MIDDLEBURY — Middlebury Police Chief Tom Hanley is a burly man who plays guitar, cracks jokes and talks loud. He’s also instituted a policing policy in his town that many at the Vermont State Conference on Migrant Farmworkers think should be emulated statewide.
Essentially, Hanley is aware of undocumented farm workers in or around Middlebury, but he’s not interested in their status. That, he says, is largely because concerning himself with their citizenship would be counterproductive to his real job, which is good policing – catching bad guys and keeping the community safe and peaceful.
Harassment of undocumented workers creates a subculture of people who are afraid to report crime, he said.
In this country, police powers are vested in the states, he said. “The FBI can’t arrest you for burglary. Our authority is enforcing state laws.” The only time that his department can detain someone for an immigration violation is if ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) calls and says there’s a detainer on this person, and we need you to hold them.
“Everybody in our community is a member of that community, and we don’t care where they come from,” Hanley said.
Harassment of undocumented workers creates a subculture of people who are afraid to report crime, he said. “I don’t call that bad policing, it’s not even policing. It’s a waste of time to question people who look different or speak a different language.
“We’d have predators in our community who victimize people they know won’t report it. That would undermine our ability to keep public peace. We don’t go searching around for people who have Immigration violations. We’re not interested. Somebody who gets up in the morning and goes to work every day is of no interest to us.”
Others suggested that one thing that might come of the conference is for people to pressure their own law enforcement agencies to institute a similar policy in order to improve safety and crime reporting.
State Police are rethinking their policy, said Robert Appel, executive director of the Vermont Human Rights Commission, in part because of a Vermont incident where farm workers were pistol-whipped and robbed on payday. “It’s an ongoing conversation because it is bad policy for ne’er do wells to get away with crime because they know the victims won’t report it.”
One of the bigger problems for undocumented workers is the need to be invisible since visibility increases the risk of detection.
Barbara Whitchurch, of the New Neighbors Project at the Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services, said her organization can help victims of crime or abuse.
“Anybody can make a report to ICE and they’re required to do something,” she said. “The fear of deportation leads to under-reporting (of crime). We create pockets of people who are sitting ducks. It doesn’t take long for victimizers to realize you’re not going to report it.”
The fear of deportation colors everything, Whitchurch said. But her organization can walk victims through a crime and the legal process, and even help with compensation. “We’re trying to institute policies that are less of a risk,” she said.
The least risky is a phone call, particularly to a domestic violence group, where anonymity is safeguarded, she said.
Appel said the Human Rights Commission accepts complaints from people who feel they have been targeted.
