Mesa Chief: No Reason to Target Illegals

Mesa Police Chief George Gascon agrees with his Phoenix counterpart, Jack Harris, that local police are limited in resources and must concentrate on crimes that threaten people's safety instead of making illegal immigration a top priority.

``I closely follow the same philosophy that Chief Harris has," Gascon said. ``If we start taking the very limited resources that we have, and we start going after people who are here illegally, but they're here working -- they are not committing other crimes -- we are going to take away the very limited resources that we have, and we're not going to be able to deal with the predatory crimes and the problems that we're having there."

Gascon declared, ``Illegal aliens are not committing crimes at any higher rate than the rest of us," and said it would be unwise to have his officers focus on citizenship status of people.

``If you have limited resources in your police department, and not enough resources to deal with the crime problems as they are, and you start taking those resources and you're shifting them to an area where you're really not having the level of crime you're having somewhere else, what you're doing is you're going to allow other parts of the criminal problem to increase."

Unlike Phoenix, where Mayor Phil Gordon wants to change police policies on illegal immigrants, Gascon said he sees no plans for Mesa to follow suit.

``If we start going after day laborers, assuming we can do so legally, we can tie up our entire police force daily in doing nothing, but putting day laborers in jail," Gascon said. ``People who are robbing, people who are selling drugs, people who are committing other predatory crimes would basically get a free pass."

Gascon said his department is understaffed as it is, with 1.9 officers for every thousand residents. He said the city is funded for 857 officers -- and usually is at that level -- but it probably should have 1,100 officers.

``Our goal is hopefully that, in the next two or three years, we will find the funding to get us to that level. But currently, there is no money to go beyond the 857."

In Phoenix, Gordon has a panel of former prosecutors studying changes which would allow police officers to question people they stop about their citizenship status. At present, they are banned from doing so. While Harris says that immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility and he does not want it to become a local police priority, he and Gordon say they are not at odds over a policy change.