Chief stands by his police

As a pair of good Irish Catholics, Raleigh Police Chief Harry Dolan and I should have had an immediate kinship.

But it didn't quite work out that way.

In our first interview, Dolan was cordial but clearly frustrated at my columns last week about the way the children of an illegal immigrant were treated following a traffic stop.

Dolan said he found the columns demoralizing to a force that works hard, puts duty ahead of personal safety and gets far too little pay for the effort. Youch -- I guess he went to Catholic school, too.

But to Dolan's credit, he didn't deny the report out of hand. He investigated.

He said the stop, as I portrayed it, was pretty straightforward. The officers flagged the car, driven by Omar Perez, because the registration was expired.

Perez, they soon learned, was driving without a license. Perez also had failed to appear in court on another traffic charge. He was arrested and removed from the car where his two stepchildren, ages 5 and 6, were strapped into their car seats.

As the arrest unfolded, Perez's wife, Cecelia Millan, an American citizen, listened via cell phone -- she'd asked her husband to leave the line open inside the car. When her son started wailing that he wanted his daddy, she said she heard one of the officers tell him he wouldn't ever see his daddy again.

Afterward, the children were left with a passenger in Perez's car, even after Millan told the police she was on the way and did not want the children left with anyone else.

Millan and her husband filed a formal complaint.

But the investigation is already done, and it's clear from Dolan that he stands by his officers. They could have handled the custody of the children better. But he believes Millan misinterpreted what she heard on the phone; he does not believe his officers made such a cruel comment to young kids.

"The driver put the officers in a difficult position," he said. "The allegation of these comments offended them professionally."

Millan said one of the Internal Affairs officers who came to interview her family told her he could tell when people were lying.

"He said, 'If it's any comfort, I think these guys are telling the truth,' " she said. "I told him, 'No that's really no comfort, because I heard what was said to my children!' "

Dolan noted that his department receives very few complaints.

But then, many immigrants, legal or not, are afraid of the police these days.

To many of us, the fact that federal immigration issues are increasingly being sorted out at the local level presents difficult challenges. But Dolan views it in stark terms: A police stop is a police stop.

"Our officers get the training to handle every stop and every arrest, no matter who is being stopped," he said. "We do not tolerate and will not tolerate the mistreatment of any person. And when we get a citizen complaint, we're going to investigate."

That message, issued from the top, is one all of Dolan's officers needed to hear. The rest of us did, too.