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Arizona SB 1070 Police Patrol

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Intro
Many individual states have been dissatisfied with federal inaction on immigration. One step towards immigration enforcement has been the 287(g) program mentioned before, which expanded the authority of local and state law enforcement officials to enforce civil immigration violations. This sparked fear among the community that police would deport individuals for minor incidents for something as simple as traffic laws. Still dissatisfied, many states took it into their own hands to enact laws against the flow of illegal immigrants. The Arizona SB 1070 law was one of the first of many policies that states have began implementing in order to counter the flow of undocumented immigrants. It’s purpose was to discourage and deter the unlawful …show more content…

For example, their arrest rates plummeted even though the number of criminal investigations rose up back in 2008 (Policing Borders, Pg.100). In their intention to fight illegal immigration, the Maricopa County Department created an extensive distrust between the latino communities and law enforcement authorities. The department's tactics against immigrants have also been very expensive resulting in very few major arrests. The department’s “crime suppression” tactics involve patrolling Hispanic neighborhoods without any evidence of crime being done. This violates policies that intend to prevent racial profiling (Policing Borders, Pg.101). When police promote the use of racial profiling, targeted groups become deviants in the eyes of the community and it becomes a social norm to stigmatize against these groups, in this case unauthorized immigrants. Since this analysis of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department, one of many counties in Arizona, before the implementation of SB 1070, the results today could possibly be tremendously …show more content…

By surveying police chiefs in communities with populations of over 65,000 a few things were found. City policies and police practices have significantly influenced each other. However, a little under half (46%) of the police departments were said to have no policy (Enforcement of Immigration Law,Pg.17). Because they have no policy, it is up to the departments to decide themselves how to deal with unauthorized immigrants. Decisions the departments make would later influence many of the cities policies that would later be implemented. The studies also found that if there were an actual written policy regarding racial profiling, there would be significantly less levels of immigration enforcement. Another interesting discovery was that many of the researched influences for policy making such as, the demographic change within the community and the political context in the community, don’t really influence policy making. The act of labeling a condition as a public problem is more influential in shaping policy agendas. The flow of undocumented immigrants to the U.S. has even been labeled as an “invasion” to the West, from not only Mexico but all immigrant communities. Many media sources and politicians began using this type of vocabulary and descriptions in order to target these “invaders”and make them out as a threat. This act of labeling immigrants as “members of

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