Or as I like to call it: “Masa-gate.”
From Asheville, North Carolina comes the story of a Latin American immigrant male who spent four days in jail because law enforcement officials mistook tortilla dough (known as “masa” in Spanish) for cocaine.
“The driver had to be forcefully removed from the vehicle and placed under arrest,” [Buncombe County Sheriff Van] Duncan said.
Hernandez said he was given no time to speak and had a knee put in his back and his arm pinned behind him. He was arrested for failing to heed blue lights and sirens and driving while intoxicated; he was jailed under a $1,500 bond.
Breathalyzer tests later showed Hernandez, who said he doesn’t drink, was not intoxicated.
His dog, traveling with him, was taken and his truck impounded.
A drug dog indicated the possible presence of narcotics in the truck, and deputies did field tests. Three tests made by three different companies conducted by different deputies all came back positive for cocaine, Duncan said.
Deputies in contact with Duncan reported, “‘This doesn’t look like drugs, but it is testing positive,’” the sheriff said.
Another thing that caught their attention was shrimp that they said was decaying, since drug smugglers sometimes use decaying food to throw off drug dogs.
Hernandez said he took care to keep the shrimp on ice and stopped occasionally to add more.
Drug trafficking charges might have been warranted, Duncan said, but officers were somewhat leery because the substances didn’t look like drugs. Still, they wanted charges that would carry a bond high enough to keep Hernandez from making bail or getting far, the sheriff said.
They rushed the food to state labs so they could get results quickly. When they got the negative results, they were flabbergasted, the sheriff said.
Duncan said he’s never seen field tests yield false positives in this way.
“I have no idea why they did,” he said.
Duncan is coming under fire from Latino officials and advocacy groups in the South for the conduct of his officers. “When you break down the steps the officers took,” he said, “everything they did was legal and reasonable.”
There’s a whole lot to say here–multiple ways for us to interpret what happened. Most of them involve race. There is the way racial and linguistic difference framed officer reactions and assumptions, closing off any possibility that what was unfolding could have been seen as the result of multiple other “reasonable” behaviors. There is the cultural misunderstanding related to the food he carried and his transport of it to family in another state. There is the inability of the various parties to communicate clearly in a common language and within a shared plane of equal and open discourse.
Most troubling, of course, is the clearly racialized manner in which officers encountered a tired, non-English dominant Latino. They assumed he was hiding something, they later assumed he would flee, and–most clearly–they assumption he had drugs.
But there is also a bright side to this–multiple bright sides, actually. First, there are Latino officials and advocates in the South who can speak out about this episode and help frame it as an opportunity for change. This is already a sign of change and of the prospect of greater change.
Second, this is being seized as a learning experience by many. The press is challenging the Sheriff’s Department in some ways and I am largely encouraged by the reader comments to the article. Many if not most of them seem to be empathetic with the falsely-arrested man and troubled by the unwillingness of local law enforcement to fully embrace this as an opportunity for reflection and change.
Finally, While Sheriff Duncan seems a bit hesitant to use this as a learning experience, he does embrace it in some ways. “The good thing is that it will probably re-energize our contact with the Latino advocacy groups,” he said.
I suspect it will.
LATINO LIKE ME 