I’m sure there are some people in our society who see the dull-eyed stare in the mug shot of Mark Ott and figure that something has gone wrong with our society – punishing a police officer for his activities that focused on people, “he thought were illegal immigrants.”
Of course, what was really going on was that Ott was a police officer in a small Florida town who saw Latinos and figured in his mind that they don’t belong in this country (even though his home state is among the one-time Spanish colonies).
SO HIS REACTION, according to police and court records, was to rip them off.
Latinos who got pulled over for traffic stops by Ott usually found themselves facing some period of harassment (including the likelihood of being shackled for a time) that would end with Ott rifling through their wallets to help himself to some cash.
In the incident that led to his arrest, a man named “Santos” had a $100 bill and a $50 bill taken from his wallet.
But “Santos” turned out to be a police officer cooperating with the FBI – who were investigating too many similar complaints from people who claimed that this one cop was too eager to single them out.
PROBABLY BECAUSE HE figured they deserved abuse, or that if by chance their immigration status really was questionable, there’d be nothing they could do about it. Perhaps he thought they should be thankful he was merely helping himself to some money – rather than bringing them in for arrest and putting them through the legal system.
In this case, the system wound up working. Ott, himself, wound up getting hit with the criminal charges – to which he pleaded guilty on Tuesday and got a minimal sentence in prison.
If a judge had been so inclined, it could have been as much as 45 years. But since the judge went for minimum terms and made everything concurrent rather than consecutive, it is just a three-year prison term.
Which makes it likely that Ott will be a free man some time in 2013. This is just going to be a bad year of his life of the 36-year-old Ott. He’s going to have ample chances to put his life back together in the future – even if it is unlikely he ever will work as a law enforcement officer again.
BUT FOR THOSE people who want to complain that the FBI would have been better off searching for “real” criminals, or perhaps even trying somehow to enforce immigration laws (even though it’s not their duty to do) than in focusing on a police officer who was figuratively nickel-and-diming people, I’d say they’re missing the point.
If anything, the Ott attitude is all too common.
There are those people who prey off of those who are living in the shadows of our society because of the jumbled mess that is our federal immigration policy. They are the ones who are at risk and have no protection from criminals – particularly since too many ideologues want to think of them as the real criminals because it fits in with their own ethnic hang-ups about what our society should be.
It also is the reason why many Latinos are paying attention to the immigration reform issue even if their own families have been here for generations and the issue does not directly impact them.
TOO MANY PEOPLE take the attitude that Ott seemed to – that Latinos are somehow worthy of such harassment.
Which is why it is a positive to see the system work properly in this case.
It may be a short prison term. But it is important to see punishment for those who harass others because of such ethnic angles, rather than presuming that the harassed are somehow worthy of it.
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