Flash point: a police officer's killing in Phoenix leads to plans for expanding police involvement in immigration enforcement.(NEWS)

ON SEPTEMBER 18, 2007, Phoenix police officer Nick Erfle, the father of two children, was shot and killed by a man he'd approached for jaywalking. What happened to Erfle was unfortunate, and very sad.

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Also sad is what's happened in Phoenix, which is likely to further institutionalize unfair treatment for large--and already discriminated-against--segments of the population.

Within a week of Erfle's death, local media reported that the man who shot him (who was later killed by the Phoenix police) was an undocumented immigrant. By December, the incident was being exploited to justify major changes in the Phoenix Police Department's role in immigration enforcement.

The policy in question is the 20-year-old Police Operations Order 1.4, which prevents local police officers in most cases from questioning people about their immigration status, and instructs them to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement about possible immigration violations only when a suspect has committed a felony. In December, Phoenix mayor Phil Gordon announced that he could "no longer support" the policy and that he had convened a board to draft a new order "that will allow individual officers to notify ICE when ANY law has been violated by a person they have reason to believe is in the United States illegally." This would considerably expand local officers' involvement in immigration enforcement and, community members fear, lead to increased racial profiling by a majority-white police force in a region with a fast-growing Latino population.

So what does all this have to do with Nick Erfle? It's typical for mainstream media to extensively cover the shooting of a police officer. It's also typical for that coverage to outweigh media attention paid to shootings of civilians by police, even though far more civilians are shot by police than vice versa. In Phoenix, three officers were fatally shot on duty between January ...