A Waste of Police Time

Judging by the priorities that the Police Department in Orange uses to deploy officers, its war on crime must be nicely under control. The officers seem to have enough time on their hands to perform duties more properly the province of Immigration and Naturalization Service officers.

Orange police have been patrolling an area where groups of workers, including some illegal aliens, used to gather in the morning to hire themselves out to employers who drove by looking for cheap labor. Orange police have been stopping the employers for every little suspected traffic infraction and then, if they thought the driver was trying to hire an illegal alien in violation of the new immigration act, passing the driver’s name on to the INS and to the Internal Revenue Service.

From an immigration standpoint, it is a waste of time. For one thing, federal immigration officers will not even begin enforcing employer sanctions in the new law until October. Why are Orange city police so diligent about something that even federal officers will not bother with?

Even if the law justified such daily surveillance, the numbers don’t. Before the new immigration law and its amnesty provision went into effect, it was not uncommon for up to 200 people to muster for work on some street corners around the county. Many illegal aliens who did not qualify for amnesty, however, have gone home. Now the groups are down to about 20 workers, not all of whom are here illegally.

That means that Orange police must take time to determine whether workers picked up by employers are citizens, legal residents or undocumented. If they don’t, they may be clogging INS files with names of people who have done nothing illegal.

It’s a bad practice that the Orange police should drop. Some local merchants complain about workers gathering on or near their property and want the loitering stopped. That doesn’t mean that city police should waste their time and taxpayers’ money to harass motorists looking for any traffic or mechanical violations that would justify the officers getting involved.

The police chief or City Council should advise the merchants to hire a private security service to patrol their property, as many businesses do. Then police could spend their time preventing and investigating serious crimes and traffic violations that truly endanger the community.