Thread: Top officers wary of bill to localize enforcement

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/nation/15591552.htm

Posted on Sat, Sep. 23, 2006

Top officers wary of bill to localize enforcement

By ANNA M. TINSLEY
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER

Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson doesn't want to see the days return when illegal immigrants are randomly stopped by law enforcers and arrested.

That practice, he said, essentially went away years ago.

But it could come back, since the U.S. House passed a bill this week that reaffirms the ability local and state law enforcement officers have to arrest, investigate and detain illegal immigrants.

"I don't have the jail space to start rounding up people innocently walking down the street who are in the country illegally but aren't otherwise doing anything wrong," Anderson said. "This is a very sticky, controversial issue that law enforcement is going to have to step back and determine what our role is locally.

"I don't see us swinging back to the old ways in the near future of just seeing someone from another country and locking them up," he said. "We will have discussions on whether we should become more active in that world."

To become law, the measure must still be approved by the Senate, which could adjourn as soon as next week. The Senate is also considering a House-approved bill to construct more than 700 miles of fencing around the Southwest border

The immigration policing proposal sounds good in theory, but it may not truly pan out, said Alex del Carmen, interim chairman of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Texas in Arlington.

"It puts an added burden on police departments in addition to the tasks they are doing now ... and this is going to completely overwhelm the criminal justice system," he said. "Federal prisons, federal detention facilities will be overwhelmed with people being arrested left and right.

"I'm not saying that illegal immigrations should be allowed or overlooked, but widening the net is going to expand not only the number of people you process through the system but also will drain the resources you have in place."

Fort Worth Police Chief Ralph Mendoza said this plan won't work until the borders are secure.

"The pot has a hole in it, and it keeps leaking," he said. "Once they secure the border, then they can deal with the illegal immigrants already here."

Mendoza said he has heard of federal officials having trouble transferring illegal immigrants to their custody even without the enhanced apprehension effort.

And he said he worries that this measure could prevent illegal immigrants who need help, either as crime victims or for health needs, from turning to police.

"They're not going to feel secure or safe enough to call for help," Mendoza said. "It was a problem years before, and it would be a problem again."

In Bedford, Police Chief David Flory said he believes that the proposal is not good because it creates yet another unfunded mandate.

And now, Flory said, local law enforcement agencies are already financially strapped because of 9-11, after which federal agencies turned their attention to terrorism.

"And they [the federal government] should have," Flory said. "But more and more local police have had to investigate white-collar crimes, which had fallen to federal agencies."

Grapevine Police Chief Eddie Salame also does not favor the measure.

"I'm concerned that enforcing the federal law would set us back in the minority communities," Salame said. "We would create a group of people who would not be calling police anymore."

And in Farmers Branch, where city leaders may themselves consider adopting controversial anti-immigration proposals, some believe that the potential law could be very costly.

"The overriding concern I hear from our staff ... was that the federal government should not mandate a requirement on local law enforcement without federal funding," said Mayor Pro Tem Ben Robinson, who at one time proposed that Farmers Branch officials ask police to copy residency papers of immigrants and give those copies to immigration officials.

Staff writer Domingo Ramirez Jr. contributed to this report.


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Anna M. Tinsley, 817-390-7610 atinsley@star-telegram.com

Its amazing isn't it how some law officials are afraid enforce the laws of our land. I say if they don't have the stomach to do the job they were hired to do, then step aside so someone else who is not afraid to do their job can step in and take over. We don't need law enforcement who only want to pick and choose what laws they feel should be enforce.

"It puts an added burden on police departments in addition to the tasks they are doing now ... and this is going to completely overwhelm the criminal justice system," he said. "Federal prisons, federal detention facilities will be overwhelmed with people being arrested left and right.

"I'm not saying that illegal immigrations should be allowed or overlooked, but widening the net is going to expand not only the number of people you process through the system but also will drain the resources you have in place."


Maybe if our president wasn't wasting OUR tax dollars in Iraq, we would have money for a fence, more ICE agents, training for local police forces...etc

The hundreds of billions spent in Iraq (our tax dollars) bought the US hatred around the world, and it could have been spent on securing OUR country, with some change left over.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1) - Cite This Source
po?lice? [puh-lees] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation noun, verb, -liced, -lic?ing.
–noun
1. Also called police force. an organized civil force for maintaining order, preventing and detecting crime, and enforcing the laws.
2. (used with a plural verb) members of such a force: Several police are patrolling the neighborhood.
3. the regulation and control of a community, esp. for the maintenance of public order, safety, health, morals, etc.
4. the department of the government concerned with this, esp. with the maintenance of order.
5. any body of people officially maintained or employed to keep order, enforce regulations, etc.
6. people who seek to regulate a specified activity, practice, etc.: the language police.
7. Military. (in the U.S. Army)
a. the cleaning and keeping clean of a camp, post, station, etc.
b. the condition of a camp, post, station, etc., with reference to cleanliness.
–verb (used with object)

I stand by what I said,if the officers no longer want to do the job because of the paperwork or whatever reason, then maybe they need to look for different work. I am an old nurse, I know all about paperwork and burden, when I no longer felt I could do the work, I got out, I didnt have the choice of staying on the job and choosing only the duties I wanted to complete, you either do what is assigned to you, all of it,or none at all. I am not saying I don't feel compassion for these officers,for the amount of work put on them, I am saying though, how can they make a conscious decision to leave a drunk they see driving on the roads who may in the next few minutes take the life of an innocent victim? I say that is an act of passive aggression, on the part of the officers because they are upset at their circumstances of feeling overworked, so they deliberately choose not to arrest the drunks, that to me, makes them accessories to any crimes these drunks committ! To me, it would be the same if when I was still practicing nursing, I had 15 pts to take care of, I knew that was to many,(happened many a time though) so I consciously make the decision only to give half of them their meds because I simply don't have time to do give the meds and do all the charting and everything else I had to do in order to take care of these pts!