Will Local Enforcement of the Immigration laws Result in (More) Racial Profiling? You Bet!!!
Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), February 2, 2006 Thursday,
Proposed state legislation has ingredients for racial profiling, Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News
I know. Another column on illegal immigration. I feel your pain. But, I couldn’t let the recent story about proposed state legislation requiring local police to act as federal immigration officials pass without getting something off my chest.
So, this one is for you, Pam, in Denver, and you, Judy, from Lakewood. It’s for you, Ed, neighbor of mine who makes most pessimists look like a bunch of wide-eyed, flower-sniffing choirboys.
“Call me the prophet of doom,” he says.
Ed has a thing about Mexicans. As I recall, his exact words were: “They ruin everything they touch.”
It’s one of his typical all-bark, no-bite comments, which he will later amend to “some Mexicans” and then to “some Mexicans living here illegally”
and then to “a lot of Mexicans are good people.”
But, this is only after his wife says: “I’m a Chicano, but I’m ashamed of my race because of those Mexicans. People think we are all alike, but we’re not.”
She and Ed sing in Pam and Judy’s choir. They are Hispanic or Latinos or Chicanos, or as Pam prefers, Spanish, because that’s her lineage. They are not, each has told me, Mexicans, and they don’t like me using the word Hispanic without saying, specifically, if the people are, in fact, Mexican.
That’s “Mexican,” with a hiss.
“It’s important for people to know we’re not the ones causing the problems.
They are,” goes their typical line.
I almost feel bad for them. All that bowing and curtsying before the throne of public approval must be exhausting.
Anyway, I went to visit Ed about this proposed legislation.
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s a good idea,” he says. “We gotta do something.”
Now, Ed is a nice, burnished shade of olive. He has a moustache. And did I mention the tattoos? If I have it right, they’re stripped along the same forearm a cop might see through the window should he pull up parallel to Ed.
Ed, who one day might be sitting down to breakfast when he realizes, drat, they’re out of coffee. Ed, who grabs some cash and hops into his van, leaving his wallet behind. Ed, who heads down Federal Boulevard and, impatient, because Ed is impatient, takes the left onto 26th Avenue after the light has turned red.
Why, hello, officer.
I.D.?
What the #@$!%$ do you mean am I a citizen?
Rep. Tom Tancredo is backing a federal version of these bills and, by his logic, Ed should be just fine. He speaks English. He has no outstanding warrants for which he would be arrested. As Tancredo said during a recent
debate: If police come in contact with someone who has an outstanding warrant and “they are not speaking English, and you ask them for ID and they cannot provide it, you get the pretty good idea they are here illegally.”
If only it were that simple. These bills would require police to determine whether someone they’ve “encountered during routine law enforcement activity” is in this country illegally and, “when appropriate” to detain them for immigration. A dozen practical objections have been raised, most from police agencies.
“Maybe some people haven’t noticed, but we have a hard time getting enough police officers out there catching the dangerous guys,” Mayor John Hickenlooper said during the same debate with Tancredo.
“Where are we going to put them?” was the first question a cop I know asked.
His next question was whether “routine activity” means not only suspects, but witnesses and victims. This is the question most worrisome to people who help battered women here illegally.
The officer said he doubts cops would seek out suspected illegal immigrants, but if they, say, pull a speeder over and there’s any doubt, “they’ll probably detain them and let immigration figure it out. Unless, it’s a cute chick with a British accent.”
Which leads me to my point. The one I argued with Ed, who didn’t need more than a couple minutes to recognize a recipe for racial profiling in the making. But, something has to be done, he repeated, recalling last year’s killing of Denver police Detective Donald Young in which an illegal immigrant with several traffic violations is accused of the slaying. He’s right. But this legislation is not the answer.
“If this is passed, we will have to prove our citizenship over and over and over again,” said Butch Montoya, Denver’s former manager of safety, who has long argued that enforcing immigration law is not the job of local police.
“I will be damned if I will show my citizenship to a cop who thinks I am an alien. I was born here, and if I happen to look like someone who is here illegally, well that’s your problem.
“If you put five of us ‘Latinos’ with five Mexicanos and you ask someone to choose which ones are legal and which are not, it will be one out of 10 is legal and the rest are illegal.”
And this is what I try to argue with Latinos so eager to draw a hard, bright line between us and them. Be careful. Which side of the line you’re on always depends upon who is doing the drawing.
griegot@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2699
KJ