Free Subscription! 
iTunes 
Our podcast will keep you up to date...
Speaking Spanish Is Not a Crime (Yet)
Dallas ticket for not speaking English called a rookie mistake
06:28 AM CDT on Friday, October 23, 2009
A Dallas rookie police officer erred when he cited a woman earlier this month for being a non-English speaking driver, police said.
Officer Gary Bromley issued a citation Oct. 2 to 48-year-old Ernestina Mondragon after stopping her for making an illegal U-turn in the 500 block of Easton Road, near East Northwest Highway, according to a copy of the citation.
"That's a charge that does not exist here in the city of Dallas," said department spokesman Sgt. Warren Mitchell. "Although we believe it was a sincere mistake ... there's no excuse for it."
He said that charge and a charge of failure to present a driver's license were dropped.
Bromley, 33, is a trainee officer in the Northeast Patrol division. His trainer on the date the ticket was issued was Senior Cpl. Daniel Larkin, 53, said Deputy Chief Tom Lawrence, Northeast Patrol commander.
Under the Dallas City Code, taxi drivers must be able to communicate in English. Mitchell said there is also a federal statute that says commercial drivers must speak English, but it would not have applied in this case.
Mondragon's daughter Brenda Mondragon said her mother was rushing to take her younger sister to school that day and did not see the "no U-turn" sign. Records show Ernestina Mondragon has a driver's license, but her daughter said she had forgotten it. She said her mother, a native Spanish speaker, speaks limited English.
"She was very mad; she was very upset," Mondragon said of her mother's reaction. "We ended up taking her to the [emergency room] because she was nervous; she was just stressing over the ticket."
__________________
- Stephen M. Smith
I heard about this during some drive time radio show this morning. The host seemed to think that the person actually SHOULD be given some sort of government penalty for not speaking the dominant language. I turned the station off.
Turns out this wasn't the only time it's happened. Anyone surprised?
At least 20 Dallas officers wrote no-English tickets
11:43 PM CDT on Monday, October 26, 2009
By SCOTT GOLDSTEIN / The Dallas Morning News
sgoldstein@dallasnews.com
Since 2007, at least 20 Dallas police officers from five patrol divisions have wrongly cited motorists for not speaking English, 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."
WFAA-TV reporter Rebecca Lopez contributed to this report.