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Immigrants (illegal & legal) Fall Prey To Street Crimes
Dallas: As robbers target easy cash, police hope to turn tide

08:28 PM CDT on Thursday, May 12, 2005

By ERNESTO LONDOÑO and TANYA EISERER / The Dallas Morning News
Many investors think twice before doing business in some parts of Dallas.


Dallas police Lt. Todd Thomasson aimed his gun at a theft suspect in north Oak Cliff last week. Derick Claiborne, 28, was charged with theft and disorderly conduct after $10.50 was taken from a charity display at a nearby bakery. But armed robbers, police say, see plenty of opportunity there and in other parts of the city with a high concentration of recent immigrants.

"We're getting a lot of outsiders coming in and robbing people because they know the Mexican nationals carry a lot of money on them and ... [the robbers] know they're less prone to call us," said Senior Cpl. Elvira Rivera, who patrols the Jefferson Boulevard corridor. "A lot of them still haven't been putting their money in the bank."

It's one of the main reasons robberies have spiked in Dallas in recent years. And Dallas police officials admit that turning the tide will require building strong relationships with immigrants and getting them to feel comfortable opening bank accounts.

Individual robberies have increased by more than 40 percent during the last five years, according to Dallas police statistics. Police say people with Hispanic surnames account for roughly 40 percent of the almost 28,500 robberies reported in the city during the last five years. Although Latinos now make up roughly the same percentage of the city's population, police fear the reported incidents could be the tip of the iceberg.

"I'd hate to see if every crime was reported what our true crime stats would show," said Dallas police Deputy Chief Vince Golbeck, who supervises the department's southwest patrol station.

The robberies run the gamut. Some have been strikingly brutal, like last month's home invasion, during which police said two men who burglarized several people at a Far North Dallas apartment complex ended up raping and killing a young Mexican woman and slitting the throat of her common-law husband.

Dallas police took a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol from a suspect arrested in a traffic stop. Police in southwest Dallas have taken more aggressive steps to take guns off the streets. Others are petty – almost senseless – like the man who last week dashed out of a north Oak Cliff bakery owned by Hispanics with $10.50 in quarters, stolen from a leukemia and lymphoma charity cardboard donation display.

But as a whole, they're changing the faces of neighborhoods, forcing parents to keep children indoors and hindering investment in ailing parts of the city.

Telma Zúñiga decided she could not allow her 15-year-old son to walk home from school after robbers struck him on a recent afternoon. Jose Zúñiga was carrying a fundraising candy box as he walked home from school in north Oak Cliff on a recent afternoon when two robbers stole the $6 he was carrying.

"He looked pale when he got home," said Ms. Zúñiga, who called police, even though her son thought it was pointless to file a report for such an insignificant amount.

"It' wasn't about the $6," she said. "I started thinking that those men could do it again. A few weeks ago they killed an ice cream vendor in this neighborhood for less money."

Police initiative

Early this year, police officers in southwest Dallas kicked off an initiative to take back north Oak Cliff. They sought to build trust with business owners and residents in the mostly Hispanic neighborhood in and around the Jefferson Boulevard business corridor and the Bishop Arts District, and to encourage victims of crime to file reports regardless of their immigration status.

"We lost a little bit of that trust because of the fake drug scandal," Chief Golbeck said, referring to the incidents in 2001 in which almost two dozen mostly innocent immigrants were arrested after police informants planted fake drugs on them. "Foreign-born nationals in Dallas are reluctant to call police when they become victims of crime."

But reaching out to recent immigrants – many of whom are in the country illegally – has proven to be an uphill battle for police. During a recent town hall meeting Dallas police officials organized in north Oak Cliff, fewer than 20 of the roughly 300 attendees were Hispanic.

That's not surprising to Ruben Cavazos, a Web site developer who chairs a crime watch group in Winnetka Heights.

"It's no secret that undocumented people operate within a culture within our culture and they have completely different norms of operating," Mr. Cavazos said.

"There's an inhibition to call the police to report an incident," he said. "They think: 'I'll bring suspicion on myself or it could cause me legal trouble. Or the people who I'm reporting will find out I was the one who told the cops, and then I'll have trouble.' "

He said the lack of faith in such institutions is reflective of the fact that law enforcement agencies often can't be trusted in Mexico and Latin America.

Business robberies in the target area have declined 38 percent, but individual robberies have increased 12 percent since the initiative was launched.

Disheartened by the slow progress of their community outreach efforts, southwest police officers decided to change gears. While not backing off from their trust-building initiatives, they've taken more aggressive steps to take guns off the streets and beefed up police presence in the area at night.

Banks benefit

Financial institutions have become important stakeholders – and beneficiaries – of the problem.

In May 2001, Wells Fargo began accepting the Matricula Consular, a document issued by Mexican consulates, as a suitable form of identification to open bank accounts at its Austin branches after the city's police chief sought their help to fight the city's high robbery rate. The bank launched the initiative nationwide six months later, and other banks, including JP Morgan Chase and Bank One, soon followed suit.

"They're very attractive to Wells Fargo," said Maria Martinez, the bank's community banking district manager in Dallas. "They're probably the largest un-banked customer base out there."

Ms. Martinez said about 800 foreigners open savings and checking accounts at Wells Fargo branches nationwide each day using consular identification documents. Since the bank began accepting the Matricula, more than half a million foreigners have opened accounts using the consular-issued documents. In 2002, the bank launched a Spanish-language Web site.

Still, Ms. Martinez said, some of these new costumers often ask whether they can easily withdraw their funds in the event that they need to move or leave the country suddenly. The bank provides programs that allow immigrants to withdraw funds in banks in Mexico.

Still keeping cash

But most immigrants still keep large sums of cash on hand.

At the Santa Clara Apartments, where robbers assaulted several residents before killing Florencia Estrada on April 26, some neighbors were still shaken by the violent string of robberies.

Esteban Alvarado, who lives at the apartment adjacent to the unit where the Estradas lived, said his family could have just as easily been targeted.

"We had left the door open that day," he said, standing in the dark hallway where his children are no longer allowed to roam unsupervised. "We had $3,000 in cash here that day" to pay for his daughter's quinceañera, he said, referring to her coming-out party to celebrate her 15th birthday.

He doesn't have a bank account, and doesn't expect to open one.

"For the same reason that we all don't have one," Mr. Alvarado said. "I don't have I.D."

Ms. Estrada's husband, Jose, moved out of the apartment Wednesday, a couple of days after being released from the hospital after having his throat slashed during the robbery, Mr. Alvarado said. He told managers that he didn't want to take any of his belongings, which were expected to be distributed among neighbors.

E-mail elondono@dallasnews.com and teiserer@dallasnews.com