AWC: good question. I may have a law degree, but criminal procedure is not my regular stomping ground. I’ll give it my best shot, though. “Probable Cause” is a constitutional mandate that all of us conservative patriots think very highly of. No podunk local government (or even a local government of great majesty such as that of PWC) can make it disappear in favor of “officer discretion.” As I read the resolution, no immigration status inquiry will occur until a suspect is in custody at ADC. That means there was some independent cause for arrest other than suspicions about immigration status. I don’t see anything in the resolution about “officer discretion” and I very much doubt that your theory that Probable Cause has been dispensed with in favor of a looser standard is accurate, quite aside from the fact that if it were, it would be a nasty attack on a fundamental constitutional component (that’s one of the reason that I regard so much of this stuff as essentially left-wing, anti-American assaults on the basic liberties of the citizens). That leaves your police force mercifully more or less where it was pre-nervous breakdown - a local law enforcement organization that will interact with the citizenry on a constitutional basis. If there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed (e.g., drunk driving, vehicular homicide, bank robbery, rape, murder, burglary, etc. , not federal civil violations like uninspected entry), the officer can halt, arrest, and place in custody a suspect. When in custody, inquiries can be made about immigration status. This would happen in the normal course even before all this goofy hoopla, but now it’s very clear that it can continue to happen. This should mitigate the public safety hit you were taking by your legal and illegal immigrant community distrusting the police force and coming to regard them as enemies, rather than keepers of the peace.

What your Board avoided by their revisions is the all-or-nothing dilemma of having to check you and me and every single other person for citizenship everytime they pulled us over for failing to come to a complete stop or a busted tail light. That would be the only way that they could beat the allegation that they were being arbitrary in who they checked for citizenship or legal residency. By going back to where they were a couple of years ago, you can be reasonably sure that any criminal committed to the penal system will be vetted at some point during his stay for immigration status checks (as had been the case previously) but that you won’t have your officers on the beat spending all their time trying to deal with people like me who don’t normally carry evidence of citizenship.

So great progress was made in stepping back from disaster (although great damage has already been done). Folks will spin, spin, spin, hoping that the bulk of their audience is too ignorant, or too emotionally overwrought to notice what really happened, and, as can be seen from some of the comments, pols can fool some of the people all of the time. Those are the ones I worry about when they cross the street, take baths, or other mundane activities that most folks can undertake without great personal danger.

Ridiculous that they don’t enforce that. So the only response is to kick all of the illegals out of the county if they don’t at least kick out the troublemakers.

Good points. Why not call the zoning office and ask and report back to us?

What will it take to get the zoning office to clean up their part of the problem which is not an actual breaking of police laws?

Why do county employees have to accept when someone says the 10 or more people in this house are all related? Why can they not make them prove this point no matter how hard it may be for non citizens without american birth certificates. Why can they not demand finger prints of all the occupants to see if they can verify who they really are. Biometrics is greatly expanding and is a very quick way to find out if this print matches another one in the files.

The county certainly seems to be able to enforce thier soning laws on property owners other then over crowding issues.

God, I hope so.

I think you should read the article in today’s Post. Looks like Nancy Lyall finally gets it.

A third column that would have been interesting in Greg’s chart is what the situation was two years ago on immigration status checks once a suspect was committed to the prison system (whether at the local or the state level). The fact of the matter is that the Board has put you guys back to what was essentially happening before any of this. All the intervening sound and fury (ultimately signifying very little) simply means that you probably have ensured that status checks will be more routinized for the prison population (although, despite sillly buggers talk about “catch-and-release” there was never a big problem of perps serving time without their immigration status being determined during their incarceration. But it made for great political theater to talk as though that were a real problem)

The BOCS significantly cut back on the breadth of the immigration check requirements being imposed on PWC’s police by ensuring that status inquiries occur after someone suspected of a fairly serious offense (serious enough to warrant taking them into custody) is locked up. What the BOCS took away was the idea that the police would check status of everyone at point of contact (since looking at someone or listening to their accent provides no probable cause for being out-of-status or illegal entry, the only way the Elect Stewart Resolution (ESR) could be administered without ensuring huge, costly legal problems for the County was to check everyone, including WASPy native types like me who couldn’t prove my citizenship at curbside any more than I could write a choral prelude with organ accompaniment). It really was the only option available to them and I guess it’s in the nature of pols to claim victory no matter how much they abjectly retreat. They saved the police force from ruin as a local law enforcement organization, and they significantly cut back the reckless financial risk that had been imposed on the County.

You’re all vastly better off with this policy. For one meeting Nohe and the others outmaneuvered Stewart in a manner reminscent of what used to happen almost every meeting during the Connaughton days. They can’t crow about it, because you guys will melt their servers with nasty e-mails. So they describe this as if it’s a little tweak. Stewart can’t fess up to being completely bamboozled for obvious reasons. So we’ll all pretend nothing happened - or better yet, pretend that this makes the regime even more oppressive, to con the more dark-spirited among you.

The only folks I worry about are those who really believe this “strengthened” the ESR. The folks who are pretending for sake of appearances I understand. Those of you who really need to believe in fairy tales - please be careful out in the real world. You’re very vulnerable.

Not being a lawyer, I do not know what the difference is between reasonable suspicion and officer discretion. Officer discretion is a lower standard which typically is not challenged. For example an officer has the discretion in certain instances of issuing a ticket or a warning. The problem I see with the discretion policy as it relates to immigration checks is the policy that the chief will establish on its use. That policy will determine under what circumstances discretion applies and what option the officer has. How well the Rule of Law Resolution works is now in the complete control of the chief. Hopefully someone will be able to review that policy before it is implemented.

The Arizona Republic has an interesting article this morning on Racial Profiling and probable cause.

“Proving racial profiling requires showing not only police discrimination but also that the discrimination was intentional.”

“We do have a right if you do have probable cause to question them about citizenship. One of them is speech,” he said. “Maybe they don’t speak English.”

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0501profiling0501.html

Perception is everything. Regardless of what got passed or unpassed Tuesday night, the perception among the Illegal Community is that PWC is back to business as usual.

It’s not time yet to storm the castle, but sharpen up your pitchforks and clean off the shovels.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/30/AR2008043003492.html

If Mexicans Without Borders doesn’t really like the changes, it can’t be all that bad after all:

“Nancy Lyall, a coordinator for Mexicans Without Borders, said the changes only complicate police enforcement without offering the county any protection from legal action.

“It seems there are a lot of loopholes in this resolution, so that the police have the ability to question people’s status at will,” Lyall said. “That’s certainly not going to prevent racial profiling. . . . It seems it’s just as ripe as it was before.”

Always a possibility to be wrong but I thought that Nohe’s motion to raise the fee to 34.00 was passed. The reason was that they needed 4 million in funds for the CIP. this was done later in the night and a couple of different motions did fail including the one by Stewart who wanted to increase the RE Tax to cover this fee which would have given the citizens a tax deduction and a savings of about 20 % which is the amount of non residentional taxable tax base in the county but that failed as well.

Greg you are believing what is reported in the MJM ?????:))))))))