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Philly Media Watch: Byko Wrong on Immigration
Denvir reads Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky so you don't have to: today, Byko condemns City Council for supporting immigrant rights.
Philly Media Watch: Byko Wrong on Immigration
"Who is Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky hating on right now?" is, I’m sure, what you roll over in your mind each morning as you brush your teeth and clip your toenails. Bicyclists? Immigrants? Those who do not celebrate Christmas?
Well, today, thankfully, you don’t have to read Byko to find out: In today’s paper, columnist Bykofsky condemns City Council for opposing Philadelphia’s participation in the Secure Communities deportation program. (Worse yet: he employs a grating fictitious "dialogue" between himself and a psychiatrist to do so.)
Secure Communities is a controversial program that, as I wrote in the Guardian last month, shares the fingerprints of people arrested by local police with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). (Byko is also defending a separate but related program that gives ICE real-time access to the police’s Preliminary Arraignment System (PARS), which records information about arrests.)
Advocates contend that fingerprints should be shared after someone is convicted of a crime, not after they are arrested. If police are seen as immigration enforcement, immigrants won’t trust the police: a dangerous prospect in “stop snitching” Philadelphia.
New York, Massachusetts and Illinois have refused to participate in the program, and ICE has been heavily criticized for misleading the public and members of Congress as to whether the program is voluntary or not.
Bykofsky argues that it’s here to keep us safe:
“ICE runs the list of those arrested to see if they were convicted of previous crimes. If ICE can't do that, some ex-cons might be released to prey on innocent people.”
Yet nearly 28 percent of immigrants detained through Secure Communities were non-criminals, and another 32 percent were convicted of very minor offenses. Just 26 percent were convicted of the most serious crimes. In Philadelphia, 238 of 421 suspects transferred from Philadelphia Police to ICE custody between October 27, 2008 and February 28, 2011 were never convicted of a crime, one of the highest rates under Secure Communities nation-wide.
Those convicted of serious crimes should be in prison regardless of whether or not they are undocumented immigrants: So what’s Byko’s point?
As my colleague Isaiah Thompson wrote last December, Byko "does his best work when adhering to a simple formula: Find a divisive issue that pits a minority group with a small voice against a healthy clamor of aging, white, middle-class, vaguely angry Philadelphians — and then side with the latter."
Today, he goes out of his way to belittle Philly’s only Latino city councilwoman, Maria Quinones-Sanchez, for not reading the text of Arizona’s infamous anti-immigrant bill.
"Last year, Quinones-Sanchez dreamed up the resolution condemning an Arizona law she hadn't read."
The "did you read the entire bill?!" thing is so tired and hypocritical: No politician (or even journalist) reads every bill or law in its entirety before commenting on it. Everyone relies on press accounts, and not just primary documents, to make sense of the world. And you, dear reader, can now use this blog post to help make some sense of Stu Bykofksy.
In other, better, news: The Daily News has a fantastic story today on wrongful convictions. Worth a read.
Byko was actually RIGHT about illegal immigration in his article.
More importantly, at the end of the Citypaper article there is a link to a "fantastic story today on wrongful convictions." Unfortunately, the article is NOT about a wrongful convictions. It's about the arrest(not CONVICTION) of the WRONG person, which happens all the time.
Since police arrest based on probable cause and not PROOF beyond a reasonable doubt, innocent people get arrested sometimes. That's how the system has always worked. Get over it. I think MOST victims of crimes would want the police to arrest the accused PRIOR to a full trial, but that's just me. So the police use probable cause, the standard required by the Constitution for 220+ years.
— LtAnger- I do not find it praiseworthy that an elected official introduces resolutions on legislation that she has never read! That is probably okay for the rest of us, not for lawmakers. Apparently only a couple of Blue states/a small number of very Blue cities have declined to participate in the Secure Communities Program.
Rick0547— rick47
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