How many of you have ever had an unpaid parking ticket? Been pulled over for a minor traffic infraction? Have non Native American ancestors? Don't answer—I don't care. But keep your answer in mind as you think about this story:
Hispanic rights advocates filming routine traffic stops in Maricopa County, Arizona, in January, captured on tape officers in ski masks who detained a woman for an hour while her young kids (4 and 6) were left alone in the car, unable to go to her. (Eventually a relative came to get them.) The girl reported the sheriff told her to be quiet.
The mother had been pulled over for having her lights off and was arrested for an unpaid parking ticket. Oh, and she was undocumented and later deported.
Where to start, right? If she'd been wanted for murder, or come out brandishing a gun, or some such, then, well, this might have been necessary. But how twisted can you get to think serving justice on a parking ticket is worth traumatizing a couple of innocent children?
I know the question of undocumented immigrants is a tinderbox, but even if you think being one is a crime so heinous and the flight risk so large that it had to be handled right then, couldn't you have let the mother and kids be together until someone came to get them? Or, as it is easy to suspect, has the dehumanization of immigrants made such basic decency farfetched?
The commenters on various news stories who wax eloquent passionate about how it's all the mother's fault for being an evil lawbreaker make me ill. When there are people like Josef Fritzl in the world? And I love the one about how the ski masks were necessary because those awful people were filming. Since when do traffic cops have the right to anonymity in doing their job? Annoying to be documented in this fashion for sure, but pairing the right to use force with a right to anonymity is a recipe for disaster. Shown here quite well.
I'm sure that this hits me harder as a parent than it would have before
(bad blogger confession: I've read numerous news reports on this, but
couldn't make myself watch the video itself), but I would like to think
I still would have recognized it as an seriously perverted set of
priorities. If you agree, MomsRising is trying to gather people to protest the sheriff's tactics, of which this is apparently not unrepresentative.
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