Members of the Informed Consent Search Coalition and sponsors of the law, HB 1201, Democratic Sen. Pat Steadman of Denver and Rep. Karen Middleton of Aurora, said that Colorado should be proud of the fact that it now has some of the strongest 4th Amendment right protections in the country against illegal searches. They said the state is another step closer to reducing racial profiling.

“While some states are looking to institutionalize racial profiling, Colorado I think has taken a proactive stance that racial profiling is wrong and that is the passage of HB 1201 for us,” said Carlos Valverde, co-executive director of the Colorado Progressive Coalition.

Groups backing the bill also included the ACLU of Colorado, Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, Colorao Immigrants Rights Coalition, Colorado Latino Forum, and the Colorado Public Defenders.

Lawmakers praised Art Way, civil rights organizer for the Colorado Progressive Coalition, for his work in rallying support for the bill.

The bill requires officers to inform drivers of their right to refuse search requests but also extends the protection to pedestrians, making Colorado the only state in the country to do so. The bill also requires that judges consider whether or not an officer informed a civilian of their rights when reviewing the legitimacy of the arrest and determining the admissibility of evidence.

“I see this as a first step. I think we should monitor this process and what comes next,” said Rep. Middleton.

She told the Colorado Independent that she planned to work to adopt a more rigorous police training program around “the decisions made when you ask for a consent search” and also to stiffen the “consequences if police officers are not employing best practices.”

Steadman explained that the bill passed through the Senate unanimously because of its focus on constitutional rights.

“When you start talking about civil liberties and 4th Amendment protections, you find that there is a lot of consensus in this building.”

He said that police officers will sometimes use their discretion inappropriately by intimidating individuals into surrendering their rights. We have to protect against that happening, he said. “That idea really swept through the Senate.”

“For me this is very much a pro-civil liberties, pro-education and also pro-community policing piece of legislation.”

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The McInnis remarks have one kind of cast in light of immediate-post-9/11 anxieties over security. Looking at this approach to state governance and how it is playing out in Arizona, where the matter is not officially terrorism but immigration status, Latinos pulled over for traffic stops, driving into interstate weigh stations or merely walking in their neighborhoods will be subject to suspicion and to arrest and incarceration based on the mere fact that they are Latino or even simply not white.

Rep McInnis 7 November 2001:

I have seen, and I have been very disappointed and discouraged recently, about some people playing what I would call the race card against profiling. We have to talk in a very serious tone and with thoughts of the consequences of doing things and not doing things, about tools of enforcement that we can utilize within the borders of our country and outside the borders of our country and for the people that want to cross the borders of our country and for the people that want to leave the borders of our country, tools that we can use to help secure the national security. One of those tools is profiling.

Now, let me distinguish at the very beginning the difference between what I describe and what I define as racial profiling, which most people in this country, including myself, are justified in opposing, and utilizing race as one of the components of a threat profile. … Racial profiling is where that is the only determinant factor that one utilizes in one’s profile construction. Now, obviously, if race is one’s only determinant factor, the only factor considered, it raises a balloon for a very legitimate argument that one is creating or causing discrimination.

But let us not confuse who are the victims here. Who are the victims in this situation? Think about September 11. We have to quit being politically correct. What has happened is we have moved from being constitutionally correct to politically correct. I am telling my colleagues, there are law enforcement personnel, there are airport security personnel who are afraid to question certain individuals because they are afraid those particular individuals will complain that they are being discriminated against.

That seems the easiest get-out-of-jail-free card one could use. If they are detaining a person in the airport and one has any kind of ethnic leverage, they could just complain they are being discriminated against: Why are you searching me? You are discriminating against me.

I actually have some constituents out there, Mr. Speaker, that think profiling, period, regardless of how we construct the profile, is not legitimate. I find that pretty interesting, because think about it, think about this: we find profiling in every avenue of our life. Think about it.

Our schools, for example, our schools profile. Our schools profile which students are getting poor scores. Our schools profile neighborhoods: gosh, people from this side of the city are getting poorer scores than people from this side of the city. They profile by race; they profile by, okay, the white students in this age bracket at this grade are at this reading level, the black students are at this reading level, the Hispanic students are at this reading level, the Vietnamese are at this reading level.

The colleges do it; they profile their top engineering students. We use it in education every day. We use it in marketing. We use it to assess risks. That is another area, in insurance and in marketing. The media, take a look at any newspaper or any television station that criticizes through editorials, or any radio station, and take a look at what they do. They profile every day of the week. They profile who their listeners are, who their viewers are, who is most likely to buy the products that they are trying to sell over their medium of communication. Of course they profile.

Hospitals profile. Traffic is profiled. In fact, I challenge my colleagues to name one aspect, one aspect of our life that is not profiling. We profile. Our political parties profile. Frankly, the political parties also profile based solely on race, in some cases, based solely on ethnic background.

For example, they might say, hey, this is a black district. Let us go in, because the blacks tend to vote Democrat, so let us not profile anything other than how many blacks in there are registered. They profile strictly on one factor, and the Republicans do the same thing with contingencies of, let us say in a particular community it may be
that the Irish in that community support the Republicans in bloc form. They go and they profile, too.

What I am saying here is, for God’s sakes, if we allow profiling for marketing purposes, if we allow profiling out there in our schools, if we allow profiling in every step of our lives, why do we not or why are we resistant at all to profiling to protect the national security of the United States of America? This is not a game. The nice guy finishes last here. In this kind of matter, the nice guy finishes last.

So I am not a proponent of, nor are my colleagues proponents of, what I would call that type of racial profiling, where the only factor we have, looking to the left to my poster, the only factor that we have to consider is race or ethnic background.

But I am strongly advocating that we continue to encourage, in fact that we mandate, until we come up with a better alternative, that we mandate threat profiling. It is common sense. It is not rocket science; it is common sense.

The bottom line is simple. The bottom line is that I agree that ethnic background, and in fact, I advocate that ethnic background alone should not be used as the sole component of a profile. At that point, I think it is fair for us to call it racial profiling.

But once we begin to use ethnic profiling as a component, one of several components to build a profile, I think it is very legitimate. I think it is smart. Obviously, it is constitutionally protected. It may not be politically correct, with a small number of people. It may be abused by a small number of law enforcement personnel.

But overall, if it just saves one terrorist attack, and it will save a lot of terrorist attacks, we have proven evidence of that and we know it does, so if it can just assist our Nation and the citizens that we have a responsibility to protect in this Nation by giving them some assurance of protection and actual protection, then we ought to be using it.

Read the entire speech here.

–
Hat tip to David Sirota, who will be discussing the story on his 760 AM radio show Thursday morning.

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The ICE agents said this was all just standard procedure. But the agents might just as well have been local police or highway patrol, who are now required by the controversial law Gov. Jan Brewer signed Friday to follow the same “standard procedure” and question individuals about their immigration status during routine stops. Welcome to the new Arizona, where there are sure to be whole websites dedicated to these kind of stories soon.

The original report from an Arizona KTVK TV news / website:

Abdon was told he did not have enough paperwork on him when he pulled into a weigh station to have his commercial truck checked. He provided his commercial driver’s license and a social security number but ended up handcuffed.

An agent called his wife and she had to leave work to drive home and grab other documents like his birth certificate.

Jackie explains, “I have his social security card as well and mine. He’s legit. It’s the first time it’s ever happened.”

Both were born in the United States and say they are now both infuriated that keeping important documents safely at home is no longer an option.

Jackie says, “It doesn’t feel like it’s a good way of life, to live with fear, even though we are okay, we are legal…still have to carry documents around.”

A representative at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) returned 3TV’s calls after researching the incident and she said this was standard operating procedure.

Arizona now has the toughest immigration-related laws in the country, making it a state crime to be in the country without the proper visa. The new law has raised howls from civil rights groups for putting the onus on local police to enforce laws tougher than federal immigration statutes. Immigration and rights activists argue the law is a misguided reaction to admittedly major security and trafficking problems on the border. They say the new state law is an unconstitutional and anti-American recipe for racial profiling abuses that will create divisions and heighten the reluctance of Latino community members to seek police assistance even for everyday matters of security and law enforcement.

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The incident seemed to add an exclamation point to calls for clearer laws that would protect all parties engaged in Colorado’s burgeoning medical marijuana trade. Indeed, the rally was meant to influence lawmakers debating proposed legislation designed to eliminate the gray areas that have come to increasingly surround pot use here.

The arrest, which came at 1:45pm, nearly two hours into the rally, was the first, and at the time of writing, only police action of the day. It occurred so quietly that hardly anyone in the crowd seemed to notice. Up to the point of the arrest, police had been huddled under a tree a few hundred feet from the gathering, largely ignoring the peaceful crowd, despite the fact that medical marijuana patients of all colors and sizes were quietly exercising their constitutional right to puff herb by passing communal joints.

So far, the Colorado independent has been unable to identify the man taken into custody or the charge that led to his arrest.

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287(g) scares victims and witnesses of crimes to avoid contacting police for fear of being mistreated.  287(g) invites exploitation by those who know that they won’t be reported to police, because it combines the contradictory duties into the same police force.

What is the result? A sweep of terror that has frightened legal and undocumented immigrants into hiding, undermining both law enforcement efforts across our country.  287(g) programs undermine the spirit and text of the U.S. Constitution, and I encourage Congress to repeal 287 (g).

Polis was speaking in reaction to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) announcement last Friday that it had signed, or was in the process of signing, 67 287(g) agreements. Two of those are with Colorado agencies:  the Colorado Department of Public Safety and the El Paso Sheriff’s Office

The controversial program had previously been suspended by ICE. Critics say the program is abused by many local law enforcement agencies, and promotes racial profiling. The poster child for misuse of the program has been Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, famous for his sweeps of Latino neighborhoods and his penchant for requiring detainees to wear pink underwear (and who is, incidentally, said to be miffed about earning a modified 287(g) agreement this time around, in a nod toward his alleged abuses).

Watch the one-minute speech:

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