This blog post continues my long history of going line by line with some of the more nonsensical claims of orthodox -- which is to say leftist -- thought on the Claremont Colleges.
NEARLY every weekend this summer checkpoints were mounted along busy Southland arterials. An intimidating cadre of well-armed police has stopped thousands of cars each night, asking drivers two questions: Do you have a valid driver's license? Have you been drinking? Answered correctly, you can get waved through. Fail to produce the requisite identification, or appear to have thrown back a few, or speak Spanish, and you're in trouble.
If that were the case, half of L.A. would be in jail right now. It must be a bit more than speaking Spanish as the questions are often asked about driving "in Spanish." Moving along...
Drunk? You'll be arrested and your car towed to an impound lot. Lack a proper license? You'll be cited and your car hauled away. In theory, this seems straightforward and would appear colorblind, too. But it's not.
Forgive me, but I would like drunks to be incarcerated. (We can quibble with the legal limit being set too low, but the laws are pretty clear. As for the color blind thing. Oh really? So you're telling me that me, a Gringo, with red hair and no license to speak of wouldn't have these things happen to him? Sir, I kindly ask that you provide the car and we'll try it.]
My wife and I recently had a front-row seat to checkpoint discrimination when we were stopped on Foothill Boulevard late one Friday night.
Because your one anecdotal experience indicates that the entire situation has gone to hell.
The newly wheel-less faced more than an evening of inconvenience. If their license had expired or they had been driving without one, their vehicle would be held under lock and key for 30 days. (If charged with DUI, you can reclaim it the next day.) This month-long loss of transportation has a devastating impact on those who drive to work - and who doesn't in L.A.?
There's a simple way to get around this. Get a license. (I don't have one and believe me I pay the piper every time my girlfriend indicates how ticked off she is that I'm too broke to own a car.) But that doesn't mean I get to roll around violating the law.
Magnifying this blow are the punitive fees towing companies and police departments charge to release an impounded automobile. In Latino-dominated Baldwin Park, for instance, the per-car tab runs to nearly $1,500; storage fees for the month make up the bulk ($1,350), and the rest comes from the city's vehicle-release fee. When families cannot pay, Baldwin Park gets a cut of the abandoned car's sale at auction.
This modern-day stick-up has become a bonanza. At its early August checkpoint, Baldwin Park officers snagged 150 cars, netting the city a whopping $38,400. Its take for the past fiscal year alone amounted to $338,000. In Bell, officers had daily quotas for impounding cars, a strategy that two years ago generated $834,000 and this past year netted $770,000. More striking still was Pomona's haul: its 2007-08 checkpoints allegedly boosted local coffers by $1million.
This isn't a "stick-up" but the clear enforcement of the L.A. law. I happen to think that civil forfeiture is morally wrong and maybe some of these charges are such that they actually cost more than the car itself, but do we really want non-licensed drivers on the road?
These impressive returns have sparked a gold rush. In 2009, according to California Watch, a nonprofit investigative team, checkpoints throughout California raked in an eye-popping $40 million in fees and fines. Police overtime pay, underwritten with federal dollars, amounted to another $30 million. Fleecing the migrant, poor and powerless is big business.
Okay, and? So what?
Yet profiling drivers is of questionable legality. California Watch and other media investigations have revealed that only a fraction of the cars hauled away are the result of a DUI. At a recent checkpoint in Claremont, 1,570 cars were stopped, but only two impoundments were alcohol related. Instead, everywhere police are seizing cars from unlicensed drivers, the overwhelming majority of whom are Latino. The sanction for such seizures, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declared in Miranda v. City of Cornelius (2005), is suspect.
Maybe, just maybe, illegals shouldn't be in the country. I would favor giving them back their cars if they left, but even then, I think it's rather generous to give a gift back to people who are violating the law.
No surprise then that checkpoints have sparked heated protests. Grassroots activists steer cars away from them by waving placards reading: Ret n Adelante! (Checkpoint Ahead). Angry citizens have jammed city council meetings to challenge their political legitimacy. The Pomona chief of police was forced out of office.
In Baldwin Park, after the lucrative August checkpoint brought 300 enraged residents to city hall, officials quickly suspended its controversial policy and released impounded vehicles.
This local activism may seem small-scale but it has the potential to shift the larger political dynamic. In the book "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck noted it was this kind of personal, street-level resistance that turned the tide for an earlier generation of the harassed, car-driving migrants. The "little screaming fact that sounds through all history," the novelist affirmed, is that "repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed."
Note what Miller is doing here. He's conflating the internal migration caused was caused by FDR's policies with the illegals who are violating our sovereignty and using our public services.
Oh, and by the way, he's a professor of Environmental Analysis. Shouldn't he want more cars off the road?
Char Miller directs the Environmental Analysis program at Pomona College and is editor of "Cities and Nature in the American West."
