Pubdate: Sun, 20 Jun 2010
Source: New York Times (NY)
Page: A18
Copyright: 2010 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Randal C. Archibold
Referenced: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/prelimsem2009/table_4al-ca.html

ON BORDER VIOLENCE, TRUTH PALES COMPARED TO IDEAS

When Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, 
announced that the Obama administration would send as many as 1,200 
additional National Guard troops to bolster security at the Mexican 
border, she held up a photograph of Robert Krentz, a mild-mannered 
rancher who was shot to death this year on his vast property. The 
authorities suspected that the culprit was linked to smuggling.

"Robert Krentz really is the face behind the violence at the 
U.S.-Mexico border," Ms. Giffords said.

It is a connection that those who support stronger enforcement of 
immigration laws and tighter borders often make: rising crime at the 
border necessitates tougher enforcement.

But the rate of violent crime at the border, and indeed across 
Arizona, has been declining, according to the Federal Bureau of 
Investigation, as has illegal immigration, according to the Border 
Patrol. While thousands have been killed in Mexico's drug wars, 
raising anxiety that the violence will spread to the United States, 
F.B.I. statistics show that Arizona is relatively safe.

That Mr. Krentz's death nevertheless churned the emotionally charged 
immigration debate points to a fundamental truth: perception often 
trumps reality, sometimes affecting laws and society in the process.

Judith Gans, who studies immigration at the Udall Center for Studies 
in Public Policy at the University of Arizona, said that what social 
psychologists call self-serving perception bias seemed to be at play. 
Both sides in the immigration debate accept information that confirms 
their biases, she said, and discard, ignore or rationalize 
information that does not. There is no better example than the role 
of crime in Arizona's tumultuous immigration debate.

"If an illegal immigrant commits a crime, this confirms our view that 
illegal immigrants are criminals," Ms. Gans said. "If an illegal 
immigrant doesn't commit a crime, either they just didn't get caught 
or it's a fluke of the situation."

Ms. Gans noted that sponsors of Arizona's controversial immigration 
enforcement law have made careers of promising to rid the state of 
illegal immigrants through tough legislation.

"Their repeated characterization of illegal immigrants as criminals - 
easy to do since they broke immigration laws - makes it easy for 
people to ignore statistics," she said.

Moreover, crime statistics, however rosy, are abstract. It takes only 
one well-publicized crime, like Mr. Krentz's shooting, to drive up fear.

It is also an election year, and crime and illegal immigration - and 
especially forging a link between the two - remain a potent boost for 
any campaign. Gov. Jan Brewer's popularity, once in question over 
promoting a sales tax increase, surged after signing the immigration 
bill, which is known as SB 1070 but officially called the Support Our 
Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.

No matter that manpower and technology are at unprecedented levels at 
the border, it may never be secure enough in Arizona's hothouse 
political climate when Congressional seats, the governor's office and 
other positions are at stake in the Aug. 24 primaries.

It took the Obama administration a few weeks to bow to that political 
reality and go from trumpeting the border as more secure than it had 
ever been to ordering National Guard troops to take up position there 
- - most of them in Arizona, Mr. Obama assured Ms. Brewer in a private 
meeting - because it was not secure enough.

Crime figures, in fact, present a more mixed picture, with the likes 
of Russell Pearce, the Republican state senator behind the 
immigration enforcement law, playing up the darkest side while 
immigrant advocacy groups like Coalicion de Derechos Humanos (Human 
Rights Coalition), based in Tucson, circulate news reports and 
studies showing that crime is not as bad as it may seem.

For instance, statistics show that even as Arizona's population 
swelled, buoyed in part by illegal immigrants funneling across the 
border, violent crime rates declined, to 447 incidents per 100,000 
residents in 2008, the most recent year for which comprehensive data 
is available from the F.B.I. In 2000, the rate was 532 incidents per 100,000.

Nationally, the crime rate declined to 455 incidents per 100,000 
people, from 507 in 2000.

But the rate for property crime, the kind that people may experience 
most often, increased in the state, to 4,082 per 100,000 residents in 
2008 from 3,682 in 2000. Preliminary data for 2009 suggests that this 
rate may also be falling in the state's biggest cities.

What is harder to pin down is how much of the crime was committed by 
illegal immigrants.

Phoenix's police chief, Jack Harris, who opposes the new law, said 
that about 13 percent of his department's arrests are illegal 
immigrants, a number close to the estimated percentage of illegal 
immigrants in the local population. But the Maricopa County Sheriff's 
Office, which runs the jail for Phoenix and surrounding cities and is 
headed by Joe Arpaio, a fervent supporter of the law, has said that 
19 percent of its inmates are illegal immigrants.

Scott Decker, a criminologist at Arizona State University, said a 
battery of studies have suggested that illegal immigrants commit 
fewer crimes, in part because they tend to come from interior cities 
and villages in their home country with low crime rates and generally 
try to keep out of trouble to not risk being sent home.

But he understood why people's perceptions of crime might lag behind 
what the statistics show. "Hard as it is to change the crime rate, it 
may be more difficult to change public perceptions about the crime 
rate, particularly when those perceptions are linked to public 
events," Mr. Decker said.

He added, "There is nothing more powerful than a story about a 
gruesome murder or assault that leads in the local news and drives 
public opinion that it is not safe anywhere."

Kris Kobach, a University of Missouri law professor who helped write 
the Arizona immigration law, pointed to crimes like a wave of 
kidnappings related to the drug and human smuggling business in 
Phoenix, something Ms. Brewer herself noted when she signed the law.

Although the reports have dipped in the past couple of years, the 
police responded to 315 such cases last year.

"That's scary to people, and people react to that all over the 
state," Mr. Kobach said. "They are concerned. 'That might happen in 
my part of the city eventually.' "

Terry Goddard, the state attorney general, who does not support the 
immigration law, said the drop in violent crime rates might not 
reflect the continued violence, often unreported, that is associated 
with smuggling organizations.

Mr. Goddard said he doubted that the immigration law would put a dent 
in the smuggling-related crime that grabs attention in the state. For 
that reason, Mr. Goddard, who is running to be the Democratic nominee 
for governor in the primary, said he backed the deployment of 
National Guard troops and supports increasing manpower and spending 
on police and prosecutor anti-smuggling units.

Brian L. Livingston, executive director of the Arizona Police 
Association, said he would prefer more attention on the border, too. 
But until then, he said, laws like Arizona's are necessary.

"We know the majority of people crossing across are not criminal, but 
unfortunately some criminal elements are embedded with them," he 
said, adding, "Governor Brewer gets that."

As Ms. Brewer put it just after signing the bill: "We cannot 
sacrifice our safety to the murderous greed of drug cartels. We 
cannot stand idly by as drop houses, kidnappings and violence 
compromise our quality of life." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake