Dr. Liana Epstein, a social psychologist connected with RSF's Racial Bias in Policing Working Group, recently co-published an article on cross-deputization, which mandates that police officers enforce immigration laws. The article, entitled "Safety or Liberty?: The Bogus Trade-Off of Cross-Deputization Policy" can be read here.
Q: Let's first define the issue -- what exactly is "cross-deputization" and why has it become such a prominent issue?
A: Cross-deputization (codified in 1996 as part of the Immigration and Nationality Act) is an optional federal training program that "deputizes" police officers to seek out undocumented immigrants and to charge them for their presence in the country without documents. This policy has gained significant popularity in recent years (U. S. Department of Homeland Security, 2008), culminating in laws such as Arizona’s SB 1070 (enacted in 2010). It has become a prominent issue because of its burgeoning popularity and the potentially negative consequences it engenders.
Q: Your paper argues that the debate over cross-deputization wrongly pits civil rights against safety. Instead, you say that ensuring civil rights is a "necessary precondition of public safety and lawfulness" because it protects police legitimacy. Why do you believe that police officers enforcing immigration laws would hurt the perception of police?
A: Our research operates from the premise that cross-deputization is "poisonous" because it is not applied equally across groups. When one is told to “find the illegal immigrant,” it is not Caucasians who have overstayed their visas who are likely to be asked for proof of their right to be in the country. We argue that as Latinos have become the accessible “picture in our heads” for undocumented immigrants there are no truly “race-blind” cues to documentation status, and thus any basis for enforcement will ultimately target Latinos disproportionately. Thus cross-deputization is inherently racialized and becomes not a question of legal versus illegal, but Latino versus non-Latino. Consequently police officers are then seen as racist. My dissertation explored this in more detail.
Generally speaking, perceiving a negative stereotype about one’s group can engender a sense of intergroup anxiety. Intergroup anxiety is simply anxiety that occurs due to the expectation of interacting with someone from another group of some sort (Stephan & Stephan, 1985). Intergroup anxiety has been shown to engender retaliatory feelings of hostility and anger at a member of the other group for provoking the intergroup anxiety affect in the first place (Britt, Boniecki, Vescio, Biernat, & Brown, 1996; Islam & Hewstone, 1993; Van Zomeren, Fischer & Spears, 2007) as well as biased behavior and prejudice (Britt et al., 1996; Islam & Hewstone, 1993). Perceiving a negative stereotype about one’s group can also degrade expectations about intergroup interactions (Darley & Gross, 1983). The more negative these outgroup stereotypes are, the more negative the interaction with the outgroup member is anticipated to be (Hamilton, Sherman, & Ruvolo, 1990).
Q: What does your research tell us about how a community responds to a police department it perceives to be racist?
A: Research suggests that the perceived fairness of a policy factors into one’s response to a policy. Procedural justice theory posits that, when policies are seen as fair, individuals who are subject to them are more likely to obey them and to support those who police them (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003; Tyler, 1997; Tyler & Huo, 2002; Tyler & Wakslak, 2004). An extensive literature supports this basic claim in a broad range of contexts including law enforcement (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003), courtrooms (Tyler, 2008), educational policy (Tyler, 2004), workplace settings (Blader & Tyler, 2003; Tyler, 2005), economic markets (Sondak & Tyler, 2007), and political institutions (Tyler, 1994). For example, past research by Tyler and Waslak (2004) has found that the perceived level of fairness with which police exercise their authority directly predicts civilians’ perceptions of whether they have been racially profiled. Police officers do not get to select which policies they would like to enforce. They are sworn to enforce the law regardless of their personal feelings about whether the law is fair. Any given civilian, however, when interacting with a police officer will attribute any unfairness or illegitimacy to that particular officer (Tyler & Huo, 2002). In our own research, we have found that willingness to report crime decreases along with perceptions of fairness both of officers themselves and the policies they are sworn to enforce.
Q: Apart from its effects on the community, cross-deputization also impacts police officers. What do we know about how police officers feel about enforcing immigration laws?
A: While much of the procedural justice research focuses on the subordinate’s perspective, little attention in this literature has been given to the perspective of those in power, particularly with regard to policy issues that are charged with bias (Tyler, 2000; 2001; Tyler & Wakslak, 2004). My dissertation focused on this in more detail. Broadly, our research suggests that officers are uncomfortable with cross-deputization for very practical reasons. These reasons are outlined in the MCC report from 2006 (page 5-8 of this document).
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