Many law enforcement officers associate Catholic imagery and symbols with criminality in the U.S. Latino community, a historian researching the American Southwest said.
In court records, law enforcement officers testify to stopping drivers by establishing “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity due to Catholic symbols or objects on their cars, Daisy Vargas, a historian and professor of religious studies at the University of Arizona, told Catholic News Service on 29th November during a three-day theology conference in Bogotá.
She said that possessing images of Catholic saints, clutching prayer cards or hanging rosaries from rear-view mirrors have been cited in legal disputes to justify vehicle searches and even arrests. A 2019 case in Ohio included as cause for a vehicle search that the defendant was wearing a rosary as a necklace and that the officer, “as a practicing Catholic, found it odd because it is generally not done in his culture.”
Vargas said that law enforcement officers “were taught that good Catholics don’t wear rosaries as necklaces,” so when they encounter Latinos with a rosaries around their necks it creates suspicion, since they see them as “pretending to be good people or pretending to be good moral citizens.”
Picture: Daisy Vargas, a historian and professor of religious studies at the University of Arizona, poses for a photo during a theology conference at the headquarters of the Latin American bishops’ council, known as CELAM, in Bogotá, Colombia, 29th November 2023. (CNS photo/Justin McLellan)