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Join us Saturday at The Guild Cinema for a special talk-back session with the director; moderated by ACLU-NM

Micah McCoy, Communications Specialist

Today, I had coffee with Derek Minno Bloom, a representative from Albuquerque Copwatch, a community oversight organization that monitors police interactions with the public. In the course of our conversation, he mentioned that he regularly witnesses people waive their constitutional rights when encountering the police.

Unfortunately, I was not surprised.

Most people give up their rights without even knowing that they are doing it. Other people waive their rights knowingly because, let’s face it, whether you are engaging in illegal activity or not, a police encounter can be nerve-wracking. Law enforcement officials are trained to use their authority to pressure people into incriminating themselves. However, it is the police officer’s job to collect evidence against you-not yours.

An educational nonprofit called Flex Your Rights has produced a fantastic and very thorough video featuring former national ACLU Executive Director Ira Glassman that demonstrates how you can best exercise your rights during a police encounter. Give it a watch to learn how you can survive a police encounter with your rights intact. And please, share this video with your friends; they may thank you for it someday.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 31, 2011

CONTACT: Micah McCoy, (972) 740-6675 or mmccoy@aclu-nm.org

SANTA FE, N.M. – Today, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico (ACLU-NM) strongly condemned Governor Susana Martinez’s executive order that mandated that police check the immigration status of everyone they arrest. This order rescinds Governor Richardson’s order that instructed local law enforcement to refrain from inquiring into a suspect’s immigration status.

The following can be attributed to Peter Simonson, ACLU Executive Director:

“This executive order invites racial profiling by giving an incentive to police to arrest people who look and sound “foreign.” New Mexicans should not have to fear that a broken taillight or other pretextual stop will lead to their arrest because of the color of their skin. Gov. Martinez has created a SB 1070-like policy, contradicting her own commitment to keep our state from following in Arizona’s footsteps.”

The text of Governor Martinez’s executive order can be found at: http://governor.state.nm.us/uploads/FileLinks/20e5f2e740f34a2297a940e2bacdfcce/110131_1.pdf

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Things are just starting to get ridiculous.

Many of you no doubt read about the Region III Narcotics Task Force heroic raid on the Camino de Paz Montessori School and Farm in Cuarteles, NM where officers in bullet-proof vests without visible insignia demanded to inspect their green house, expecting to find a marijuana grow operation. They didn’t find Marijuana. What they did find…was organic tomatoes.

Although I’ll be the first to admit that home-grown tomatoes taste so good they ought be a crime, I find it downright disturbing that our local Narcotics Task Force is operating with such sloppiness that they subjected grade-school children to the high-drama of a narcotics raid, complete with National Guard helicopter.

From the Santa Fe New Mexican:

We were all as a group eating outside as we usually do, and this unmarked drab-green helicopter kept flying over and dropping lower,” she [Patricia Pantano, education director] said. “Of course, the kids got all excited. They were telling me that they could see gun barrels outside the helicopter. I was telling them they were exaggerating.”

After 15 minutes, Pantano said, the helicopter left, then five minutes later a state police officer parked a van in the school’s driveway. Pantano said she asked the officer what was happening, but he only would say he was there as a law-enforcement representative.

Then other vehicles arrived and four men wearing bullet-proof vests, but without any visible insignias or uniforms, got out and said they wanted to inspect the school’s greenhouses. Pantano said she then turned the men over to the farm director, Greg Nussbaum.

“As we have nothing to hide, you know, they did the tour and they went in the greenhouses and they found it was tomato plants and so that was the story,” she said.

Read the full story

Law enforcement throughout the state has become increasingly aggressive in their search for illegal marijuana grow operations lately. The ACLU has received complaints from people in Madrid who say helicopters have been buzzing their homes incessantly, low and loud, looking to bust the various small-time grow operations that dot rural NM.

These sorts of tactics should raise the hackles of any privacy or civil liberties-minded person. If a Montessori school is subject to narcotics raids, who isn’t? Should gardeners everywhere resign themselves to periodic investigations of their backyard gardens by the National Guard and narcotics officers? Perhaps one could make an argument that this is the price we pay for having a safe, drug-free society…if that’s indeed what we had. In fact, the Drug Policy Alliance says it’s had the opposite effect:

Many of the problems the drug war purports to resolve are in fact caused by the drug war itself. So-called “drug-related” crime is a direct result of drug prohibition’s distortion of immutable laws of supply and demand. Public health problems like HIV and Hepatitis C are all exacerbated by zero tolerance laws that restrict access to clean needles. The drug war is not the promoter of family values that some would have us believe. Children of inmates are at risk of educational failure, joblessness, addiction and delinquency. Drug abuse is bad, but the drug war is worse.

Few public policies have compromised public health and undermined our fundamental civil liberties for so long and to such a degree as the war on drugs. The United States is now the world’s largest jailer, imprisoning nearly half a million people for drug offenses alone. That’s more people than Western Europe, with a bigger population, incarcerates for all offenses. Roughly 1.5 million people are arrested each year for drug law violations – 40% of them just for marijuana possession. People suffering from cancer, AIDS and other debilitating illnesses are regularly denied access to their medicine or even arrested and prosecuted for using medical marijuana.

With deep budget cuts already in place and state employees on furlough, how can New Mexico afford to continue funding this drug war–a war that is disastrous for our civil liberties and the health of our communities?

We’ve tried prohibition, once with alcohol and then again with drugs. It’s been an utter failure by any standard. It’s time to try something else.

- Micah McCoy, Communications Specialist

For more information on the ACLU’s work to change U.S. drug policy, visit the National ACLU’s Drug Law Reform page.

FBI’s Power To Track And Map “Behaviors” And “Lifestyle Characteristics” Of American Communities Raises Alarm

The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico (ACLU-NM) today asked the FBI to turn over records related to the agency’s collection and use of race and ethnicity data in local communities. According to a 2008 FBI operations guide, FBI agents have the authority to collect information about and map so-called “ethnic-oriented” businesses, behaviors, lifestyle characteristics and cultural traditions in communities with concentrated ethnic populations. While some racial and ethnic data collection by some agencies might be helpful in lessening discrimination, the FBI’s attempt to collect and map demographic data using race-based criteria for targeting purposes invites unconstitutional racial profiling by law enforcement, says the ACLU.

“The FBI is collecting data not based on any evidence of criminal activity, but solely on individuals’ perceived race, ethnicity, nationality or religion,” said ACLU-NM Managing Attorney Laura Schauer Ives. “This creates the potential for racial profiling on a truly massive scale.”

The FBI’s power to collect, use, and map racial and ethnic data in order to assist the FBI’s “domain awareness” and “intelligence analysis” activities is described in the 2008 FBI Domestic Intelligence and Operations Guide (DIOG). The FBI released the DIOG in heavily redacted form in September 2009, but a less-censored version was not made public until January of this year, in response to a lawsuit filed by Muslim Advocates. Although the DIOG has been in effect for more than a year and a half, very little information is available to the public about how the FBI has implemented this authority.

“The public deserves to know about a race-based domestic intelligence program with such troubling implications for civil rights and civil liberties,” said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “We hope that the coordinated efforts of ACLU affiliates across the nation will finally bring this important information to light so that the American people can know the extent of the FBI’s racial data gathering and mapping practices and whether the agency is abusing its authority.”

ACLU affiliate offices across the nation today filed coordinated Freedom of Information Act requests to uncover records about the FBI’s collection and use of racial and ethnicity data from their local FBI field offices. The requests were filed by the ACLU affiliates in Alabama, Arkansas, California (Northern, Southern and San Diego), Colorado, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia.

The DIOG provisions in question are available online at: www.muslimadvocates.org/DIOGs_Chapter4.pdf

The entire DIOG is at: www.muslimadvocates.org/latest/profiling_update/community_alert_seek_legal_adv.html