Cop Unlocks Key to Identifying Criminal Aliens Using Stolen Identities
Unlocks Key to Identifying Criminal Aliens Using Stolen Identities
Police expert responsible for hundreds of imposter arrests, with offenses ranging from welfare fraud to murder
by Edmund Kozak | Updated 19 Jul 2017 at 7:19 AM
Police Officer James Scott of Saugus, Massachusetts, is an expert in impostor detection, and he has developed a training program for law enforcement officers that equips them with the knowledge and skills necessary to identify suspects who are in the country illegally.
Scott has extensive experience with identity theft committed by illegal aliens, and his program helps officers to specifically identify aliens who have fraudulently obtained driver’s licenses.
Roughly 700 law enforcement officers from Massachusetts and elsewhere in New England have taken Scott’s program in the past two years. They have taken that knowledge and used it to catch and deport hundreds of illegal alien criminals.
In an interview with LifeZette, Scott said he first became aware of the widespread problem of illegal aliens obtaining legal drivers licenses during the heroin epidemic.
"I became aware that a lot of heroin dealers had actually stolen the identity of a U.S. citizen, walked into a registry of motor vehicles, not just in Massachusetts, and obtained a valid driver's license using the identity of another person," he said.
Scott explained that most of the dealers were citizens of the Dominican Republic who had stolen the identities of Puerto Rican citizens, often specifically Puerto Rican criminals.
Local ABC affiliate WCVB 5 reported on two such criminal illegal aliens in March 2016.
"Convicted heroin dealer Roberto Villegas ... had at least four Massachusetts driver's licenses and has used more than 10 different identities. Drug dealer Eric Matos was deported three times, but that didn't stop him from getting five Massachusetts driver's licenses using false identities," the station reported.
It is not a stretch to say the problem is of epidemic proportions, according to Scott.
"I got a trooper I work with who's great at this," said Scott, "he thinks we can fill Gillette Stadium with just the impostors from Massachusetts alone."
Scott's program teaches officers to run suspected stolen IDs against FBI (and at times Puerto Rico police) records. The success of the program speaks for itself.
"In New Hampshire in 2014, statewide they had six cases of license fraud," Scott said. "In April 2015 [the New Hampshire State Police] came to my class. They stayed a half hour late on Friday afternoon — they ended the year with 50-plus imposters," he said.
Scott's program has also been adopted by the Burlington office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The criminals Scott and his colleagues have apprehended showcase the scope of crimes committed by illegal aliens.
"We've had rapists and murderers," said Scott.
There are also "impostors that are stealing benefits, EBT and MassHealth," said Scott. "Twenty-five percent of our identified imposters are in fact stealing MassHealth and EBT," he said.
http://16344-presscdn-0-70.pagely.ne...ed-360x210.jpg
Debunking the Claim ICE Cooperation Deters Crime Reporting_Numerous studies find immigration enforcement has no 'chilling effect' on aliens contacting police
There "was a 31-year impostor in Fall River, Massachusetts. A couple of Fall River cops came, understood the training, and applied it. Long story short, they made a traffic stop, identified a suspect and 10 months later they took the guy down on a search warrant," Scott said. "They hit his store where he was selling heroin and other drugs, and they hit his apartment, found his documents ... he even voted."
Despite the obvious success of Scott's methods and the obvious significance of the problem they are designed to solve, he has been unsuccessful in his efforts to lobby the state of Massachusetts to adopt his program.
"I think the numbers are so bad, they're so many of them, and no one wants to be holding the bag ... saying that we got beat for a lot of years, and these guys have been contributing to the heroin epidemic," Scott said. "No one wants to be holding that bag — no one wants that."
http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/c...en-identities/
