The golden rule of effective community-based policing can be summed up with one word: trust.

My 30-plus-year law enforcement career taught me that our public safety depends on fostering trust between police and all community members of good will – including California's immigrant residents. During my tenure with the Sacramento and Fresno police, we worked hard to build relationships with all communities.

Many times, immigrant residents who were victims or witnesses to serious crimes provided crucial information that helped us crack tough criminal cases.

But now, a faulty federal immigration program is torpedoing the trust we built.

The program in question is being forced on local agencies with no transparency and mostly deports people out of the country who have never been charged with serious crimes – some who have no criminal history at all – and makes witnesses afraid to come forward.

So it might surprise the reader that the program is called "Secure" Communities. In my professional experience, it makes us less safe.

"Secure" Communities, or S-Comm, sends fingerprints from everyone arrested by police to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to conduct immigration background checks. This happens at the moment of booking at the jail – even for those who turn out to be innocent.

ICE then asks localities to hold immigrants (oftentimes, with zero reimbursement for detention costs) and picks them up for deportation.

I believe that blurring roles between local law enforcement and federal immigration runs counterproductive to our basic mission and damages policing efforts.

California is safer when our law enforcement officers are able to prioritize protecting and serving the community.

For these reasons, prominent members of Congress are calling for a moratorium on S-Comm, and California Assembly member Tom Ammiano has introduced Assembly Bill 1081, the TRUST Act.

The TRUST Act would restore the trust necessary for law enforcement to do our job.

The bill recognizes that Californians know our needs best and lets jurisdictions exit the troubled program. Counties that want to participate can do so – with protections guarding against racial profiling and making sure victims of crimes and innocent people aren't wrongly targeted.

I support the TRUST Act because I know of the damage S-Comm can cause to policing and to people's lives.

Last month in Sacramento, a brave domestic violence survivor from San Francisco faced deportation because, when she finally found the courage to call for help during an incident of abuse, she was mistakenly arrested with her abuser.

Her story is not an isolated incident. While ICE assured local police and the public that S-Comm's mission was to identify and deport serious criminals, ICE's own data uncover a total contradiction to this understanding where 27 percent of Californians deported under S-Comm were classified as "non-criminal," and an additional 41 percent were charged with lower offenses, including only traffic violations.

So the program misses the mark about 70 percent of the time. That's a failing grade in my book.

Some argue that under S-Comm, local law enforcement only provides information, and the federal government takes action. President Barack Obama said this month that "decent people with the best of intentions" face deportation under the current system.

Moreover, S-Comm allows bad- apple officers to apprehend individuals without cause to land them in deportation proceedings, undermines the community trust that helps keep us safe, and negatively affects the safety conditions for good officers.

Ultimately, we need reform at the federal level. In the meantime, California law enforcement shouldn't be a part of this floundering program that forces local governments to perform a federal responsibility – especially when public and officer safety can become a casualty.

S-Comm should be reined in and regulated with our Assembly's support for the TRUST Act or scrapped altogether at the federal level.

Real secure communities are ones where our police and residents work together in cooperation instead of fear. Passing the TRUST Act would make us all safer. In today's economic hard times for the nation, state, and local governments, it also makes great fiscal sense.

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Arturo Venegas Jr. retired in 2003 as Sacramento's chief of police.

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