7th lawsuit filed over Ariz. law

July 11, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

PHOENIX

A seventh challenge to Arizona’s tough new immigration crackdown says training materials designed to teach police officers how to enforce the law give “vague and ill-defined factors” as reasons to question someone’s legal status.

Officers aren’t supposed to use a person’s race to determine whether there’s reasonable suspicion they’re in the country illegally.

But the lawsuit, filed Friday in federal court, says the training materials developed by state-police bosses allow officers to rely on things such as whether a person speaks poor English, looks nervous or is traveling in an overcrowded vehicle. They also can take into account whether someone is wearing several layers of clothing in a hot climate or hanging out in an area where illegal immigrants are known to look for work.

That will lead to “widespread” racial profiling of Hispanics, the lawsuit says.

“It’s like having a law that tells police to go out and arrest all children but to not use the fact that a person looks like a child,” Los Angeles-based attorney Peter Schey, lead counsel for the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit, said Saturday.

“Rather than training police officers about who is and who is not really deportable, the training materials focus on vague and ambiguous factors, such as a person’s dress or limited ability to speak English or demeanor, whatever that means,” Schey said. “An average law-enforcement officer using those standards is inevitably going to focus on a person’s physical appearance or race while being sure not to say that in his or her report.”