Plugging border will tame streets

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepubli ... s0922.html
Sept. 22, 2007 12:00 AM

For days now and nights, they've been coming to Pinchot Avenue. Children and their parents, citizens and immigrants, old soldiers and first-graders who feel this loss in a personal way.

And police. Since Tuesday, they've kept watch over this hallowed ground as people have come. At all hours they have come, and from across the state. From every walk of life they have come to stand before the spot where a brave man died.

Everyone, that is, but the ones who need to stand there the most.

They're in Washington, running the country and doing such a fine job of it. I wonder if they've noticed the extra blood on their hands this week.

Phoenix Officer Nick Erfle was killed Tuesday morning by an illegal immigrant who was brought here as a baby, a thug who by the age of 22 had amassed an impressive record of gang activity, drug use, thievery and violence. One who was deported last year but was back within weeks, right about the time our leaders in Washington were making speeches about the need to get control of the border.

One year and one dead cop later, they are still making speeches.

Meanwhile, a fair number of people are making themselves dizzy, spinning Officer Erfle's death to suit their own purposes. One crowd unbelievably sees no connection between his death and that hunk of Swiss cheese we call a border. Another would have you believe that every gardener and dishwasher is packing heat and hunting cops.

The truth is somewhere in between. As is the solution, if only people would come out of their foxholes long enough to look for it.

But, of course, they won't. Entire careers are built on staking out a claim in this controversy and digging ever deeper into whatever front they've chosen in this particular fight: the noble immigrant or the alien invader.

Such people aren't interested in a compromise that would secure the border immediately, along with a promise to come back and find a way to treat those already here - the ones who don't kill cops and don't cause trouble - with a little fairness and humanity.

There is the battle, after all, to be fought on talk radio and over the blogosphere and on the political front, where there are constituencies to woo and futures to secure.

Meanwhile, the real war rages on, on streets very much like the one where Officer Erfle died. Just ask any Phoenix cop.

"The crime caused by these illegal immigrants is completely out of control," one officer told me this week. "The entire Maryvale area is a war zone due to illegal immigration. Kidnappings are commonplace in the illegal community. Drop houses are everywhere. These crimes tie up police resources all the time and cause our citizens to have to wait hours for police services."

It's a shame that our leaders in Washington - they who have already decided they can't do anything about illegal immigration until 2009 - can't talk to a cop on the streets of Phoenix.

It's a shame they won't come to Pinchot Avenue, before the spot where a brave man died this week.

They should see the outpouring of care and concern from the community and the raw pain and the rage. They should see the letters and the lighted candles laid down by strangers, the military medals and the rosaries and the note from a first-grader, trying to console her classmate who likely doesn't know anything about the politics of illegal immigration.

All he knows is that he lost his daddy this week.


Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8635. Read her blog at robertsblog.azcentral.com.