By Scott Goldstein
Dallas Morning News
DALLAS, Texas — At least 20 Dallas police officers from five patrol divisions have wrongly cited motorists for not speaking English since 2007, according to records.
The number of officers tied to the tickets is greater than police initially estimated. And it is likely to grow because Dallas police officials say they plan to look back several more years and include the supervisors who signed off on the tickets in the investigation for possible dereliction of duty.
Almost all of the 38 people cited for the offense – which is not a crime in Dallas – were Hispanic. None of the officers who wrote the tickets were Hispanic, records show. The officers range from rookie to 13-year veteran and wrote as many as five tickets each for not speaking English.
In five cases, the person cited paid all or a portion of the $204 fine. In the other cases, the charges were dismissed, officials said. Police initially said 39 tickets had been issued in the last few years, but Administrative Judge C. Victor Lander said one of those tickets was voided.
The erroneous tickets came to light last week when a woman told the news media she was cited for being a “non-English-speaking driver,” among other offenses, during an Oct. 2 traffic stop in the White Rock area. Police officials initially said the trainee officer who ticketed Ernestina Mondragon, 48, a native Spanish speaker and U.S. resident, had made an isolated rookie mistake.
As it turned out, that was not the case.
The controversy expanded Friday after Police Chief David Kunkle announced that officials had discovered dozens of other cases in which officers cited motorists for not speaking English. Kunkle apologized, promised an investigation and said that pending charges would be dropped and that those who paid fines for the charge would be reimbursed.
Mondragon hired an attorney, and Hispanic leaders called for a far-reaching review for signs of possible racial profiling.
Senior Cpl. Glenn White, president of the Dallas Police Association, said the department’s response and the public outcry are overblown. Several of the officers who wrote the tickets are association members, he said.
“Now there is going to be a big internal affairs investigation into what?” he said. “They’ve corrected the problem; they’re going to make it go away or refund the money. It’s done.”
White said the aggressive response from department brass is another in a string of high-profile cases in which leadership came down unfairly on officers.
“You go to work every day and if you make a mistake, you got a colonoscopy coming from the command staff,” White said.
In the case of Mondragon and perhaps the others, the officer was confused by a pull-down menu on his in-car computer that listed the law as an option. But that was in reference to a federal statute regarding commercial drivers that Kunkle said his officers do not enforce.
The fact that it was in the computer at all shows that the tickets are a symptom of a “system breakdown,” White said.
Police officials said they already had plans to change the software in the roughly 400 squad cars that have the pull-down menu. They expect that to be completed in coming months.
The citations uncovered thus far make up a tiny fraction of the roughly 400,000 annual tickets issued by a police force of 3,600, which could explain why court officials would not have noticed a trend and alerted police officials.
Lander said his own investigation revealed that all of the cases that came to a judge were dismissed.
“The final summation is that the system worked most of the time,” Lander said. He added that 38 cases “out of the hundreds of thousands we see, while it is significant to the individual charged, is very, very few and far between.”
Copyright 2009 Dallas Morning News