Arizona's new illegal-immigration enforcement law has raised a host of concerns from critics, but none more prevalent than the pervasive fear that the law will lead police officers to target those who look Hispanic.
Those concerns are not unfounded. It has happened in Arizona before.
Racial profiling - stopping and questioning individuals based strictly on their race or ethnicity - is in most cases illegal. It is also easy to allege but difficult to prove in individual cases.
Two episodes in Arizona brought problems with racial profiling to the fore. The police agencies involved were left paying out settlements, implementing new training measures and overhauling their procedures to fend off similar claims in the future.
The two instances are below:
1997 Chandler sweep
A joint operation of Chandler police and U.S. Border Patrol agents resulted in the arrests of 432 undocumented immigrants. But it also caught in its snare hundreds of legal immigrants and U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent.
The five-day operation drew criticism from the Hispanic community that it was racially motivated.
A $35 million civil-rights lawsuit was filed, alleging violations of the constitutional rights of legal immigrants and citizens who were detained. The Chandler City Council paid $400,000 to settle the claims.
Federal investigations found that the sweep violated Border Patrol policies by going into residential areas and concluded that the racial- and economic-profiling allegations were difficult to defend. Border Patrol agents had failed to document basic information about the people who were detained, and the sweep was conducted in poorer parts of the city.
2001 DPS case
In 2001, racial profiling again was the focus of a class-action lawsuit after 11 motorists accused state Department of Public Safety officers in northern Arizona of targeting minority drivers for traffic stops and searches.
The suit was dismissed, appealed and ultimately settled, with the stipulation that DPS launch a data-collection campaign that included information on every stop officers made, including the reason for the stop, characteristics of the driver and vehicle, and the stop's date, time and location. The agency later agreed to give the information to an outside team to evaluate.
More recently SB1070 may have already been responsible for the death of a Hispanic U.S. citizen in Arizona. Nicholas Riccardi of the Las Angeles Times has the full story here:
Had Arizona's governor not just signed the toughest law against illegal immigrants in the nation, the killing of Juan Varela probably would have been written off as just a tragic neighborhood dispute.
The 44-year-old U.S. citizen was watering chile plants in his front yard when a neighbor confronted him and shot him to death, according to police documents.
Varela's brother, Antonio, told police that the neighbor, Gary Kelley, who is white, called Juan Varela by an ethnic slur and said he had to "go back to Mexico" now that Gov. Jan Brewer had signed SB 1070. The family campaigned to publicize the death, culminating with the county prosecutor's decision last month to add a hate-crime allegation to the second-degree murder charges filed against Kelley.
For those that say that SB1070, will not lead to racial profiling, the above examples would indicate, that in Arizonawith or without the state immigration law, profiling was already a problem.
An Arizona district judge is expected to give a ruling on the federal law suit against SB1070 some time between now and Thursday.
