Nik Rajkovic / news@whmi.com


Livingston County Sheriff Mike Murphy took to social media Tuesday to defend a resolution before commissioners that would allow data collection of immigration status.

He argues police already record race and sex, plus we allow our data to be mined and collected online and through social media.

“It’s kind of ironic, I find, that we live in this statistic-driven world where if you can’t measure something you can’t improve on it, but yet when we talk about keeping track of or knowing how many contacts we have with illegal immigrants, everybody’s hair gets on fire,” he said.

Sheriff Murphy cited several cases involving illegal immigrants reported by police in Brighton, Pinckney and his own department in recent months.

“We do have illegal immigrants here. Can you say they’re all criminals? Of course not. Can you say they’re all here creating traffic offenses? Of course not. But to say it doesn’t exist or we shouldn’t keep track, I think is insane,” he said.

“It does exist and we do need to keep track so we can better understand the problem.”

The sheriff also fired back at the local Democratic Party’s criticism over a recent FOIA request.

“When the FOIA request was submitted asking for arrests over the last 18 months, we don’t keep those statistics. That’s not a check mark that’s filled out, like if somebody is a male or female, black, white, Asian. That is a statistic we don’t capture. The FOIA was denied based on that, as it should have been.”