the White House deployed seven hundred marines to Los Angeles, purportedly to help quell the protests against immigration raids, photos spread of them detaining a protester. Catherine Rampell, of the Washington Post, reported last week on an immigration raid targeting a landscaper working outside a boutique home-design business in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in which agents showed up “in masks and tactical gear and refused to show IDs, warrants or even the names of any criminals they were supposedly hunting.” In the piece, Rampell spoke to the business’s co-owner, Linda Shafiroff, who said, “It could have been like a band of the Proud Boys or something.”

In each of these circumstances, the federal government is asking ordinary people to trust that those wearing uniforms are acting on behalf of the public, while also allowing them to shroud their identity and their mission, and pushing the boundaries of what law enforcement can do. It is hard to imagine a scenario more perfectly engineered for exploitation. In February, a man wearing an ICE jacket at the Conservative Political Action Conference, outside Washington, D.C., admitted to a podcaster that he had no affiliation with the agency, but said of his jacket, “It’s $29.99 on Amazon. I would recommend buying a small, if you’re my size.” In Philadelphia, police sought a man who had entered a car-repair shop wearing fake security apparel; yelled “Immigration!,” which caused some employees to scatter; and then proceeded to tie up a worker and rob the business. By the end of March, the fake-ICE situation had grown sufficiently common in Southern California that the Los Angeles Times ran a feature titled “ICE impersonators and other scammers are on the rise: How to protect yourself.”

Some of these impersonators are scamming for money. But others, especially those harassing migrants, may be expressing some solidarity with the President’s political aims. The leaky membrane that Trump has established between law enforcement and his own agenda does a disservice to the officers, many of whom are simply trying to do their jobs. It may also make their work more dangerous. The more lawless the government is, the easier it is for lawless individuals to impersonate officers, and the more likely it is that citizens will doubt that the real officers actually represent a legal authority.

Which is a recipe for generalized mistrust. For citizens to know who an armed federal agent really is, and what authority he is operating under, should be part of even the most basic commitment to transparency. At a minimum, courts and politicians should pressure government agents to disclose their identities during raids and detentions, and to clarify where their authority begins and ends. If they don’t, or can’t, a more dystopian path beckons, of endemic suspicion of authority. (In California’s Central Valley, as immigration raids peaked, school attendance reportedly dropped by twenty-two per cent.) On Saturday, at an anti-Trump No Kings protest in Salt Lake City, Utah, a man reportedly appeared to be crouching behind a wall, while carrying what looked like an AR-15-style rifle. (Open carry is mostly legal in Utah, and it isn’t yet clear whether he supported or opposed the protests.) Several armed people whom the police referred to as “peacekeepers” providing security for the protest—though whether this role was official or self-assigned was under investigation—pulled their own weapons and yelled. One fired at the man, managing to disarm him but killing a bystander.

In Minnesota, authorities said that they were looking into Boelter’s motives, and whether he belonged to a wider network. In the meantime, jitteriness prevailed across the political class. The Times suggested that political violence is “becoming almost routine”; Greg Landsman, a Democratic congressman from Ohio, told the paper that for months he has envisioned an assassination attempt each time he speaks in public. “It’s still in my head. I don’t think it will go away,” he said. “It’s just me on the ground.” These are the kinds of pressures that can dispel public service, and disrupt a democracy. Amid all the general calls to cool the heated rhetoric of partisan politics, a specific measure might prove helpful: more clarity about who represents what area of law enforcement, and where the limits of their mission lie. Otherwise, this risks becoming the summer when everyone—all the way up to the politicians—began to feel unsafe. ♦