Thread: FL: Beware police profiling

Beware police profiling
July 18, 2009

The Lake County Sheriff's Office has been busy over the last couple of years.

Deputies routinely stop vehicles, interrogate occupants, and detain them without pressing charges. All while checking their immigration status. Illegals are then held on "detainers" for the Border Patrol.

Civil libertarians and immigration activists decry the tactics as racial profiling, an accusation that Sheriff Gary Borders vigorously denies. Yet almost all of the more than 200 people his department has held on immigration suspicions over the past two years answer to names like Hernández or GarcÃ*a.

According to a recent Sentinel report, the Seminole County Sheriff's Office detained only eight people without charges during the same time period. In Volusia County, the number was two.

Is Lake profiling? David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and racial-profiling expert, thinks so — though, it's a hazy legal point: "The fact that their stops are legal as they begin... doesn't mean that profiling is not going on."

What is clearer is this: The community — regardless of any swelling resentment toward illegals — should be wary of giving a tacit nod to anything less than race-neutral policing. And Mr. Borders needs to be mindful that an exaggerated focus on hauling in illegals could exacerbate lingering tensions between the community and police following the beating of a deputy by a mob in March 2008, a beating that included at least one illegal immigrant.

Even before the beating, Mr. Borders wanted to escalate the crackdown on illegals, seeking a partnership under a federal immigration program that trains and deputizes state and local law enforcement to investigate, detain, and arrest illegal immigrants.

However, critics such as the Police Foundation, a nonprofit research group, have long decried the program. A University of North Carolina Law School study found that instead of targeting serious crimes, as the program mandates, local officers often acted to "purge towns and cities of 'unwelcome' immigrants" by ethnically profiling Hispanics at traffic stops and using the pretext of minor violations to detain them.

The very thing critics now say the Sheriff's Office already does. They note booking sheets absent of any criminal charges against the more than 200 detainees.

Nevertheless, Mr. Borders shrugs off criticism, backed by residents who he says wanted to know why his department wasn't "arresting more of them (illegals)."

If that indeed is the outcry, the department is giving the people want they want.

But did the community really want the Sheriff's Office to become Lake's own La migra — a term in Spanish-speaking communities for immigration authorities?

Do the ends justify the unwarranted detention and distress of a passenger with a Spanish accent who can't produce an ID because she forgot her purse?

The danger in overzealousness is that it can produce unintended results.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., has become a national folk hero for his hard line on illegal immigrants. A newspaper exposé found his deputies stop vehicles only on the suspicion that illegal immigrants are inside and run raids in mostly Hispanic neighborhoods or near day-laborer haunts.

Mr. Arpaio's enforcement efforts have produced hundreds of arrests of illegals. But, the crackdown has also meant slower emergency response times and fewer criminal investigations and arrests. By the way, Mr. Arpaio's department is under U.S. Justice Department investigation for civil rights violations.

Lake County is not Maricopa County. Nor should it hope to be. The Sheriff's Office should enforce the law — all laws. But it ought to step off the path that assumes minorities are undesirables — not neighbors.

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www.orlandosentinel.com

However, critics such as the Police Foundation, a nonprofit research group, have long decried the program. A University of North Carolina Law School study found that instead of targeting serious crimes, as the program mandates, local officers often acted to "purge towns and cities of 'unwelcome' immigrants" by ethnically profiling Hispanics at traffic stops and using the pretext of minor violations to detain them.

How many times do we have to hear this lie? According to the author of 287(g), Sen. Grassley, the program was written to give local law enforcement the tools to arrest, screen, and hold illegal aliens for deportation. Nowhere in the 287(g) amendment was it mandated that local law enforcement was only supposed to apprehend serious criminals. The program was designed for the apprehension and deportation of ALL illegal aliens that participating law enforcement officers came into contact with during the normal performance of their duties.