Saturday, October 24, 2009

Dallas police wrongly ticketed non-English-speaking drivers


This must surely warm up the cold, bitter hearts of Pat Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, and the rest of the English-only nativist movement in the U.S.:

Dallas police ticketed 39 drivers in 3 years for not speaking English.

They will not be happy to learn, however, that Police Chief David Kunkle is not amused and has promised "to investigate all officers involved in the cases for dereliction of duty."

I was surprised and stunned that that would happen, particularly in the city of Dallas. In my world, you would never tell someone not to speak Spanish,

Kunkle said. Pending cases are being dismissed and fines are being reimbursed to those who were ticketed and paid them.

It doesn't seem there there was a department-wide effort to target non-English speakers. "The citations were issued in several different patrol divisions by at least six different officers." In some cases at least, ignorance of the law may have played a role:

In [one] case and perhaps the others, officials said, the officer was confused by a pull-down menu on his in-car computer that listed the charge as an option. But the law the computer referred to is a federal statute regarding commercial drivers that Kunkle said his department does not enforce.

Still, Kunkle is right to investigate, and those ultimately responsible ought to be held accountable. Ignorance is no defence, after all, and along the way there were officials who should have known that what was being done was wrong.

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5 Comments:

  • I wish it were the law for non-commerical drivers to speak and READ English. I would only pardon those who were visiting from a foreign country. The officier should be praised not punished. I appreciate the coverage on this topic. This should be a wake up call for illegals and immigrants to learn English.
    Thank you.
    Regards,
    Mrs. B

    By Anonymous Mrs. B, at 10:52 PM  

  • It is important, I do agree, that people be able to communicate with each other in any society, but the fact is, English is not the only language spoken in America, and there is no English-only policy. Yes, absolutely, immigrants should learn English. Why? Because it's the main language, and it's in their own best interests to learn it, and it's in society's interests that people not be divided by language. But this is what happens in a multicultural soceity, even in a melting pot. And it has nothing to do with "illegals," as you call them.

    The point is, even if people should learn English, there's no good reason to ticket them for not doing so.

    By Blogger Michael J.W. Stickings, at 12:51 AM  

  • I wonder if Mrs B would "pardon" American born drivers who don't read English. There are any number of them. Of course that immigrants don't learn English and that they deliberately refuse that simple task has been part of our mythology for well over a hundred years although the slander disproves itself continuously.

    It's nice though that dear Mrs. B has assumed the role of judge and jury and arbiter of who may or may not dwell in the US with full power to pardon. I wonder what she thinks about the government intruding into private lives, because establishing a Federal language proficiency agency or language police would be expensive and redundant since obtaining citizenship does already require a basic knowledge of English.

    By Blogger Capt. Fogg, at 10:29 AM  

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    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 3:58 AM  

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