My arch enemy friend Chris asked a reasonable question in comments on my Bryon York post. To Wit:
Pete, what circumstances would give an officer reasonable suspicion that a person was not a legal resident?
It’s the type of question that the media is all over today, it deserves an answer so here it comes.
You are asking the wrong person, let me explain why:
One of the things you learn in a job is how to recognize signs, for example, when debuging a system certain performance signs or browser actions will indicate a spyware issue. Others will indicate that temp files haven’t been cleaned out since sometime the Red Sox won the Series. I’ve found after a decade of doing this that I can watch a system for several minutes and have a pretty good idea what is going wrong.
This is true in any good profession or hobby. Mike the butcher can recognize the differences between different grades of meat in the shop. Bob the hardware guy knows a good door from a cheap one. Marge at ZuZu’s Petals knows a good flower from a bad one. Bill at the Border Grille & Bar knows the difference between a tomato that can be used in a salad, a sandwich or a salsa and one that is only usable during a bad performance onstage.
Likewise a police officer who has been trained in law enforcement and spending years or decades in an area where they’ve had to deal with illegal immigration on a daily basis would recognize things that you or I, not having having had said experience would not even think of looking for.
But Pete you say, we can’t trust the police to enforce the laws fairly. We can’t? Look at the record. Do you feel intimidated by the police in town? Do you feel scared or worried. They have all kinds of legal authority over you yet you don’t quake in fear? Why are you so ready to trust your local police but are unwilling to allow people from Arizona that same courtesy? Because they are different from you? Because they are republicans and/or conservatives? Because they are as Larry Baer called the tea party people “Stupid White People”? Talk about profiling!
Lets look at the record in one high visibility area. The police forces in the United States in cooperation with Federal and Homeland security have managed to successfully defend this nation from terrorist threats without the curtailing of individual rights particularly of American Muslims.
Can the American Muslim community honestly say their ability to work, or worship or live have been curtailed over the years? I think not. Can anyone rightly say that their ability to protest the war and call out President Bush was unreasonably restricted? It is to laugh.
I also think it is facetious to think that with national attention upon them said police are going to act capriciously when their jobs and futures are at stake, particularly in this economy. The ACLU, La Raza, Al Sharpton, The Free Muma, ANSWER, ACORN et/al and other who make their living ambulance chasing are drooling at the chance to catch them overstepping their authority. These cops know the score if you don’t realize that the you have not paid attention to our litigious society nor to the politics of the left.
So no I don’t know what would constitute a reasonable suspicion but the officers enforcing the law will, and if anyone is victimized by an officer going overboard there will be a plethora of lawyers and media to go after them that Ken Gladney never has and never will see after being beaten on film.
That’s why I and others don’t take people who are willing to call Arizona a police state seriously. They wouldn’t know a police state if it hit them upside the head and are only interested in feeling better about their self righteousness. Perhaps they should take a closer look at what is happening just across the border these days.
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