(3 of 7)
Arizona state representative John Loredo, 29, a Mexican American, says that since 1990, he has been pulled over by police "six or seven times for no reason other than racial profiling." Once, while pulling up to his grandmother's house on Christmas Eve, his car lit up. Five police cruisers were behind him, a helicopter overhead. He was ordered onto his knees and handcuffed. "They said there'd been a drive-by shooting," Loredo says, and he presumably matched a suspect description. "Situations like that happen all the time," Loredo claims, judging by calls he receives from constituents and by the way that police have come at him with sass and swagger until they find out he is a public official.
Loredo says most of his west-side neighbors want the police responding quickly to their calls, locking up gangsters and shutting down drug dens. But they don't want their kids harassed--good kids who go to school and to work--as part of the deal. "That type of aggression has an extremely negative impact on people."
Davila, who works the very neighborhood where Loredo lives, answers, "We've got nearly 3,000 officers in this city. Do we have some bad apples? Yes. But we're trying, and this is a department I'm proud of."
Davila got laughed out of elementary school when his family moved 40 years ago from Mexico to Douglas, Ariz. He couldn't speak English, and kids made fun of him, so he ran home, only to have his mother drag him back. One day the teacher had the class write a letter. Put the principal's name at the top, she said, followed by a comma. Davila dutifully wrote down the principal's name and then drew a picture of a bed. The Spanish word for bed is cama. The teacher slapped him, the class roared, and his mother told him to find a way to endure. Without an education, he would have no chance in America.
Davila is now 49, and on July 20 he'll complete the course work for a master's degree from Northern Arizona University. His grade-point average is 4.0, and his wife Sue hangs his report cards on the refrigerator along with their son's and daughter's, both community-college students. And still he must endure. He is called "coconut"--brown on the outside, white on the inside--by some Mexican Americans. And when he made sergeant in 1982, he overheard a white colleague say, "We got another spic promoted. Let's see how long this beaner lasts." Yet Davila believes as passionately in the goodness of his officers as he does in the goodness of struggling immigrants.