Lax Policies on the Border a Boon to Organized Crime

Phoenix - Police Chief Jack Harris is stolid and patient, but there
are limits. Clearly he is weary of explaining that this is one of
America's safest large cities, with declining rates of violent crime
and property crime, even though it has one of the nation's highest
rates of home foreclosures. Unfortunately, there are the
kidnappings.

There were 368 reported kidnappings for ransom here last year ---
perhaps more than anywhere else, other than Mexico City, where
kidnapping is such a long-established industry that the wealthy
sometimes buy kidnap insurance. Law-abiding citizens here are rarely
at risk. Most of the kidnappings are drug smugglers and human
traffickers preying on one another.

Some of the smugglers who bring in drugs from Mexico bring people,
too, along desert trails and through dry washes, to "drop houses."
Regarding both drugs and people, Phoenix is a transshipment point:
Most of both are distributed to other states. But some of the people
become pawns in horrific transactions. A person in the United States
might pay, say, $2,500 to have someone smuggled into the country, and
then might receive a phone call: Pay an additional $5,000 and we will
stop raping or torturing the person you want.

A small "drop house," with no functioning toilet, may, Chief Harris
says, hold 60 people - he has seen 100 - in squalor. Fifty of them
just want to move deeper into America in search of work, but all of
them might have only their underwear, their clothes having been taken
away to prevent them from running away. The cross-border traffic in
narcotics and people is, Harris says, just one way globalization is
shaping crime. When the United States tightened controls on supplies
of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the precursor chemicals for
manufacturing methamphetamine, American motorcycle gangs were pushed
out of the business. The production of those drugs moved to Mexico,
where drug-makers imported ephedrine and pseudoephedrine from China.

To the problem of reducing regular crime - homicides in Phoenix were
down 24 percent in 2008 - Harris has applied proven methods. They
include the nimble deployment of manpower to high-crime hot spots,
close relations between police and neighborhoods, and intense
concentration on the small number of career criminals who commit a
large majority of the crimes. Phoenix's familiar sorts of crimes have
not much to do with most of the city's immigrants, legal or illegal.
They commit a smaller percentage of the crimes (10 percent) than they
are of the city's population (24 percent). But the lurid crimes that
are giving this city an unmerited reputation as dangerous represent
the seepage of the Mexican cartels into his city.

For them, Harris says: "The answer is not in Phoenix. The answer is in
Washington." We know how to close a border, Harris says - "build a
wall" and deploy "machine gun nests." But, "I personally think that is
stupid." For now, however, the United States "has turned immigration
policy over to Mexican thugs." So we have reached a point at which
barbed wire, car batteries and acid become the business tools of
kidnapper-torturer-extortionists.

With a force large enough to police the nation's fifth-largest city,
Harris can deploy 60 officers to deal with one kidnapping. That would
be impossible in smaller cities, to which such crime might be driven
by success here. But "don't give me 50 more" officers to "deal with
the symptoms." Rather, says Harris, who was raised in a rough Phoenix
neighborhood, give me comprehensive immigration reform that controls
the borders, provides for whatever seasonal immigration the nation
wants, and one way or another settles the status of the 12 million who
are here illegally - 55 percent of whom have been here at least eight
years.

For those whose profession it is, law enforcement sometimes seems like
bailing an ocean with a thimble. Harris wants not a bigger thimble but
a smaller ocean.