A while back the national news picked up on how the mayor of Morristown, NJ, Donald Cresitello wanted to have 10 of his officers trained by INS under the 287G legislation allowing local law enforcement to enforce immigration law. This would give those officers the ability to detain and hold for INS any illegal aliens who commit a crime, although what is less clear is if they are empowered to do random stops looking for people without papers. A feat that is pretty daunting in Morristown since a crack down on illegal immigrants would effect 50% of the town as it is 25% legal immigrant, and another 25% illegal.
But illegal immigration is not Morristown's biggest problem. Like most of NJ there is no more land for development, but Morristown has the double curse of being an old town with many house 70 to 100 years old, meaning they are huge on large tracts of land but limited ratability. What is inconceivable to many on the west and midwest is that Morristown is not just small, but it is circled completely by another town, and neither town has much land still yet to develop. And on top of Morristown's illegal immigration situation it is also beset by a large public housing development and lots of section 8 housing throughout the town.
So you have a town with few increasing ratables and lots of housing available for ratables has been purchased by the town for subsidized housing, further reducing income. Add to the a downtown that is being refurbished that has caused business to leave until the town square is viable and you have the recipe for disaster. Also, if that weren't bad enough Morristown is the county seat of Morris County, so the county has absorbed lots of space for their purposes, further reducing ratables.
How is tax ratables related to 287G? Glad you asked. The town council and mayor are playing budget chicken. The mayor insists he needs more cops to make 287G pay off for the town and still maintain the same level of protection for the citizens. The council however, told the mayor he had to cut money from his budget. The mayor's solution, cut 12 police jobs; that is over 25% of the force.
Cresitello was also dealt another blow when the INS put in a change to the 287G regulations stating that the county jail had to agree to house the prisoners for INS until they could be placed in the INS detention center. The local sheriff said they could not afford the amount of space Cresitello estimated would be necessary to house illegal immigrants that would be processed due to 287G.
But Cresitello remains undaunted in his pursuit to train his officers in 287G even though he may be laying off the officers he needs to make it work. And even though he doesn't have a place to house detainees. And even though he had a reality check that goes against his, and others, misconceived ideas on illegal immigrants in Morristown.
You see in the first two months of 2008 Morristown has arrested almost 200 people, of that 56 are immigrants, of that 56 only one is an illegal.
And this is where most who claim to be conservatives and I will part ways, at least on this issue. The only way Cresitello will be able to justify having officers trained in 287G is if they make an immediate and effective impact on the number of illegals, and that means detaining illegals that have not committed crimes. It is easy to say that the crime they have committed is being here illegally and that is true. But in order to determine of they are here legally or not means that the police will be stopping people on the street and asking for IDs. And that is not the precepts upon which this country was founded, it was behind the Iron Curtain where you had to show your papers to every officer that asked, not in the USA.
People should not have to prove they are here legally, and the police should not have the power to randomly stop people and ask for ID. If a crime is committed, fine. But with an estimated 12 million illegal aliens, and with 60 million people here legally claiming to be of spanish/hispanic heritage there is an awful lot of people, such as myself, who would potentially be stopped and asked to show proof of citizenship/residency, which I don't carry with me. Nor should I be asked to show ID unless there is a reason, my skin color is not a reason.
And if the police start rounding up people based upon residency status illegals will not report when they are the victims of crime, or I should say, they will report it to an even lesser extent than they do now. That will have the effect of making it open season on illegals once the predators know that the illegals are not going to report the crime. Not reporting crime makes the statistics drop (part of his agenda) but not reporting it does not make crime go away.
If you are from Morristown the name of the mayor is well known as he has owned a business and been a local politician for decades. But what most people forget is that about 15 years ago Mr Cresitello owned the largest, dirtiest, most densely stacked haven for illegals in town. The conditions were so poor, broken doors, broken windows, rats, cockroaches, electrical code violations, no or broken smoke detectors, and over-stacked rooms that he was taken to court and the judge fined him and ordered him to 30 days of house arrest to be served in one of his apartments in that building. Cresitello then appealed saying that he would lose his business and that the sentence was cruel and beyond the scope of the judge. He won and escaped being sentenced to stay in his building that had conditions so harsh it was illegal to make him live there.
So when all is said and done, the reason Cresitello wants to crack down on illegal immigrants in town is because they reported him for being a slum lord and they have caused the crime rate in the town to go up by reporting that they were the victims of crime. Which when the facts are examined it explains why he is so adamant about getting 287G training for some of his officers despite only 1 of 200 arrests being an illegal immigrant and his town being virtually bankrupt. For Cresitello its not business, it's personal.
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