Fixing The Wrong Problem

I recently read that the main problem with Arizona's new anti-illegal immigrant law is that the police can pull anyone over for any reason because the traffic laws are so Byzantine that you essentially cannot operate a vehicle at all without breaking one. This, in turn, allows the police to target brown people disproportionately.

I'd buy this, except... Nothing about the new law changes the traffic laws that the cops are supposed to be abusing. About the only thing valid about it is that the cops may now target people who "look Mexican" with the specific intent of checking their immigration status. But it doesn't change that the cops could single them out before the law change.

If you really want the police to be unable to profile like this, you need to make traffic enforcement less discretionary.

Comments

28th-Jun-2010 04:45 pm (local) fuzzy_geff
I've seen that argument recently, too, and have a different reason for not buying it. The keyword is "recently": I hadn't heard this argument at all until this week, which seems really odd for somebody's "main problem" with a law that made international headlines.

Am I too quick to assume that the open borders crowd are lying? Perhaps, but that's all I have time for, what with all the correcting "immigrant without documents" back into "illegal alien" they keep making me do.

Crap, it's a reflex now: an arrest record is a document. A deportation order is a document. A printout of the TV Tropes page for "bokukko" is a document. We don't want documents; we want them to obey our gorram laws.

28th-Jun-2010 09:31 pm (local) mcthag
I had heard about the traffic stuff prior to this, being an owner of a hot-rod makes you hyper-aware of how discretionary the police can be.

Not that I am buying the complaints of the johnny come lately's.