As with the Henry Louis Gates arrest last year, I think the bigger issue transcends race. Arizona has created a situation where it is easier for a police officer to detain you. Simple violations that would result in a ticket could lead to arrest if you don’t have identification on you. Let’s back up. Maybe that’s the case already. Maybe the Supreme Court already said cops can do this in Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada. In that case a cop claimed suspicion of a crime for the detainment. That’s exactly what SB1070 is doing. It’s even a little better because the cop has to have stopped you for some other violation. The disturbing part is that this law has just widened the justification for what is legitimate suspicion of a crime. Before something like a “disorderly conduct” charge or a bogus tip would have to be invented to detain a person; now it’s when “reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States”. I think that’s extremely vague and open for abuse. Not only that, with the added emphasis on immigration enforcement, I would suspect that police will have more incentive to go after minor violations with an eye toward using it to ask about a person’s immigration status.
I’ve been saying exactly this since day one. A police officer can detain you for any number of reasons. Once a police officer is detaining you, they can question you about your immigration status. That’s not theory; that’s a given.
Think about the law as it’s written, rather than what you think might happen in the best cases of its application.
Jeff is absolutely right; this is a disturbing law that sets a really bad precedent, and it has absolutely nothing to do with, as the right wing nutsos seems to think, me being an open-border advocate. I want the borders closed tight as a drum just like the rest of the smart world, but I don’t want to add racial profiling to the toolkit of police to solve that problem.
Considering the fact that Puerto Rico may soon become our 51st state, I say we drop Arizona from the union and keep Puerto Rico. It keeps the number at a nice even 50 and we get rid of a state dumb enough to pass this law and elect John McCain.
I call that a win-win.