By Paige Gurgainers
A few worship leaders had hard-hitting questions for City of Minden Chief of Police Jared McIver at the 2nd Annual Minister’s Breakfast held last week at the Community House. Some of the topics included church security, mental health issues, patrols, building checks and the possibility of implementing a new ride-along program.
Another topic included failure to identify.
According to the Louisiana Public Defender Board, in Louisiana this can also be referred to as “stop-and-identify” law. This allows law enforcement to lawfully stop citizens they suspect of criminal identification and ask for identification. If they refuse to identify, they can be arrested and face fines, incarceration, probation and/or community service.
One local pastor asked, “There seems to be a new onslaught of failure to identify arrests. So, what constitutes a failure to identify arrest? Why are we having so many?”
McIver explained there could be several possible scenarios for why this is occurring.
“Sometimes a person could resemble somebody we are looking for. Sometimes they may have warrants; somebody that is wanted and we are trying to identify them,” said McIver. “Sometimes it could be a variable where we are having a lot of crime, a lot of drug activity and an officer stops to identify someone. Sometimes people are wanted and have something to hide and give fake names. It could be the area; it could be intelligence we receive. It’s not just one factor. There could be many, many factors.”
The pastor asked the chief if this is a legal process and whether citizens have a right to refuse.
“Yes, they can ask for identification. They can refuse, but they are still supposed to, by law, provide identification,” answered McIver.
Another pastor then brought up the issue of racial profiling. He asked, “How is that different from racial profiling?”
“If an officer were racially profiling, I would not want them at the Minden Police Department, first and foremost,” explained McIver. “That is not anything we do. The police department does not go out and go after somebody of a certain color or a certain race, like today is the day for white Americans, or African Americans, or Asians or Hispanics. That is not the case.”
The pastor did not seem satisfied with McIver’s answer, saying “I don’t want to keep beating that horse, but suspicion is not a crime.”
McIver continued to explain there are times the department has intelligence that has not been released to the public. He said, “We have a narcotics unit that works on a lot of different things, and those things cannot be put out there, but it is never about race. We don’t target races or genders or anything.”
McIver said he was unsure whether racial profiling had been an issue under previous administrations but guaranteed that is not currently happening within the department.