Anchorage Police Officer Found To Be An Illegal Immigrant

[PiKA2001]

http://www.adn.com/2011/04/22/182360...restedcop.html

At a news conference Friday, U.S. Attorney Karen Loeffler said that patrolman Rafael Espinoza, on the Anchorage police force for about six years, was really Rafael Mora-Lopez, a Mexican national working in the United States illegally.

The man known as Officer Espinoza -- Mora-Lopez, in reality -- was an excellent employee, Police Chief Mark Mew said. The investigation has so far not turned up any information that Mora-Lopez was involved in any other criminal activity outside the case announced Friday, Mew said.

"His problem was he lied his way into the job," Mew said.

The identity swap was discovered when the police officer applied for a U.S. passport in January and officials from the State Department found that the Rafael Espinoza identity he was using was actually another person, a U.S. citizen in the Lower 48, Loeffler said.

It's pretty weak that it was the State Dept that found this out and not Anchorage PD Internal Affairs Office or whoever handles their background investigations.

Part of the ongoing investigation will look into how the Mexican national slipped through the screening process for Anchorage police officers, Mew said. For example, officers must pass a lie-detector test during the interview process, Mew said.

"As part of that, do you ask them their name?" a reporter asked Mew.

"He obviously got through the polygraph," Mew said. "I can tell you what we generally ask, but what's at issue is what did we ask on that day, in that interview, and we haven't gotten to that yet."

I'm against using pre-employment polygraphs as a replacement for a thorough background investigation. You can lie through your teeth and pass a poly and you can tell the complete and honest truth yet fail a poly. I will say that polygraphs are useful for interrogation purposes but not in cases of playing 20 questions with random people who haven't committed any crimes (that you know of). This is the second case I've read about in the last month where a polygraph passing corrupt or dirty cop gets caught for something that a thorough background investigator would have discovered during a pre-employment investigation.