A police officer writes about Arizona's immigration law

"Jack Dunphy" is a police officer with the LAPD.  He writes under an assumed name because he wants to stay employed.

Here, he writes about how real police officers are likely to handle Arizona's new law.

How will the police, ask the critics, determine what is "reasonable suspicion" to believe someone might be an illegal immigrant? On this I can speak from long experience, as I have spent a good part of my police career working in neighborhoods of Los Angeles where illegal immigrants can be found in abundance (there are many such neighborhoods here). As police officers develop on the job they learn to recognize certain cultural patterns, perhaps the most important of which are those displayed by men who have spent time in prison. Such men almost invariably adopt manners of dress, speech, and behavior that a seasoned police officer can recognize instantly — and he had better, if he wants to end his day in the same condition he started it. Even if you were to dress an ex-con in a Brooks Brothers suit, give him a hundred-dollar haircut, and place him among a group of men similarly dressed and coiffed, any cop who had been around a while would have no trouble at all picking him out of the crowd.

This is not to equate illegal immigrants with ex-convicts, but the concept of noticing cultural cues nonetheless applies. Regardless of a given person's ethnicity, there are mannerisms and behaviors that are more common on one side of our southern border than the other, and the degree to which a person displays these mannerisms and behaviors offers the careful observer an idea of which side of that border the person is from and how long it has been since he crossed it.

Yes.  Cops are very good observers of behavioral cues.  That's why I tell the adopted nephews it doesn't pay to think about how much you may dislike or disrepect cops, or keep unflattereing nicknames in the front of your mind when you're around them.  (And train yourself out of that sort of thinking regardless -- it too easily becomes a habit.)

As I put it, cops can pick that up in your "vibes".

You might be driving down the street and see a police car in your rear-view mirror and assume the officer is looking for a reason to pull you over. In truth that officer very likely isn't paying any attention to you at all. Instead he is probably thinking about where he's going to have lunch, what he's going to do after work, or what a jerk his lieutenant is. Only when a driver commits some violation of the traffic laws is an officer's attention drawn to a car, and the occupants' ethnicity becomes apparent only when the officer pulls the car over and asks the driver to produce his driver's license, registration, and proof of insurance. When a driver has none of these documents, as most illegal immigrants do not, it seems only reasonable that the officer be allowed make inquiries as to the driver's immigration status.

There is one point I've been thinking about, and I haven't seen raised anywhere else:

There are enough illegal-immigrant hoodlums to occupy the attention of the police that families need not fear being harassed on their way to the local ice-cream parlor whether they're illegal immigrants or not. Despite the president's dire warnings, I don't envision stakeouts at Baskin-Robbins stores in Tucson.

And there certainly won't be in those areas around Tucson patrolled by the Pima County Sheriff's Department. Sheriff Clarence Dupnik told reporters in Tucson last month that the new law "is unwise, it's stupid, and it's racist," raising the troubling question of whether his deputies will enforce the law if and when it takes effect.

The cynical side of me suspects the Pima County Sheriff might not be terribly upset if his officers did harass people on their way to get ice cream, or indeed, everywhere else.  If a law the Sheriff dislikes is enforced stupidly enough, it might go away.  I can imagine people who oppose the law enforcing it as obnoxiously as possible so it will become unpopular and be repealed, and those who support it using good judgment and common sense.

I can't possibly be the only one who's thought of that, can I?