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Immigration crackdown gets mixed reviews
The Board of County Supervisors got good news and bad news on Tuesday regarding their crackdown on illegal immigration.On the plus side, the number of illegal immigrants arrested is up. On the downside, so is mistrust of the county police department.
The good news, pointed out Board of County Supervisors Chairman Corey Stewart (R- at large), is that the newest version of the county’s immigration policy has netted the most arrests so far.
Originally, the board ordered police to run an immigration check any time they had probable cause to believe a suspect is an illegal immigrant. Shortly after that, the board changed its policy, requiring police to check suspects’ immigration status only after they had been arrested and taken into custody.
That policy has been working well, Stewart said. In March and April, under the first version of the policy, police took 66 and 55 suspected illegal immigrants into custody.
Mandatory checks were suspended in May and June so the numbers for those two months are unreliable, said Police Chief Charlie T. Deane.
In July and August, the two months during which the new policy has been in effect, police took 67 and 75 suspected illegals into custody, up slightly from the first two months.
“This has resulted in an increase in the number of illegal immigrants you’ve put in physical custodial arrest,” Stewart told Deane, declaring a policy victory on Tuesday.
However, Deane’s report points out that suspected illegal immigrants made up only a tiny fraction of arrests in that time period. In March through August, police made 7,500 criminal arrests. Illegal immigrants made up only 1.6 percent of those, though Deane acknowledged that some illegal immigrants may not have been accounted for in May and June.
The police department’s one-year cost for the immigration crackdown is $1.2 million.
Fortunately, Deane said, there have been no credible charges of racial profiling, which had been a major concern in the beginning.
However, there has been an issue with Freedom of Information Act requests, Deane said, noting that “at a minimum, 1,040 hours have been spent on that.”
Officers said privately that most of those FOIA requests have come from Help Save Manassas members seeking huge amounts of data about the immigration crackdown.
And the department’s success in the field has come at a cost to community relations.
Results of the county’s annual Citizen Satisfaction Survey were handed out Tuesday as well, and the police force took a hit from citizens. Overall satisfaction with the department’s performance was down “significantly,” from 92.3 percent last year to 89 percent this year. That kind of drop-off is unusual for any Prince William government department.
Even worse, satisfaction with police “attitudes and behaviors” is down even more, from 87.9 percent in 2007 to 79.3 percent in 2008. That’s the lowest the police have ever scored since the question was first used in 1995.
Thomas Guterbock, the University of Virginia researcher who conducted the survey, said the decline was clearly due to minority feelings.
Hispanic satisfaction was down “fairly sharply” he said, adding that “African-Americans have also become less satisfied in the past year.”
Asked how he felt about the survey, Deane said he had expected a decline.
“I’m not surprised,” he said. “Due to the discussions there have been in the community and the varying degrees of opinion,” I’m not surprised. “I am disappointed.”
Deane said his force has been trying hard to enforce the board’s policy while also focusing on community relations in the immigrant communities.
“We are going to focus on illegal aliens who commit crimes,” he said. “We’re going to protect victims and witnesses and we’re going to treat everyone fairly.”
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