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Posted on Mon, Mar. 31, 2008
The question of crime

Studies, local cases uncover wrongs against, by immigrants
By Robert Morris

Do illegal immigrants contribute more crime to communities?

Some people say they are responsible for additional crime, while others say they commit fewer crimes than citizens.

Others say immigrants are more likely to be victimized, and thus need extra protection. High-profile instances, such as several in the Grand Strand in recent years, also help shape perspectives:

In October 2005, two teens in the country illegally were racing each other at 79 mph down U.S. 17's Restaurant Row when one hit and killed Joyce Dargan, a 57-year-old woman retrieving the mail from a roadside box.

Both boys, 14 and 15 at the time, pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison until their 21st birthdays, the maximum allowable by law. Immigration authorities will then take up the case, and Dargan's family members have pledged to follow its progress through that point.

In April 2007, four young men went on a three-day crime spree that included robberies and shootings at a convenience store in Socastee, in the River Oaks area and near the former Myrtle Beach Pavilion Amusement Park on Ocean Boulevard. Five people were injured, though none died.

Several of the suspects were illegal immigrants, and they all identified with a Hispanic gang. Rather than deport them, and risk their being set free, 15th Judicial Circuit Solicitor Greg Hembree said he plans to try them locally and jail them for as long as possible.

"They're so bad and so dangerous that the fact that they're illegal immigrants really isn't going to matter," Hembree said. "We're going to prosecute them as much as we can and get them as much time as we can in the state system. We're going to pay for them because what they did was so bad."

The bottom line might be summed up in a statement by Anne Morrison Piehl, a professor of economics and criminal justice at Rutgers University, in her testimony before Congress last year:

"The addition of immigrants to the population, if immigrants commit any crimes at all, by definition, will increase the total number of crimes in the United States."

For some, even one crime committed by an illegal immigrant is too many. Entire Web sites are devoted to Americans' lives lost by the alleged wrongdoing of immigrants.

"The borders remain a sieve while the human carnage from crime perpetrated from illegal aliens continues to mount," reads the Web site immigrationshumancost.org.

Statistics, however, paint another picture.

"The empirical research does not suggest that immigrants pose a particular crime threat," Piehl testified. "In contrast, the evidence points to immigrants having lower involvement in crime than native-born Americans."

Locally, the numbers seem to support that.

Hembree said he has no data to suggest immigrants commit more crimes than the citizens.

"I can't say that because you're an illegal immigrant, you're more likely to be involved in criminal activity," Hembree said.

Likewise, public defender Orrie West said she has no data on how many illegal immigrants she defends every year, but she estimated that less than 300 of her 3,000 yearly clients speak only Spanish. Most of those cases are for domestic-violence, drug-possession and drunk-driving charges, she said.

Ties to gangs

For anti-immigration activists, the specter of organized crime by immigrants, such as street gangs, poses a special threat.

"Mara Salvatrucha, originally confined to Los Angeles, has now spread across the U.S.," reads a report published by the American Immigration Control Foundation, citing relevant newspaper clippings. "They have attacked people with machetes, but their armament also includes AK-47s."

Members of the Myrtle Beach Police Department's three-man gang task force have primarily seen two Hispanic gangs, the Valtos Locos and the Sur -13s. The notorious MS-13 gang has little local presence, Lt. Kevin Heins said, though police have seen some members passing through.

In what he termed a very ballpark estimate, Heins said 150 gang members probably live in Myrtle Beach, with several hundred more elsewhere in Horry County. American Bloods and Crips are the biggest groups, followed by the Hispanic gangs.

The gangs are mostly very neighborhood-specific, sometimes confined even to a particular apartment complex, Heins said - you can't assign one community, such as Conway or Socastee, to any one gang.

Other than their ethnicity, no obvious characteristics separate Latin American gang members from their American counterparts, Heins said. They all recruit from the same general teenage demographics and commit the same gamut of vandalism, assaults and burglaries.

"Hispanic gangs are involved in the same things that Bloods and Crips or any other gang are involved in," Heins said.

A broad statement about local gangs' level of organization is hard to make, Heins said. Some are just groups of tightly knit locals, adopting a name.

"I disagree that we really have gangs," said West, the public defender. "We might have a couple of boys who saw something on TV and think they can call themselves that."

Others may have been started by teens who moved from larger, more gang-infested locales to the Grand Strand.

"They're mimicking what they saw out there and starting their own group here," Heins said.

Occasionally, well-connected gang members do pass through the area, Heins said. But overall, the chance of falling victim to random gang violence is low.

Targeted as victims

Instead of committing crimes, illegal but otherwise law-abiding immigrants often are targeted by criminals, said Tammy Besherse, an attorney with the Columbia-based Appleseed Legal Justice Center, which advocates for low-income people in the state.

Illegal immigrants often keep their earnings in cash, rather than using banks.

Racist attackers, too, know illegal immigrants want to avoid law enforcement, making them less likely to report race-driven crimes against them, Besherse said.

"If they're assuming they're not here legally by looking at them, they're probably also assuming they're not going to call the police if they attack them," Besherse said.

Only one ethnicity-based hate crime - which is based on nationality, not necessarily skin color - was reported to the FBI in 2006 from Myrtle Beach, and none were reported elsewhere in the county.

Walter Quinonez, a 35-year-old legal immigrant from Mexico who manages his father-in-law's Socastee restaurant, El Rodeo, said he has borne the brunt of that hate firsthand. One night, a group of young, white men were harassing him, shouting racial slurs, so he called the police, he said. The police couldn't find the men in the neighborhood and left, and, soon after, the men returned and attacked Quinonez, breaking the windows of his car in an attempt to get to him, Quinonez said.

No record of Quinonez's police call could be found by Horry County police.

Recently, a similar but less violent incident befell Quinonez and his son, 15-year-old Walter Quinonez Jr. The father was teaching his son to drive when the clutch failed and the car stalled on the road. A pickup truck swerved around their car from behind, avoiding a crash, but then stopped on the road in front of them. Angry men jumped out, and one brandished a bat, calling both father and son "wetbacks" among their curses, said Walter Jr.

Only when Quinonez threatened to call the police did the assailants leave, but their faces and racist comments remain part of the S.C. community that Quinonez and his son both now know.

In a more subtle form of discrimination, immigrants are often presumed to be in the wrong in unrelated disputes, simply because of their lack of citizenship. Columbia-based construction worker Javier Farfan, speaking through an interpreter, said he came to the U.S. to work four years ago legally, though he would not say precisely how he did so. On a job in Myrtle Beach, he was staying at a motel when he came home from work one day to find that he had been evicted, he said.

The police were called, and the motel manager falsely accused him of vandalism, Farfan said. He tried to protest, but the officer told him he had no way to defend himself against the accusation and would be better off leaving peacefully, Farfan said.

"A lot of times in situations like that, the police will say they don't have any proof either way. And that is the truth, they don't have any proof," Besherse said. "It's one person's word against another."

Police trends

Although immigrants may be less likely to commit crimes, Hispanics are searched or jailed more often than whites, according to a national 2007 Department of Justice study.

Although police pull over members of all races at equal rates, nearly 10 percent of blacks and Hispanics are searched, compared to less than 4 percent of whites. Blacks and Hispanics were also more likely to be arrested or threatened with force than whites, the study found.

Defense attorney David Canty, who represents Spanish-speaking clients, said an "astonishing number" of people are jailed for what he called "driving while brown."

Many Mexicans still have a driver's license from Mexico, but officers often arrest them anyway. Canty said that every time such a case goes to court, his client is acquitted after Canty points out that police do not arrest Canadians for driving in the Grand Strand.

"The only difference I know is skin color," Canty said.

Sometimes Hispanics in the country legally take the blame for illegal immigrants, said Lydia Ten-Legette, a translator for the public defender's office. Ten-Legette is from Puerto Rico, a U.S. commonwealth. She is a U.S. citizen, as are all Puerto Ricans, but she said police sometimes ask Puerto Ricans if they are here legally.

"Sometimes they can't tell," Ten-Legette said. "They think we're all the same."

Any law enforcement agency is likely to have officers who are more likely stop cars driven by Hispanics, Canty said.

While specific officers may allow racist leanings to dictate their job performance, Besherse said they are probably relatively isolated exceptions, not the norm.

"There could be some overzealous officers out there, but I don't think all officers are like that," she said.

Instead of alienating immigrants by making every contact with police carry the threat of deportation, Besherse recommends agencies create community-policing officers specifically designed to earn Hispanics' trust.

The Richland County Sheriff's Office, for example, has Spanish-speaking officers who set up a small desk inside a Mexican tienda, allowing people from the neighborhood to feel safe reporting crimes against them or sharing information that may help solve other crimes.

"That goes a long way to helping build trust," Besherse said.

Blinded by emotion

At a November meeting of the Horry County chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, Horry County Public Safety Director Paul Whitten spoke on his calculations of the cost to jail illegal immigrants.

After his brief speech he was assailed by accusations from the audience that road officers routinely ignore law-breaking Hispanic drivers.

In a recent interview, Whitten said he was surprised at the questions because they were so far from the truth.

"The allegation that Horry County police will not pull over Hispanics for traffic violations is blatantly false," Whitten said. "Nobody gets a free pass on breaking the law."

Traffic on state roads such as S.C. 544, where higher concentrations of Hispanics live, is the primary jurisdiction of the state police, Whitten acknowledged, meaning a county officer driving on S.C. 544 to another call may not stop every speeder on the way, unless the violations are obviously dangerous. Either way, the decision on whether to make a stop is not based on the driver's race, he said.

Whitten also noted that, if facing a roomful of Hispanics, his officers might be accused of targeting Hispanics - which he said is also clearly against police policy.

In both extremes, Whitten compared people's perceptions of law enforcement activity to that of ambulance patients. If an ambulance is nearby and gets to a call quickly, all the patients will thereafter praise the ambulance service. If the same ambulance has a long way to travel to its next call, the entire service will be criticized for an appearance of long response times.

"Their perception might be based on a small sample of events," Whitten said. "This issue is an emotional issue."



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