Jody Kasper
Northampton Chief of Police
“You can come and talk to us. If you are a victim of a crime or a witness or whatever situation you might be in, you can be in our building and this is a safe place for you.”
To get the perspective of local law enforcement, we interviewed Jody Kasper, the Chief of the Northampton Police Department (NPD) to asked her about Northampton’s designation as a sanctuary city, NPD’s relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), policy repercussions of the current national administration, and the challenges immigrants may face in working with law enforcement.
We inquired about what Northampton’s designation as a sanctuary city means to the Northampton Police Department. Chief Kasper responded, “It means mostly 2 things for the Police Department. The first is that we don't respond to administrative detention requests.” She continued, “[ICE] occasionally might send us these... a request to temporarily hold somebody that we have here in our custody.” She relayed that when the Police Department takes someone into custody, they scan that person’s prints and those scans go to a database kept by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Chief Kasper explains,
When that happens, someone, like a member of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, might be aware that we had someone here in our building that they were interested in. So, they might then send us a paper that says, ‘Please hold onto this person for 48 hours.’ And it is just that; it’s a request. It’s labeled a request, it's basically asking us if we will do that. And our city, our city leadership, has defined us as a sanctuary city and part of that definition has indicated that they don't want us to engage in this practice. So we don’t. So we would hold onto the person for a normal amount of time.
We asked for clarification on the difference between an administrative detainer request from ICE and a warrant for arrest. She responded,
That would be different. So if we had someone here in the same situation, and they were arrested, we rolled their prints and then we got a judicial warrant from ICE that basically said, ‘Please hold this person; they committed a robbery in another state or in your state and we want to hold onto them.’ That's a public safety issue; that’s a criminal issue, and we would hold onto them.
She explains that the second impact Northampton’s designation as a sanctuary city has on its Police Department is that,
If we pull over someone driving a car and they don't have a license and they are undocumented, we will give them extra time to try to find someone who can come and drive the car away who is properly licensed, rather than towing the car. Because we recognize that if the car gets towed, that could be really detrimental to the person who may not be able to get it out if they are unlicensed, don't have money, or anything else. So we just give them a little bit of extra time.
Chief Kasper added, “And of course we don’t engage in proactive, you know, seeking out people who are undocumented and taking any sort of enforcement action.”
We inquired as to whether the President’s threats to take federal funding from sanctuary cities would influence Northampton. Chief Kasper responded, “Right now, our policy has not been impacted at all. We've been a sanctuary city for a number of years and that hasn't changed since any new sort of federal directives have come out or any sort of new opinions or stances based out of the federal government [have come out].”
Finally, we also wondered what barriers there were for new Americans to report crimes to police. Kasper reflected,
Yes so, I definitely think that it is challenging right now in our country to be an immigrant, undocumented or not. Even immigrant families who are legally here on a variety of different green cards, or in other ways, or maybe who have family members who aren't documented, are under quite a bit of stress right now wondering, kind of, what's going to happen to them and to their family members and friends. And I think that there is a real fear for some people about going to their local police or any law enforcement agency. I understand that... I understand why that's there. So what are we doing to kind of counteract that? I mean, we're doing the very best that we can. And, I think we work a lot on community outreach programs, building trust, kind of reaching out proactively to resources in our community who we know are connected to immigrant communities… We certainly spend a lot of time, you know, getting that message out there that, ‘You can come and talk to us. If you are a victim of a crime or a witness or whatever situation you might be in, you can be in our building and this is a safe place for you.’