WASHINGTON — Police agencies, which rarely take children with a show of force, say they cannot recall anything like the Immigration and Naturalization Service operation that removed 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez from his relatives' home using an armed assault team.
Law enforcement officials regularly face the decision of how and when to use guns to take innocent kids into custody. While few officers openly criticize the capture of Elian at gunpoint, they always look for nonviolent options.
Local police, who handle dangerous domestic disputes daily, avoid either a show of force or use of force whenever they can. Most of the time, they don't have to go in with guns drawn.
"What you've got is a child with a warrant out on him, and when is the next time that that is going to happen?" asked Lt. Lester Bell, head of a county Crimes Against Children unit in Georgia. Federal agents used an alien arrest warrant that declared Elian "in violation of the immigration laws" and a search warrant to enter the Miami house and remove the 6-year-old on April 21.
Even immigration agents, who pursue illegal aliens of all ages, have never had to use such force to take a child, acknowledged spokeswoman Maria Cardona.
"We serve search warrants all the time, but it's the first time we've had to serve a search warrant to relatives who have remained unwilling to abide by INS instructions," she said.
Still, Cardona said, the agency has enforcement agents around the country ready to stage a similar raid if necessary.
The danger of the action was cited by family members and others in accusing Attorney General Janet Reno of risking the boy's life to appease Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
The Clinton administration denies that. Polls show most Americans cheer the return of the boy to his father. And children's-rights groups applaud both the result and the method.
"We need Janet Reno to go into a thousand homes this week," said David L. Levy of the Children's Rights Council. "Elian is but the tip of the iceberg."
Pamela S. Stuart-Mills, director of Parental Alienation Syndrome Research Foundation, said she has witnessed abduction cases where authorities faced armed guards.
But rarely, if ever, has the nation witnessed live, recorded or in still photographs the taking of a child with such force as the Miami operation.
Even with real-life police shows nightly taking viewers along in patrol cars, the image of a little boy inches from the barrel of a fearsome automatic rifle still shocked the country.
In 13 years, the nationally syndicated TV show "COPS" has never shown a child taken at gunpoint from an adult, its producers say. COPS cameras have never gone with immigration agents, but they have followed local police in several U.S. cities.