Thread: N.J.: Cops ticket day laborers

Cops ticket day laborers
Saturday, March 10, 2007

By SAMANTHA HENRY
HERALD NEWS


PASSAIC -- Police issued at least six summonses to day laborers waiting to get picked up for work along Dayton Avenue Friday morning. The move came just days after Mayor Samuel Rivera said the city would not ticket workers but instead issue warnings to contractors who picked them up anywhere other than a city-sanctioned hiring center.

Rivera said Friday he did not know the police had been issuing tickets.

"I was unaware," he said, and immediately called police officials. Over the phone, he instructed them to stop issuing summons until he could address the situation.

"I asked them to give me a chance to meet with the workers," Rivera said. He said he would try to discuss the situation with day laborer representatives next week.

At issue is the use of a new city-sanctioned hiring center at 139 Parker Ave., set up to be run and paid for by the day laborers who use it. But the storefront center, across the street from The Home Depot, has seen little use since opening in January.

Jacobo Maceda, one of the day laborers who was issued a summons Friday, said many workers think the center is too small and don't see contractors picking up workers there, so they remain in the parking lot.

"The tickets won't make me go to the center," Maceda said in Spanish. "There's too many people there, the contractors don't go there and it's disorganized."

Maceda's ticket did not carry a fine, but was a court summons to appear on March 15 and answer to charges of blocking a public sidewalk and "making school kids walk in street to avoid them."

The ticket was issued at 9 a.m. Maceda argued there were no children in sight, and school officials said the school day begins at 8:42 a.m. A group of day laborers, including Maceda, said that two policemen had pulled up in an unmarked car, asked them for identification, and then issued the summonses to six workers.

Rivera had promised to give the day laborers a monthlong grace period to get the hiring center up and running before ordering police to ticket anyone still soliciting jobs in the streets around The Home Depot.

After the deadline came and went, Rivera said he wouldn't fine the workers, but instead go after contractors to try to force them to use the center -- believing the day laborers would follow.

Both the mayor and several workers expressed concern this week that the situation could escalate in the coming warmer months, when the construction season gets under way, and the ranks of the day laborers can reach several hundred on any given day.

Some said those increasing numbers, combined with the impasse at the center, the fractured leadership among workers and the police's efforts to maintain public order, could reignite tensions that led to the creation of the center in the first place.

www.northjersey.com

This is what one gets when a community has a 3rd WORLD Government!

Chaos

Aiding and Abetting is what I call it!

Your representing criminal foreign nationals aka illegal aliens!!


The cops were just doing their job as law abiding, patriotic AMERICANS!

What next? Will the Mayor ask the police to hold open doors for bank robbers? Maybe he can have police set up lounge chairs in case these day laborers get tired of standing

Please people! Have some compasion here, you know these "immigrants" are only doing the jobs that us Americans won't do. Those policemen need to be handing out free miller beer and BOA credit applications instead of writing silly tickets to these hard workers

Side note: I applaud the effort by the police but to me ticketing them is about as effective a trying to shovel smoke with a pitchfork in the wind. These uneducated people of low/no morals cannot comprehend the simple concept and meaning of the word "ILLEGAL". It would be more interesting if the cops wrote a big red "I" on each of the illegal's foreheads. Permanent marker (made in USA) of course. Kind of a "tag and release" program so that when the cops get the chance to arrest them identification will be quicker. It wouldn't be "racial profiling". More like "alphabet profiling"