SOUTH FLORIDA POLICE FACING MORE CRIMINALS NOT AFRAID TO SHOOT AT THEM

The threat of a death sentence once was seen as a deterrent to anyone
thinking of killing a police officer.

Not anymore.

"You used to just see a guy turn around and flee before they'd ever
take a shot at a cop," said Lt. Mike Wallace, of the Palm Beach
County Sheriff's Office. "Now there's no hesitation. They don't think
twice before shooting at the police.

"We've just been lucky so far in Palm Beach County, luckier than
what's happened in Broward or Miami-Dade," said Wallace, commander of
the county's sheriff's Violent Crimes Task Force. "But I can tell you
we're having more people shoot at us than I've ever seen."

The shootings of four Broward County sheriff's deputies in the past
12 months -- resulting in deaths of three of the officers -- mirrors
a national trend in which more officers have been killed than at any
time since the late 1970s, experts say. This is also the first year
in at least three decades that shootings have exceeded traffic deaths
as the leading cause of death for police officers.

Last week's shooting of Deputy Paul Rein makes the Broward Sheriff's
Office one of nine local law enforcement agencies across the nation
in which two or more officers have been killed this year. Miami-Dade
lost one officer in September, and a Hillsborough County Sheriff's
Office sergeant was killed while sitting in his cruiser at a red light.

As of Friday, at least 63 officers had been fatally shot nationwide
this year, compared with 48 shootings in 2006, according to the FBI.
The rate of police slayings began to accelerate in late 2006 -- the
holidays can be particularly dangerous for officers -- and the trend
has continued this year.

More shootings occur annually in Southern states where police tend to
patrol alone. Consistently over the past decade, about 60 percent of
all police officers assaulted in the United States were assigned to
single-officer patrol vehicles, according to U.S. Justice Department
crime statistics. Three of the four Broward deputy shootings involved
solo officers.

There is no single cause for the upsurge in killings. Police,
prosecutors, social workers and criminologists cite a variety of
factors that seem to be behind the rise in violent crimein Florida
and the United States over the past two years.

Among the factors: the growing numbers of light, cheap assault
weapons, overcrowded prisons that are hardening juveniles and adults,
cutbacks in police budgets and anti-crime programs, and the rise of
street gangs in South Florida and other parts of the United States.

Together, they are producing a new generation of criminals who are
more combative and tactical in facing police. They may wear body
armor themselves and shoot at the head of an officer wearing a
bulletproof vest. Of 26 officers shot to death wearing body armor
last year, 15 were shot in the head, according to the U.S. Department
of Justice.

Broward Sheriff's Deputy Maury Hernandez was shot in the head after a
routine traffic stop in early August. He survived. Four days later,
Sheriff's Sgt. Chris Reyka was shot at least five times -- from as
close as five feet -- as he investigated cars parked behind a
pharmacy in Pompano Beach.

"There's a very dangerous situation in many South Florida inner
cities where the youth see the police almost as foreign occupiers,"
said Wayne Rawlins, a youth crime consultant with Project Safe
Neighborhoods, a federally funded anti-crime program based in
Hollywood. "These are the offspring of the crack culture of the
1980s, and there's this whole music, video and literature scene in
which you don't cooperate with the police, you don't snitch, and you
don't back down.

"These guys will not hesitate to draw a gun and shoot a police
officer, which means they won't hesitate to shoot anyone else,"
Rawlins said. "It's just the culture that's been forming because of
hip-hop, drugs, and everything else."

The shoot-first mentality also may be the effect of a decade of
harsher sentencing for drug use and three-strikes laws that leave
many felons with the sense they have nothing to lose. Michael Mazza,
40, who is accused of shooting Rein on Wednesday morning as the
deputy was driving him from jail to a court hearing, was a career
criminal facing life in prison for armed robbery. He had spent most
of the past 10 years in prison on a variety of charges.

"In my opinion, the death penalty is no longer a deterrent to these
guys for shooting a police officer," said Scott Knight, chief of the
Chaska, Minn., police and a consultant for the International Chiefs
of Police on police assaults. "It's as bad as I've ever seen it, and
I have 31 years of experience."

Other experts fear the impetus on mandatory sentencing, combined with
tougher police responses to crime-ridden communities, is hardening
life in high-crime areas. Federal cuts to after-school programs and
rehabilitation programs for prisoners have left police officers with
few resources to prevent crime surges. There have been more than $2
billion in cuts in Justice Department law enforcement programs since 2002.

"You have a lot of inmates, people who were incarcerated during the
war on drugs in the '80s and '90s, being returned to the streets
without jobs and without prospects," said Jack Levin, a criminologist
at Northeastern University in Massachusetts. "Some of them are going
right back to drugs, drug gangs, trafficking. They've done hard time
and they don't really care."

Levin also sees a public complacency toward crime and considers that
a major concern. Crime rates had been dropping for 15 years until
they began rising again in 2004.

As the federal government fought terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks, funds were cut and were not replaced by local
governments,whichweren't willing to pay for more police.

That was especially true in neighborhoods with gang problems that
rarely spilled into more affluent areas. In these pockets of poverty,
local drug gangs have taken more control.

Meanwhile, law enforcement officers have used more aggressive
techniques in arresting gang members and deporting them if they're
undocumented.

"We got very complacent. Everyone thought that crime would keep
falling and nobody bothered to examine why it was falling," Levin
said. "A lot of people don't remember the 1980s, how violent it was
out there. The danger is that if we're not careful, we slide back
into those bad old days."