Q and A: Why does a major police organization oppose SB 1070?
By Marcelo Ballvé
New America Media
July28, 2010
Editor’s note: The
National Black Police Association is no stranger to dealing with
controversies around racial profiling. That’s one reason why the
Washington D.C.–based organization opposes SB 1070, the Arizona state
law that asks police to do the job of federal immigration agents and
investigate suspects’ immigration status. In the hours before a judge
blocked key provisions of the law from taking effect. Ronald Hampton,
the group’s executive director, outlined his concerns.
New America Media: Why
does the National Black Police Association oppose Arizona's new
immigration legislation?
We think it's going to
hinder policing. Not just in Arizona, but in the 13 or 14 states that
are considering something similar. We've been talking about community
policing for years now, and this law is going to cause people to
withdraw from partnership with the police— I mean, it's crazy.
Please explain the idea of
community-oriented policing, which your organization advocates, and the
impact you believe SB 1070 could have, if it were fully enforced.
Community policing is
something we have been involved in for at least the last 25 years. It's
a concept where you develop a partnership between police and communities
to provide public safety. It’s important to know that very rarely do
police officers live in the urban areas they patrol. So we utilize the
vested interest and experience of people living in those communities to
help solve crimes and provide prevention and intervention, tell us
what's going on. Ninety-five percent of the people who live in our
communities are law-abiding, so it doesn't make sense to alienate them.
The whole bedrock of
community policing is to work together with the community—it’s the
community that solves crimes. What's the first thing police do when they
get on the scene? They start trying to identify witnesses, and they
start trying to interview people for information. [With SB 1070,] people
who may be undocumented are going to be afraid of cooperating with
police.
The same kind of suspicion
exists with young people [who] are less likely to cooperate with police
because sometimes police have a tendency to take advantage of young
people. The mistrust is going to begin to spread.
Do you see any parallels
in terms of what Latinos may experience with SB 1070 and law enforcement
agencies' targeting of African-American communities?
Look at the issue of
racial profiling. If you do racial profiling when you do police work,
you're going to fail every time, because there's no substitute for good
police work.
What if law enforcement
were to go to the local legislature and say, “We need a law that would
allow us to go into the black neighborhoods in order to clamp down on
drugs and gangs”? There's a great deal of stereotyping and labeling that
happens with drugs, violence, and gangs. Police perceive it as coming
out of the black community and try to find shortcuts in order to zero in
on a particular group.
There might be a time when
we might see legislation that would allow police to fight drugs,
violence, and crime in black communities the same way they are trying to
do with SB 1070 in Arizona. They could come into neighborhoods with
roadblocks and raids.
SB 1070 is dangerous …
because it gives law enforcement agencies this unlimited reach in doing
whatever it is they decide to do. As it is, as a society, we've had
trouble trying to grab hold of police powers and limit them.
What are some of the areas
of police work, in your view, that might be negatively effected by SB
1070?
Working with victims of
domestic violence is one of the toughest areas of police work. We've
done an awful job through history protecting the victims of domestic
violence. To do anything, we need the cooperation of the victims. With
1070, what will happen is that the victim will be less likely to come
forward to police, because the person's immigration status has become
more important than protecting the person. That's a perfect example.
Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona
says new protections were written into the legislation specifically to
prevent ethnic profiling and the targeting of innocents. She says the
law is not going to cause problems of this sort.
Having spent 24 years as a
police officer, I think it's going to create a problem. We know racial
profiling is against the law now; that doesn't mean racial profiling is
gone. It happens all the time, and it's going to happen in the context
of this law.
Who's going to be there to
monitor, to make sure it doesn't happen? I think that this was part of
the strategy to get this law passed—to write in that it's not going to
use race as a factor. But who do they think police are going to stop
when they're looking for people who are in the country illegally? Who
are they going to look for?
And the police officers
are not going to write on a piece of paper that they used race, or that
they stopped this person because they look Hispanic. They’re going to
come up with creative paragraph to explain how it happened.
Do you consider
comparisons of SB 1070 to laws in Nazi Germany or the Jim Crow South
farfetched?
The person who is
subjected to these laws is going to have a different view than those who
aren't. After we see how 1070 is carried out, then the victims of 1070
are the ones who are going to be able to say if they were treated fairly
and if their rights were protected. Whenever we have controversial laws,
there are always these two sides. They can be horrible, if you happen to
be on the victims' side of it.
There's a great deal of
talk of tensions and mutual suspicion between the black and Latino
communities. Is this evident at all among black police officers?
Unfortunately we live in a
country where minorities are sometimes pitted against one another. We've
seen it with jobs, services, and access. But we work very closely with
the Hispanic law enforcement organizations, and we've worked with some
of the organizations involved in the immigration issue.
We don't have the luxury
of buying into the stereotyping and marginalization that has taken place
around poor people in our country. If it can happen to them, it can
happen to us. Don't forget that racial profiling has been going on long
before we had the term racial profiling. We put together a brochure on
what to do when the police stop you in 1975.
We don’t have the luxury
of thinking that we are the ones that are disadvantaged and they are
not, or we're not and they are. What we have to do is address inequities
in the system and ways in which we are pitted against one another, as we
are on this issue. Racial profiling can occur in Arizona, or in D.C. or
North Carolina. The more we work together— Hispanics, blacks, and
whoever is victimized by disparities in our criminal justice system and
in society—the better we're going to be prepared to improve our
communities.
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