Editor,
Most police and sheriff departments do not have a quota system. They are in fact illegal in many states.
If the officer is more concerned about meeting arrest quotas than they are in justice, this makes for a dangerous system. It allows them to lead people to jail for no reason or the simplest of offenses.
This is problematic for a justice system that is already under stress, and more indicative of a tactic used by an authoritarian regime. It would also diminish trust in police officers who rely on community respect and cooperation.
Yet the Department of Homeland Security has implemented an aggressive arrest quota for their ICE agents, many of whom are newly hired and barely trained. Targets are no longer people but numbers.
Hence, two more people were killed in vehicles in just one week. One had lived in the USA for 35 years, working at a construction company and was on the verge of gaining legal status.
Why would that take so long? That is our immigration system.
The other was from Colombia and had the right to work in America, yet was shot with his three-year-old in the car. As always, when a victim is in a car it is claimed that they were using it as a weapon when they were afraid and fleeing.
Ultimately that is usually proven to not be true, but in the meantime the agent is often allowed to stay on the job without any formal investigation or mental health intervention.
Legitimate policing agencies treat their own better than that, with sensitivity toward both the victim and the officer.
Awhile ago the Democrats in Congress attempted to hold back funds from ICE until agents could be properly trained, fitted with body cameras, required to drive marked cars and be unmasked.
Because Republicans are in control of both the House and the Senate their valiant effort failed, so we continue to have Stephen Miller calling the shots.
But should we accept DHS’s established protocol that includes pulling people out of their cars, their homes, their work sites, stripping them of their constitutional rights and any due process, sending them to incarceration centers often in other states or even other countries, depriving them of basic human decency?
America used to be so much better than this.
Marie Francis
Mariposa
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