Some of my in-laws live in Arizona in a suburb of Phoenix. They’re not Tea Party rednecks. They’re retired teachers and fairly liberal Democrats. And every time I’ve talked to them in the past decade, they’ve complained about violent crime and illegal immigration, and how they want the federal government to control the border.
So I have some idea why the Arizona legislature enacted the law that so many people are complaining about. But it could lead to an increase in violent crime.
How so?
In the fall of 1973, I returned to college in Greeley. A friend who had managed to graduate had found a job. He was a deputy sheriff in Weld County. We’d share a beer or two with some regularity. On one occasion, he talked about nailing a perp for aggravated assault in an area north of town where, to put it politely, English was not the primary language.
“I’d bet most of them didn’t even have fake green cards,” he said.
“So you called Immigration?” I asked.
“Hell, no,” he said. “That’d just make our job a lot harder.”
Back then, Immigration wouldn’t even show up unless there were at least 20 suspected illegals. “And if the feds do deport them, they dump ’em off just across the border, so they’re back here in a week anyway. It’s a waste.”
But the main reason he and his fellow deputies did not attempt to enforce federal immigration laws was more complex. He pointed out that “damn few people are stupid enough to commit a crime while I’m in uniform watching them.” Weld County didn’t have a squad of highly trained crime-scene technicians; dusting for fingerprints then was about the size of it.
“We can’t be everywhere. If we’re going to maintain any kind of public order, we need people to report crimes, and we have to find witnesses and get them to talk and maybe testify in court,” he said.
So community support and trust were important.
“It’s hard enough to get rape victims even to report the crime, let alone testify in court. Now throw this in: She’s scared she’ll get deported if she calls us. Or somebody who gets robbed. Is he going to report the theft if he thinks we’re going to check his papers and deport him?”
Of course not, I agreed. “So we always make it clear that we’re not there to enforce immigration laws. We’re there to ask about a theft or assault or whatever.”
But I was enough of a redneck nativist to ask what would happen if they did crack down on immigration status. “Word would get out fast,” he said. “Nobody would report any crime, maybe not even murder. You’d have this enclave of total lawlessness. For one thing, that wouldn’t look good for us cops. For another, they wouldn’t just prey on each other. They’d be hitting us gringos, too. Swipe a car, get it back to the chop shop in the barrio, nobody will talk, and it could get a lot worse than that. So there are some real practical reasons for us not to care about immigration status.”
My cop friend believed that his job was necessary “to keep the bad guys from running the world. We’re supposed to serve justice, to protect the weak from the strong. Just because a woman’s papers aren’t in order doesn’t mean she deserves to be raped, and the puke gets a walk.”
That’s what one deputy told me nearly 37 years ago. And it explains why Arizona’s proposed immigration crackdown could lead to an increase in violent crime, although it might not be reflected in the official statistics.
Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
