Sherman R. Frederick/Properly Subversive
Marin County held another “Beat Up The Sheriff” meeting the other day. This time relatively new Marin County Sheriff Jamie Scardina was in the hot seat explaining why he cooperates with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when illegals are booked into the county jail for serious or violent felonies.
I’m going to use the term “illegal” here because if it’s good enough for President Biden to use in the State of the Union Address, it ought to be good enough to use in polite Marin society, too. For more ‘illegal,’ ‘undocumented’ nomenclature, see this column.
Anyway, back to the public flogging of Marin law enforcement.
In 2022, 33 very dangerous dudes were in the county slammer and reported to ICE. In 2023, there were 13.
How dangerous were these people? Well, one guy had two kilos of fentanyl on him, enough poison to kill the population of San Francisco and Marin combined. And let’s not kid ourselves. He wasn’t in Marin to keep all that fentanyl in case Walgreen runs short. He was here to illegally sell it to our kids. Another guy (allegedly) dragged a woman off the street by her hair, pulled her into a car and drove her to another location where he repeatedly sodomized her. Nice behavior for an uninvited guest in our country.
The Marin meeting featured much hand wringing and gnashing to teeth. Some accused the sheriff of racism. But the sheriff stood there and took it and refused to apologize or agree to change policy.
Good for him because Marin has a crime problem and some it deals with illegal immigrants. We know this just by the number of people who (allegedly) commit such heinous crimes the sheriff feels the need to call ICE. What we don’t know, however, is how many illegal immigrants are arrested and booked into jail on alleged crime that don’t quite hit the ICE threshold.
These “garden variety” arrests can range from domestic violence, DUI, burglary, brandishing a gun, prostitution, pornography, etc, etc, etc.
If we’re serious about discussing illegal immigration and crime in Marin, we ought to have the full numbers. For example, I’m writing this on March 14. How many illegal immigrants have been arrested and jailed since the first of the year? I don’t know and you don’t know.
Instead of yelling at the sheriff for daring to take public safety in Marin seriously, let’s get the complete set of crime stats out in the daylight. Then we can have a meaningful discussion.
(You can reach the writer at shermfrederick@gmail.com.)
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