In Texas, Drivers Ticketed for Inability to Habla Ingles

[WSJ_law_blog]

Question: When is it a crime to not know a language?

Answer: Over the last three years, when you’re pulled over for traffic violations in Dallas.

It’s true. Late last week, the Dallas police chief David Kunkle announced that Dallas police had, over the past three years, wrongly ticketed at least 39 drivers for not speaking English. Kunkle promised to investigate all of the officers involved in the cases. He also announced that pending cases will be dismissed, and those who paid the $204 fine for the charge will be reimbursed. Click here for the story from the Dallas Morning-News.

The case that led to the discovery of all the others occurred Oct. 2, when a woman was stopped for making an illegal U-turn. An officer cited the woman for three violations: disregarding a traffic control device, failure to present a driver’s license and “non-English speaking driver.”

In that case and perhaps the others, officials said, the officer was confused by a pull-down menu on his in-car computer that listed the charge as an option. But the law the computer referred to is a federal statute regarding commercial drivers that Kunkle said his department does not enforce.

The citations amount to a small percentage of the roughly 400,000 tickets issued by Dallas police each year. But the total is large enough to have possible legal ramifications, said George A. Martinez, a professor at the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law.

“It sounds like a policy,” Martinez said. “Discrimination on the basis of language ability, and that’s targeting Latinos, and so that sounds pretty serious to me.”

Kunkle, who apologized repeatedly, said he recognized the incidents probably would damage the department’s relationship with the Hispanic community.

“When we deal with crime victims … our interest is not their immigration status,” Kunkle said. “It’s not something that we concern ourselves about. We want to serve all people.”