Marchers protest car impounds
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More than 200 marchers paraded Saturday from Roseland to Santa Rosa City Hall to call on police to stop impounding the vehicles of unlicensed drivers, the majority of whom are illegal immigrants.
The marchers, whose leaders met last month with Police Chief Tom Schwedhelm, said the 30-day impound requires car owners to pay about $2,000 to recover their vehicles, a great financial burden.
"We believe that our City Council would be respectful to immigrants and would be understanding of the suffering of immigrant families when their cars are taken," said Richard Coshnear, a member of the Committee for Immigrants Rights, the event's organizer.
Both the activists and the police chief said their recent meeting was cordial and they want to continue the discussions.
But for Schwedhelm, the key is public safety, and he believes the impound program and other aggressive traffic enforcement tactics over the past four years have taken unsafe drivers off the road and reduced the number of serious crashes.
"More people are alive today due to that focus on traffic," he said.
Undocumented immigants have been unable to obtain California driver's licenses since 1993. The state two years later adopted a law that allows police to impound for 30 days the vehicles of unlicensed drivers.
A review of the 2,064 vehicles impounded by Santa Rosa police between January 2003 and June 2005 found that 88 percent of the autos and trucks were taken from Latinos.
Law enforcement leaders maintain unlicensed drivers haven't had the needed training nor demonstrated to the state their ability behind the wheel. That deficiency often leads to accidents.
"If they continue to drive, they put the public at risk, so impounding their cars sometimes is the best alternative for the safety of the other drivers," said Sonoma County Sheriff Bill Cogbill.
Activists Saturday expressed skepticism about the safety risk of such drivers. And they maintained that the current law isn't keeping unlicensed drivers off the road.
"If that's the logic behind it, it hasn't worked." said Daven Cardenas, a spokesman for the committee. Unlicensed drivers simply abandon the impounded vehicle, buy a new one and return to driving, he said.
The activists said Santa Rosa could follow San Francisco's new policy of giving unlicensed drivers 30 minutes to find a licensed driver to take the vehicle. In such instances, the autos aren't be impounded.
Committee member Alicia Sanchez said the issue might seem a "small win" in the big picture of the immigration debate, but a change in the impound policy would show immigrants that their efforts can bring results. She urged the city to work with her group and find a solution that would be "beneficial to the community as a whole."
Mayor Susan Gorin said it is important to discuss the issue, but the community expects police "to make sure that people are driving safely down the road."
"We know that in this country we need to have a large conversation about immigration reform," Gorin said, "and the solutions are not easy."
