Why Law Enforcement Officials Should Hate Arizona 's Racist New Law
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on April 30, 2010, Printed on April 30, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146677/
William John Cox has worked as a prosecutor, a public defender, and decades ago, a police officer in El Cajon,
"Sometimes, in the early morning we would see illegal immigrants trudging north carrying their few belongings in the knit shopping bags known as 'Tijuana briefcases,'" he recalled in a posting on Facebook, following the signing of Arizona's draconian immigration law. "We would stop them, ask for the papers, and arrest them if they had none. When the border patrol officers picked them up at the station, they would leave a box of practice ammunition as a reward for each one arrested."
Those were the '60s. A few years later, in the early 1970s, Cox was tasked with authoring the Los Angeles Police Department's new policy manual. He and his colleagues weighed whether this sort of collaboration between police and immigration officials made sense. The answer, they determined, was no: such practices would undermine law enforcement by creating a chilling effect in the very communities police rely on to solve crimes. This logic would be codified in 1979 by the L.A. City Council and then-Police Chief Daryl Gates, who implemented Special Order 40, a mandate that forbids "initiat(ing) police action with the objective of discovering the alien status of a person." Despite attempts by right-wing groups to challenge the order, it has been upheld in court ever since.
In Los Angeles, Cox told AlterNet in a phone interview, "they decided that if you have police officers who are enforcing immigration laws, then what happens is that you cut off that voluntary flow of information that is essential for law enforcement in a free society."
"Say a woman has been raped," he explains. "Is she going to come forward and say, 'Yes, I've been raped,' if she will then get deported for reporting her victimization?" Fear of deportation would not only mean her rapist could get away with his crime, but would be free to go on and victimize someone else. "There is a value to society in having her come forward," Cox says.
Dr. Richard Weinblatt, a former police chief and deputy sheriff who once worked on the border in
Signed into law on April 23,
If the person is unable to verify that he or she is in the country legally, "a
According to Weinblatt, this forces the hand of law enforcement in situations where action may not be called for. "This law says that if the officer or deputy sheriff on the local level -- a non-immigration, non-border patrol person -- feels that they have developed 'reasonable suspicion' that a person is an illegal alien, they are mandated -- they must, there is no discretion here -- they are mandated to investigate."
"For most officers in the field, reasonable suspicion is a very gray area," Weinblatt says. In the jump to reasonable suspicion, "police are going to have to be able to articulate certain facts that made them go further. Well, what kinds of facts would make them go further? You can guess it yourself: If the person is darker than me, if a person has more of an accent than me. Well, what is that? That's racial profiling."
Cox agrees that racial profiling -- "behavior that we do not want to encourage" -- will be an inevitable result of the law. "Once you start down that slope of saying it's now okay to stop every Hispanic-looking person and asking for their papers," he says, "then you're just asking for a police state."
This is no exaggeration. In a state where racial profiling is already rampant, the coercive language of the new law "effectively compels Arizona police to make immigration enforcement their top priority," argues National Lawyers Guild president
The Law Enforcement Engagement Initiative, an organization of police officials who favor federalimmigration reform , condemned the law, saying it would probably result in racial profiling and threatenpublic safety because undocumented people would hesitate to come forward and report crimes or cooperate with police for fear of being deported. TheArizona Association of Chiefs of Police also criticized the legislation, saying it will "negatively affect the ability of law enforcement agencies across the state to fulfill their many responsibilities in a timely manner"; the group believes the immigration issue is best addressed at the federal level.
Lawsuits and Frivolous Lawsuits
Less than a week after the law was signed, the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, along with the American
"The Arizona community can be assured that a vigorous and sophisticated legal challenge will be mounted, in advance of SB1070's implementation, seeking to prevent this unconstitutional and discriminatory law from ever taking effect," MALDEF president and general counsel Thomas A. Saenz said. The law takes effect 90 days after its signing.
For the
As Marjorie Cohn writes, this means that "even if a municipality is innocent, it will still be forced to rack up exorbitant legal fees to defend itself against frivolous lawsuits."
Then there's the "flip side," according to Weinblatt: "People who are stopped and asked to prove their legitimacy, if you will -- they can sue. So now you have a situation where fiscally strapped government agencies are going to be sued whether they do it, and sued whether they
For Weinblatt, who is based in
According to the
"In Ohio, we've had departments shut down, we've had officers laid off. Ohio has had a long history of fiscal problems," says Weinblatt. "They've got stretched resources to begin with -- and now you want to saddle them with another duty? And if they do it or they don't do it, they're likely to have to defend themselves in a lawsuit?"
Getting police officers involved in immigration work is not like training for traffic stops, says Weinblatt. "There are so many different nuances to immigration law, so many different types of status, classifications of people, different types of visas." In order to do it right, police officers would have to be trained, at considerable cost, in all of these nuances. Such training, he argues, would take place off-site, and departments would have to hire temporary replacements to fill the gap. "From a police chief's perspective, it's a logistical nightmare."
When it comes to local police and immigration enforcement, argues Weinblatt, "they should not be involved at all. And if they want to get involved, they should have discretion."
Must Police Officers Enforce All Laws?
In 1971, President
Ultimately, the new law in
"I think this is more related to hard times," says Cox. For an equivalent moment in U.S. history, he says, "you have to go back almost to the Chinese exclusion laws in
"So many Chinese workers came into California and the Western United States to build railroads and so forth -- but then they began to establish themselves into the cities such as San Francisco." When hard economic times presented themselves, "people started saying, 'Wait a minute we have to do something about them.' So in San Francisco, for example, they passed a law that said that in order to operate a laundromat, it had to be in a brick building." (At the time, most Chinese laundromats were not in brick buildings; it was a blatantly discriminatory law.)
Cox cites vigilante groups like the (now-defunct) Minutemen as helping set the stage for Arizona's new law -- "In a way what we're seeing is an extension of that" -- but it is as much about economic distress. "What we're experiencing right now is really high true unemployment … People are getting really antsy they are getting scared -- and it's really easy to turn on immigrants."
Weinblatt agrees that "politicians are tapping into a vein of public sentiment, particularly in the Southwest."
"I'm not saying that the folks in Arizona don't have a legitimate beef with the federal government and with the system the way it's working," he says. "I'm not saying that they don't have real concerns."
"The biggest crime of all this," says Weinblatt, "is that the folks that are suffering and are the saddest of victims, they become victimized even further. Because now where do they turn? They can't even turn to the police now can they?"
As a police officer in
In fact, the situation he confronted with domestic violence calls serves as a useful analogy for the new law, he says. "It's like, I'm going to walk into a domestic and I'm going to try to solve in 20 minutes what took maybe 20 years to develop. This is a simplistic, knee-jerk reaction. You can't expect local law enforcement officers to try to go in there with a Dirty Harry kind of approach of crime control and try to solve a problem on a simple level. This is a complex political problem, it needs a political solution that comes out of Washington DC."
Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer and editor of Rights & Liberties and World Special Coverage. Follow her on Twitter.