Walking Through the Fire by Steve King

Author:Steve King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fidelis Publishing
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

2010: DEFENDING COMMON SENSE

In June 2010, while defending Arizona’s immigration laws on the House floor, I said, “Profiling has always been an important component of legitimate law enforcement. If you can’t profile someone, you can’t use those common sense indicators that are before your very eyes.” Having grown up in a law enforcement family surrounded by uniformed men and spending considerable time on the border riding with Border Patrol agents, I was speaking from firsthand experience. I also clarified the agents were “not discriminating against people on the sole basis of race.”

Oddly, what Trip Gabriel found racist or divisive was my listing of the non-racial variables Border Patrol agents use to profile illegal border crossers. Here is what I said:

Those common sense indicators are all kinds of things, from what kind of clothes people wear—my suit, in my case—what kind of shoes people wear, what kind of accent they have, um, the, the type of grooming that they might have, there are all kinds of indicators there and sometimes it’s just a sixth sense and they can’t put their finger on it.

Gabriel thought my comments sufficiently racist that they did not need any further clarification. The few who commented on my remarks at the time thought them stupid and funny. The most common response was to isolate one of the indicators and say something like what the Huffington Post did in its headline, “Steve King Says Illegal Immigrants Can Be Sussed Out by Footwear, Psychic Powers.”115

Under pressure from my own party, I refused to back down. Yes, I had a few speaking engagements canceled but that is par for the course. No one, friend or foe, offered anything like constructive criticism of my remarks. There is none really. All law enforcement officers profile. They have to. Otherwise, they would be stopping no one or everyone. The most relevant variables are sex and age. After a violent street crime is committed, for instance, police will look much more carefully at men than at women and more carefully at young men than old men. Shouldn’t they? In fact, if you took profiling away from the tools of law enforcement, you couldn’t describe a criminal in any way whatsoever.

Over the years I have continued to defend profiling. “The fact that liberals have risen to attack me and call me names without rebutting my assertions concedes my point,” I said at the time. “When they start calling you names, you know they’ve lost the argument.”

In 2017, I found myself arguing the obvious with CNN’s Chris Cuomo. Our talk about profiling was part of a larger discussion on Arizona’s famed sheriff, Joe Arapaio. Days earlier President Trump pardoned Arapaio who was convicted on contempt of court charges. “Profiling is wrong,” said Cuomo. “It is found wrong under the law. It is found wrong as a practice by the Justice Department. That is what they told Joe Arapaio he was doing and they said stop it.”

“I don’t agree,” I responded.

“What don’t you agree with?” said Cuomo who seemed shocked by my answer.

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