MS - 13 Documentary:
Drug Policy as Race Policy: Best Seller Galvanizes the Debate
Economist article 1/20/11 on Central American gang activity
The rot spreads
Drug-trafficking gangs find a promising new home in some of the poorest and most vulnerable countries in the Americas Organised crime in Central America Jan 20th 2011 | SAN SALVADOR | from the print edition BATTLEFIELDS aside, the countries known as “the northern triangle” of the Central American isthmus form what is now the most violent region on earth. El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, along with Jamaica and Venezuela, suffer the world’s highest murder rates (see map). The first two are bloodier now than they were during their civil wars in the 1980s. Organised crime is now the main cause of the bloodshed. Central America forms a bridge between Colombia, the world’s biggest cocaine producer, and Mexico, which is the staging post for the world’s biggest market for the drug—the United States. As pressure has mounted on the mobs, first in Colombia and now in Mexico, Central America has attracted more traffic. Ten years ago it had fewer cocaine seizures than either Mexico or the Caribbean; by 2008 it accounted for three times more than both combined. Over the same period the murder rate rose across the region, doubling in some countries. “Central America is entering an extraordinarily critical phase” in which its peace and security are threatened by “the onslaught of the drug-trafficking organisations”, an official from the International Narcotics Control Board, a United Nations agency, warned this month. Related topics * El Salvador * United States * Colombia * Honduras * Central America Much of the blame lies with the arrival of the Mexican mafias, mainly the Zetas and the Sinaloa “cartel”. The assassination of Honduras’s top anti-drugs official in 2009 seems to have been a Sinaloa hit. Zeta training-camps and recruitment banners have sprung up in Guatemala. The Mexican mobs are also contracting out their work, taking advantage of Central America’s competitive narco-labour market. They recruit trained hitmen from the pool of soldiers laid off by several countries’ armies, slashed since the end of the civil wars 20 years ago. Guatemala has cut its army’s nominal strength by two-thirds since 1996. Now former members of its notorious Kaibiles special forces are said to have close links with the Zetas, themselves a former Mexican special-forces unit. See our interactive map of drug-trafficking routes and "cartel" territories in Mexico Then there are the roughly 70,000 members of Central America’s maras, or youth gangs, which provide a ready supply of teenagers willing to ferry drugs, mind kidnap victims and carry out other low-level tasks. The blossoming links between the drug traffickers and the maras are a big worry. “What would happen if the cartels infiltrated and united with the maras? There would be war, as in the favelas [self-built settlements] of Rio de Janeiro,” says Alejandro Gómez Vides, president of the Central American Court of Justice. Leave aside that nowadays Rio looks peaceful compared with parts of Central America. There are signs this fusion is already happening. In El Salvador the proportion of crimes attributed to minors rose from 5% in 2000 to 12% in 2009, and the number of imprisoned youths more than doubled in that period. Mexican mobs have found the maras to be “fertile ground”, says Aída Luz Santos de Escobar, president of El Salvador’s public-security council, a government agency. In the maras they have found “people who don’t value life, nor even their own liberty,” she says. The Mexicans’ tendency to pay in drugs has pushed up local consumption, offering new opportunities for criminality. Most Central American governments are ill-equipped to tackle the mayhem. The countries of the “northern triangle” are among the poorest in the Americas, with income per head of around $2,700, less than a third that of Mexico. The $2.1 billion of drugs, arms and cash recovered in Guatemala during the first six months of last year was equivalent to 5% of the country’s GDP. Yet despite its poverty, Central America receives little outside help: of the $1.6 billion so far allocated under the Mérida Initiative, a United States drug-fighting programme for Mexico and Central America, Mexico received 84%. Political instability adds to the difficulties. Nearly all foreign aid to Honduras, as well as intelligence-sharing, was frozen following a coup against its president in 2009. One result has been a rise in drug flights from Colombia and Venezuela to Honduras, according to a report from the Wilson Centre, a think-tank based in Washington, DC. At least 154 such flights were logged in 2009, compared with almost none in 2005. A new government has since restored some of Honduras’s international ties, and the flights have tapered off. But some American congressmen want to cut aid until human rights are respected. Though Central America offers a new base for Mexican traffickers, it could yet be their undoing. Mexico’s cartels, now the most powerful in Latin America, began as runners for the Colombians and were paid in product. They promptly seized control of distribution in the United States, and turned the Colombians into mere suppliers. The maras of Central America, which have close ties to inner-city gangs in el norte, could yet pull off the same trick. Roy David Urtecho, Honduras’s attorney-general, recently warned that the maras were seeking “to establish themselves as legitimate traffickers instead of street-level thugs”. The battleground in the war on drugs may be about to shift again. from the print edition | The Americas --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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New York Magazine article about Rikers Island: The Program
<a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/70978/">The Lords of Rikers</a>
The juvenile unit of the New York City jail is a survival-of-the-fittest finishing school for the roughest kids in New York. And an upcoming case alleges the guards run the show. * By Geoffrey Gray *
Published Jan 30, 2011 Illustration by Jeffrey Smith “One Main, House of Pain.” That’s what inmates have called the most dangerous wing of what is considered the most dangerous facility on Rikers, the juvenile-detention building known as the Robert N. Davoren Center, or RNDC. The place is a kind of sick mirror image of a freshman dorm in college. Everyone here is between the ages of 16 and 18, and instead of SAT scores and high-school transcripts, these teenagers have commissary accounts and public defenders. The vast majority are minorities from broken homes in public housing, awaiting robbery and murder charges. They have all the ordinary problems of youth: impaired judgment, poor impulse control, and invincibility complexes, distorted and amplified by hard life on the streets. Within the facility, the power dynamics are akin to those in Lord of the Flies, but, as these are teenagers, often even more perverse. They go to war over items like Pop-Tarts and cookies, arm themselves with toothbrushes sharpened into daggers, and send one another to the hospital. This juvenile jail is a gateway to the state prison system and also where the adult selves of these young people are being formed. Recently, Rikers has been an especially explosive environment. Last year, the city reported 84 assaults overall against Correction officers, the highest number in the last decade. The Correction-officers union was dubious about that figure; using a different formula, it found the number of assaults against officers to be nearly double that amount. At RNDC, one captain nearly died in a fight and had his jaw broken in two places. In another facility, an officer had part of his thumb bitten off. “It’s getting to the point that they’re cutting staff and they’re taking dangerous chances on the proverb of saving money,” says one RNDC captain. “I got two decades on the shelf. I had a broken hand last year, and I got my nose fractured this year.” At Rikers, the uptick in violent incidents has created another problem: Inmates are not punished for breaking jail rules because the traditional discipline tool doesn’t work; the cells in the Bing, the punitive-segregation building, are routinely filled. At RNDC, officers have found a rough-and-ready solution to this problem, which is, as they say, to separate the sheep from the wolves. The wolves are all sent to one unit: One Main. No one, neither guard nor prisoner, wants to come here. The inmates are all high risk, and many have gang affiliations. With fewer staff monitoring the housing areas, among a host of other complicating factors, officers have been charged with deputizing violent teenagers to keep order for them and falsifying documents to cover it up. This muddled relationship—“the devil’s bargain,” as former prison commissioner Marty Horn calls it—can easily get out of hand as the inmates take over the asylum. “There’s nothing you can do, or anyone else, to make them stop fighting,” says the captain. “They are kids, and they want to fight each other. That’s what they do.” And some are stronger than others. “Jail is like the ocean,” says a deputy warden. “You got your bluefish, your barracudas, and your great whites.” Christopher Robinson was like many of the teenagers who end up at One Main, a hard-luck kid from the roughest part of Brooklyn. He was not a high-risk inmate. He arrived in late August of 2008. He’d been sent because he’d violated his parole for, of all things, showing up at a new job as an overnight stock boy at Staples when he was supposed to be home. He’d been arrested a few months earlier for an alleged assault; before that, he’d served a stint at a juvenile facility upstate for stealing cell phones and a computer. Among the kids that Robinson hung around with in Brooklyn, Rikers is a kind of finishing school. A rough streetwise kid from the projects expects to be sent there, hears the stories, learns the jail’s rituals from older boys. And for Robinson, Rikers ran in the family. Israel Rivera, his father, spent time there on the way upstate for a murder he’d committed at age 15, two months after Christopher was born. “When I was growing up, when a dude went to jail, it was the thing to do,” Rivera tells me. “You was a somebody. To be a man, you had to go to prison.” While Christopher’s mother, Charnel, doted on him, there was little she could do to counteract the gravity of the streets. Some said her son was a Crip. “I knew Ice,” a friend told Correction investigators, using Robinson’s nickname. “We met at Crip meetings at a Brooklyn park.” Robinson was a tough kid, but he was still partly a child, too. His mother told me that after he came home from the juvenile facility upstate, he would try to climb into her bed. When she told him he couldn’t, he slept on the floor beside her bed. See Inside: House of Pain. Map by Jacob Thomas. By the time Robinson arrived at One Main, Michael McKie, a Correction officer, was desperate to get out. McKie hadn’t planned on working in a jail. At six feet eight inches tall, McKie was a basketball star. “He was a dunking machine,” says Eric Eisenberg, McKie’s coach at Tilden High in Brooklyn. “He’s blocking shots, running the floor, taking charges.” When McKie’s dream job with the NBA didn’t work out, he joined Correction. Jail work was an odd fit. “You could not pick a more meek, genteel, kind kid in the whole world than Michael McKie,” Eisenberg says. Both McKie and Robinson have left One Main, but not under circumstances either of them would have chosen. On October 18, 2008, Robinson was beaten to death in his cell by fellow inmates. And months later, McKie and a partner were charged with running a criminal enterprise inside their housing area and outsourcing their duties to the teenagers who killed Robinson. The enterprise was so organized that it allegedly had a name—“the Program”—with inmates operating in “teams” to enforce order while extorting inmates for their commissary chits and phone privileges, even the right to sit in a seat. If convicted, McKie and his partner could face up to 25 years in prison and end up serving time with those once under their watch. The case is scheduled to go to trial in March and is shining a light on one of the darkest places in our culture. Taxpayers pay about $72,000 per inmate per year at Rikers, just about twice as much as tuition at the best private schools in Manhattan. The case has also captured the attention of the Department of Justice. In recent months, prosecutors from the Civil Rights Unit in Washington, D.C., have contacted city defense attorneys to obtain information about cases in which officers are alleged to have used inmates to keep order at RNDC. Sandy Rubenstein, who represents Robinson’s mother in a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city, got a call from the Feds. So did attorney Julia Kuan, who filed a number of claims on behalf of Rikers inmates and turned over information. “They are casting a wide net,” Kuan says of federal prosecutors. “They are looking into bringing a class-action-type lawsuit. They are less interested in whether or not anything has been substantiated, but in seeing a pattern of similar complaints.” The main target of their investigation, she says, is “this ‘Program’ stuff.” In the dayrooms of the Rikers juvenile facility, it’s not uncommon for officers to see an inmate sitting on a tall stack of plastic chairs—a kind of throne—while other inmates stand or sit on the floor. To sit down is a privilege, and therefore has value. One way to earn a seat, inmates told investigators, according to internal reports, is to join a “team,” a group that has formed a power bloc within a housing area. But while power is exercised for its own sake, it’s also used to compel weaker inmates to surrender the meager fruits of Rikers life. “Are you wit’ it?” is the way it begins. At RNDC, what it means is, have you accepted the power structure as it exists. “Everyone goes through it sooner or later,” one inmate told investigators, according to an internal report. “It is part of your time, manning up.” “They attempt to extort you for the telephone, commissary, and even what channel [is] on the television,” said another inmate. “If you can even watch television.” Of course, they prey on the weakest. The only way to escape from the cycle is to become physically fearsome, “to get your weight up,” as one inmate phrased it. One inmate had his milk stolen in the dayroom, then was punched in the face. “Since you are not ‘with it,’ you get nothing,” his attacker said. When you’re asked “Are you wit’ it?,” if you answer no, you get “spanked,” that is, beaten savagely. One confessed team member said, “We put the dude in a chicken-wing position and attack the rib area only.” The chicken wing means hands behind the head, like a full nelson in wrestling. Another inmate told investigators that if “you did not comply, you had to walk through a line of inmates; while you walked, you would be assaulted.” Once you are “with it,” you enter a hierarchy. The lowest-ranking members of the team, investigators found, were referred to as “dayroom niggas”—peons who have no rights and don’t even get to use the chairs and tables. Just above them are the “pop-off dummies.” “The pop-off dummy is the inmate that complies with anything the Team tells them to do,” one jail report states. Illustration by Jeffrey Smith Like fight. The call “P.O.D.’s” is like the opening bell in a prize fight. “They’ll say, ‘P.O.D.’s!’ and then you see the two weakest guys in the dorm start fighting,” says the RNDC captain. “You see these two little retards that weigh 80 pounds each trying to fight each other.” At Rikers, violence is a kind of currency, and whether people are afraid of you is inseparable from your status. The officers nominally run things, but they know that if the inmates aren’t afraid of them, they may have problems. And while violent criminals are always dangerous, the type of officer guarding them has changed in recent years. Veterans now complain that seasoned old-timers like themselves have retired and that, because of budget cuts, their replacements no longer get the proper training they need. What’s more, the city now requires Correction officers to have at least two years of college, a rule some say has weeded out many streetwise recruits. Now nearly half of all officers are women, who are sometimes outmatched physically. Veterans also complain about the widespread use of video cameras throughout Rikers. The cameras are supposed to keep unruly officers from getting out of line, but they also prevent some officers from disciplining inmates. The cameras do not have audio tracks, and when disputes arise, it’s impossible for investigators to determine who said what. “The inmates play to the cameras,” the RNDC captain says. Officers fear suspensions, which has created an atmosphere in which officers might be inclined to have inmates keep order. What’s more, the seniority system is designed in such a way that the most inexperienced officers are assigned to work the most dangerous details. The new officers are also asked to control violent teenagers who have ever-shifting allegiances to gangs both inside and outside Rikers. An RNDC captain reels off gangs in the building like items on a shopping list: “You got your Latin Kings, your Netas, your Crips, your Bloods, your MS-13s, and your skinheads. And then we mix them all up and you throw them together.” Each gang has its own code, its own secret language and manuals. Walking down the corridors, officers hear inmates shout out “Eighty-eight,” a Blood code that means a captain is nearby, or “Forty-four,” a Crip code that means the same thing. The most powerful gang on Rikers are the Bloods, and the Bloods network is so vast it’s hard to keep track of the various sects: Goon Bloods, Gorilla Stone Bloods, Brim Bloods, Desperado Bloods. Often, one Blood will approach another to confirm his Bloods status. “G-checking,” it’s called. The Blood will deliver the phrase “What that red be like?” If the Bloods member is legit, he responds, “That red be like five-poppin’, six-droppin’, Crip-killin’ to my casket, five alive, six must die, rest in peace to O.G. Tye, 50/50 Love, Fuck 50/50 Love, that’s the old laws that go against Bloods …” Other factions have influence, too. The Trinitarios, a Dominican gang, are considered one of the fastest-growing in New York and are known for their weapon of choice—machetes. Another Rikers power base is the Nation of Islam, which has long offered protection to Muslim devotees throughout the state and federal prison system. For a young Correction officer, learning the ropes can be punishing. Michael McKie was assaulted by inmates three times—once he was sent to the hospital. He put in for transfers out of RNDC, but the requests were repeatedly denied. He and his wife, Sharmaine, talked about moving away with their two young daughters if a transfer didn’t come through. By the fall of 2008, he was desperate. His fifth anniversary at Correction was approaching, and with it a major bonus, bringing his salary to roughly $84,000. But was the increase in pay worth it anymore? McKie’s high-school basketball coach Eisenberg remembers getting panicked calls from him. “He’d be like, ‘This place is crazy, I got to get out of here.’ ” “I got to get out of here,” Christopher Robinson told his mother when she visited him in Rikers shortly before his death. It was unclear when he was leaving. A hearing for his parole violation had been rescheduled several times, and a two-week stay at the end of the summer had turned into nearly two months in custody and now it’s the fall. Violent incidents were reported nearly every day throughout the facility. One detainee was beaten over the head with a telephone receiver. Another had a finger severed. Four others suffered “orbital fractures” from being punched in the face. On September 19, 2008, a month before Robinson’s death, a Legal Aid assistant faxed a letter to senior Correction officials to alert them to a 16-year-old housed in Modular 3 Upper North who “was asked by the inmates in his housing area if he was ‘with the Program.’ ” The teen said no, and “was jumped by several inmates.” After the fight was broken up, the inmate alleged, an officer ordered the 16-year-old to put his hands on his head, then “struck him in the mouth. [The teen] was escorted into the vestibule and elbowed in the eye and struck several times with a stick.” On September 21, 2008, two days after the warning letter was faxed, five other inmates in a nearby unit were attacked “because they would not be down with the team,” an inmate said. Down a few floors and through the long halls of RNDC, Michael McKie and partner Khalid Nelson had their hands full in One Main. On that same September day, an inmate in their custody, Alcides Polanco, a teenager awaiting trial for murder, claimed he was approached by another inmate inside his cell and asked, “Are you wit’ it?” He said no, and a fight broke out. Afterward, Polanco was taken to the medical center (but not before he made his way to the dayroom and assaulted one of his attackers) and then to the emergency room with an orbital fracture. Investigators questioned Polanco and other inmates, and by comparing these accounts with those the officers had given, they began to suspect that the officers were, at the very least, looking the other way when inmates were assaulted. A month later, in Modular 3 Upper North, Christopher Robinson got into a fight. He and several others were alleged to have attacked another teenager. The detainee claimed he was asked, “Do you respect me?” When he laughed, Robinson and others jumped in. It is conceivable that Robinson might have been joining a team, working his way through the Program, looking to have a chair. After a lockdown following the fight, a deputy warden wanted to transfer Robinson and other attackers to the Bing. But as usual, the Bing was full. Robinson had to be transferred somewhere and punished. He was sent to One Main, House of Pain. “That’s when the hunter became the hunted,” says the deputy warden. When Robinson arrived at One Main, Michael McKie was not on duty. He was home, using up his vacation time. He was in good spirits. He’d received a phone call from Rikers. There was news: McKie’s transfer had finally come through. Soon he would be reporting to work at the Manhattan Detention Center, the jail in downtown Manhattan known as the Tombs, a far more comfortable assignment. “He would open your cell when you were sleeping,” an inmate claimed. “The team would then put you in a chicken-wing position and beat you.” Meanwhile, at One Main, Robinson was on lockdown. Meals were slipped through a slot in his cell door. He had reason to be scared. He was childhood friends with Tyreece Abney, the last inmate to be beaten to death on Rikers, four years earlier. On October 17, Robinson was scheduled to attend a hearing for his parole violation. But the parole hearing was rescheduled a third time. That night, he played cards and checkers with a friend in the dayroom and talked about girls. He’d recently learned his girlfriend was pregnant. He wanted to raise the child, even if it meant he would be a father in prison like his dad. On October 18, after lunch had been served at One Main, three inmates entered Robinson’s cell. It’s unclear how they got in. Only one officer has access to the cell doors. This officer works inside the glassed-in security station on the housing area—the Bubble, it’s called. Every hour, inmates have “options” to either stay in the dayroom or their cells. The officer in the Bubble opens all cell doors for roughly five minutes so inmates can get their belongings. Inmates are not permitted to enter one another’s cells. On this day, they entered. According to the police report, inmates “demanded [Robinson] pay a protection fee from his commissary fund, or they would beat him until he promised to comply.” Robinson refused. “One held his arms,” the report states. “The other two hit him in the chest until he fell unconscious.” The officer on hall duty lingered near the entrance of the housing unit. The assault lasted ten to fifteen minutes, witnesses say, an eternity for a beatdown. An officer eventually entered the cell and administered CPR, to no avail. The medical examiner was called. When the NYPD forensics team arrived, they found the boy’s body lying in his cot, face up. His tan shirt was torn. His liver had been lacerated. One lung was punctured, blood surrounding it. He had been beaten so badly that a footprint could be seen on his chest. Meanwhile, detectives interviewed the detainees on One Main, many of whom were Bloods. If Robinson was a Crip, he had been housed in unfriendly territory. “The interviews,” the police report states, “reveal that two days prior [Robinson] had stated that he ‘would die before he would “get with it.” ’ ” As the commissioner of the billion-plus Department of Correction, Marty Horn’s first task after Robinson’s death was to summon his senior staff to his office and watch the entire movie Lord of the Flies. Horn wanted them to see the final scene in the film, in which, after warring among themselves on a remote island, the surviving boys see a boat from the Royal Navy. “If we didn’t play that role, the strong arm of the state being a protector of the weak, then these housing units would devolve into Hobbesian worlds,” Horn says. The irony, hard to be lost on anyone in the room, was that the devolution had already occurred. Horn changed the name One Main to One Central, so it wouldn’t rhyme with House of Pain. Among other things, investigators from the Correction intelligence unit undertook a massive internal investigation. In total, 341 detainees at RNDC were questioned. Nearly everyone confirmed the Program’s existence. “When I was in 2 Upper South, I was asked if I was ‘wit’ it.’ When I said no, I was hit in the face by a ‘pop-off dummy’ on the tier,” one inmate said. “I was housed on Mod 1 and broke my hand because I was not ‘wit’ it,’ ” another said. “My cell just opened up. I was not with it.” “They tell another inmate they have to pay to live or even pay to sit at a table. Forget about a chair.” “I do not have a chair. I am just a dayroom nigga.” Correction investigators also fielded allegations about other RNDC officers’ complicity in the Program, so many that Horn claims he decided to plan his exit from Rikers. “It horrified me,” Horn says, “to think this was all going on under my nose.” Dora Schriro, Horn’s replacement at Correction, has struggled to control the increasing number of violent incidents on Rikers. Last month, at a City Council oversight hearing, Schriro claimed the reason for the uptick was that staff were better reporting incidents, but she failed to articulate a comprehensive plan to combat jail violence. In December, after clamoring from Sidney Schwartzbaum, the union leader for deputy wardens, Schriro initiated one reform by opening up a punitive-segregation unit within RNDC so inmates are punished there rather than herded together in units like One (Main) Central. So far, it’s been working to quell violence, sources inside RNDC say. Meanwhile, prosecutors are preparing to go to trial in Robinson’s murder case. At the Bronx district attorney’s office, the Program and jail violence is familiar territory. In February 2008, months before Robinson arrived on Rikers, prosecutors charged RNDC officer Lloyd Nicholson with running the Program, assaulting inmates and falsifying reports. In one instance, an inmate claimed, Nicholson “put the ‘not with it niggaz’ in the dayroom and extremely beat the shit out of the person, until they say ‘wit’ it.’ ” One inmate was beaten so badly he had a punctured lung. Last year, Nicholson was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison. The crux of criminal cases against Correction officers often rest on the reliability of the witnesses. The problem for prosecutors is that in nearly all cases they are inmates, who are notoriously untrustworthy. What makes inmates even more unreliable on the stand is that they are often forced to admit to making deals with prosecutors in exchange for their testimony. But piecing together the case against McKie and Nelson, inmates told investigators similar things. “Most of the problems started with the C.O.,” one inmate said, according to an internal report. “They call him ‘Mac.’ He would open your cell while you were sleeping, and he would let the Team come into your cell. The team would then put you in a ‘chicken-wing’ position and beat you.” “C.O. Mack ask inmates if they are wit’ it,” another inmate stated. “They do not hit you in the face unless you try and defend yourself and start swinging.” Another told investigators McKie tried to make him a “P.O.D., pop-off dummy.” When he refused, the inmate was “assaulted by unknown inmates.” Prosecutors came to believe that all of this was consciously sanctioned and even directed by the guards. They ultimately charged McKie and Nelson under an enterprise-corruption statute, a state version of RICO. McKie and Nelson had essentially started their own prison gang, the indictment claims, and “recruited inmates to serve as subordinate managers, foot soldiers, and enforcers for the Program and directed them to maintain order within One Main.” “I just want people to know, my husband didn’t do this,” says Sharmaine McKie, Michael McKie’s wife. We’re sitting in a diner in Brooklyn, and her eyes well up with tears. She reaches for a napkin. “Gangs is what he never wanted to get involved with. He’s not supposed to be the one in jail.” After his arrest, a judge placed McKie’s bail at $400,000. He and his family couldn’t afford a bond. His old basketball coach Eisenberg put up his house, but there wasn’t enough equity in it to cover McKie’s bail. McKie was sent to an upstate prison, waiting for trial to begin, only to have it postponed several times. Almost two years passed before he was released. Sharmaine refused to tell her daughters where Daddy was. “He’s at work,” she’d say. The girls would cry and scream, and finally she told them; soon she was like Robinson’s mother and other mothers and spouses who make those dreadful prison visits. In a way, the gravity of Rikers had pulled them all down into its orbit. One day in court, Sharmaine approached Charnel Robinson. Trying to show compassion, Sharmaine told Charnel, “I know what it’s like to lose your loved ones. I lost my husband for a year and a half [in prison].” Charnel was not comforted. “Your husband may be away for a year or whatever, but you’re visiting him, talking to him on the phone. I am never talking to my son again. And he’s my only child.” After his death, Charnel learned that Christopher’s girlfriend was having an abortion. Charnel begged her family to reconsider. Charnel offered to raise it. To bring up her boy’s child would be a way of keeping Christopher with her. The girlfriend had the abortion anyway. “Like two deaths at once,” Charnel says. She is sitting in her apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. She’s preserved Christopher’s bedroom as a kind of shrine. She’s kept his first paycheck from his first real job—the one that got him in trouble with his parole officer and triggered his fatal trip to Rikers—sealed for two years before opening it. He earned $279.39 as an overnight stock boy. She also has letters he sent her when he first went away to the juvenile facility upstate, letters she used to read in the bathroom with the door locked so others in the apartment wouldn’t hear her sobbing. I pick one up. “Yo mom wats good wit you,” he’d written. “I realy miss you I getting in troble up here but I’m gone change up cause I got to get home … I wish I never got locked up and the first place and if I get home I am not coming back.”
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The Caribbean Sun, sea and murder Jan 31st 2008 PORT OF SPAIN From The Economist print edition
Here, too, drug-trafficking is to blame ELEVEN people, including five children, were shot dead in Guyana last weekend when unidentified gunmen went on the rampage in the village of Lusignan. A couple clung to their 11-year-old grand-daughter as bullets were pumped into them; a little boy clutched his mother's night-dress as she tried to crawl under her bed. Furious villagers later set up barricades, demanding protection and justice. Police suspect it was the work of a gang acting on the orders of Rondell “Fineman” Rawlins, Guyana's most wanted man with a $150,000 bounty on his head. He is said to blame the government for the disappearance eight days earlier of his pregnant girlfriend, on her way to the nearby capital of Georgetown to give birth. But racial hatred provided the target. Like Guyana's government and half the population, Lusignan is mostly ethnic Indian, while Rawlins and his gang are ethnic Africans. Many of Guyana's neighbours suffer even worse violence. Indeed, the Caribbean, better known for its blue skies, cricket and rum punch, is the world leader in violent crime. According to a joint UN-World Bank study last year, it has a murder rate of 30 per 100,000 inhabitants—four times the North American figure and 15 times the West/Central European average. Jamaica is the world's most murderous country, followed by El Salvador, Guatemala and Venezuela. But some smaller Caribbean islands are catching up fast, irrespective of size or wealth. Pretty little St Kitts, with just 40,000 inhabitants, suffered three murders in four days last November. The prosperous Bahamas are far more dangerous than impoverished Guyana. In Trinidad and Tobago, the murder rate has quadrupled over the past decade, despite a fall in unemployment from 18% in 1994 to 5% last year. The common factor behind this violence is the illegal drugs trade, which provides gangs with cash and weapons. But the link with narcotics is not simple. Since the 1990s, cocaine shipments in the Caribbean have stabilised while murder rates have soared. Suriname, no slouch in the drugs business, has the region's safest streets. Violence surges when gang politics are unsettled. Fights break out over turf, bad debts or deals gone sour. Rivalries peak when supplies run dry, and when arrests or deaths create a leadership vacuum. More than 6m tourists visited the English-speaking Caribbean last year. Few ran into serious trouble. Most of the bullets hit young working-class men with the wrong networking skills, or their families and neighbours. But armed robbery, ending sometimes in murder, has a wider social reach. In some islands, a climate of fear curtails everyday routines. Many Jamaicans no longer risk a night-time drive to Kingston's airport. Catholic churches in Trinidad have moved their Christmas midnight mass to an earlier hour. Public reaction varies. Crime barely featured in last year's elections in the Bahamas and Jamaica, nor is it an issue in Belize's current campaign. But in Trinidad and Guyana, political polarisation has brought calls for get-tough policies such as “zero tolerance”, the enforcement of the death penalty, and the imposition of a state of emergency. The region's prisons are already crowded. Of 31 countries with more than three out of every thousand citizens behind bars, 17 are in the Caribbean. Trinidad, Jamaica and Barbados are now strengthening their coastguards to choke the influx of drugs and guns—though this may simply force the drug barons to shift their trade elsewhere. On land, where police services are creaky and their staff sometimes corrupt, reform is under way, but will be a long haul. Even when arrests are made, it can be years before the culprits are brought to trial. Removing the glamour of gangland crime for the region's disaffected youth will take even longer.
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Mexico has become the new Colombia due to displacement and US intervention in Columbia. Tecate Journal Smugglers Build an Underground World
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Drug smugglers are using passageways, like this one in Tecate, Calif., to avoid stepped-up border security. Increased border enforcement has helped deter illegal immigrant traffic and boosted drug seizures, but it has also driven traffickers to find new ways to breach the American border. By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD Published: December 7, 2007 TECATE, Calif., Dec. 6 — The tunnel opening cut into the floor of a shipping container here drops three levels, each accessible by ladders, first a metal one and then two others fashioned from wood pallets. The tunnel stretches 1,300 feet to the south, crossing the Mexican border some 50 feet below ground and proceeding to a sky-blue office building in sight of the steel-plated border fence. THE CONCEALMENT A shipping container shrouds the opening of a smuggling tunnel found Monday. THE OTHER SIDE The business building where the tunnel opens in Tecate’s twin city, of the same name. Three or four feet wide and six feet high, the passageway is illuminated by compact fluorescent bulbs (wired to the Mexican side), supported by carefully placed wooden beams and kept dry by two pumps. The neatly squared walls, carved through solid rock, bear the signs of engineering skill and professional drilling tools. Shrink-wrapped bundles of marijuana, nearly 14,000 pounds worth $5.6 million in street sales, were found in the shipping container and in a trailer next to it, making clear the tunnel’s purpose: to serve as another major smuggling corridor. Found Monday here in Tecate, it is the latest of 56 cross-border tunnels found in the Southwest since the onset of additional guards and fencing aboveground after Sept. 11, 2001. “I’m never alarmed when they are found,” said a senior investigator with a task force of federal law enforcement agencies still combing the scene Tuesday. “I am alarmed we don’t find them enough.” The authorities believe that the increased border enforcement has helped deter illegal immigrant traffic and allowed agents to make more drug seizures. But they acknowledge that it has also been driving traffickers to redouble their efforts to find alternative ways of breaching the border. It is not just tunnels. Immigration agents in San Diego say they are concerned about a spate of rickety boats found in the last year along San Diego County beaches, some having just dropped off illegal immigrants. People smuggled through official border crossings have been discovered tucked into hollowed-out dashboards in vans and trucks and in perilous pockets in vehicle undercarriages. “It’s like squeezing a balloon,” said Michael Unzueta, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in charge of the San Diego area. “The air has got to go somewhere.” But the tunnels are now found with alarming regularity, and often just under the noses of law enforcement officers. This latest one is a block from a Border Patrol station and next to a hill that agents often use to watch for illegal immigrant traffic. And in September, a Border Patrol vehicle became stuck in a sinkhole in San Luis, Ariz., 50 yards north of a border fence, that turned out to be a collapsed segment of a smuggling tunnel under construction. A total of 69 such tunnels have been discovered — 68 along the Southwest border, the other at the Canadian border with Washington State — since the authorities began keeping records on them in 1990. Of that total, 80 percent have been found, mostly through informant tips, since the terrorist attacks, when border enforcement was significantly stepped up. The longest, found last year in the Otay Mesa district of San Diego, stretched nearly half a mile. Because of concerns that terrorists could adopt the tactic to smuggle radioactive and chemical materials into the United States, a military team checks each underground passageway discovered; no residue from such materials has ever been found. Most of the tunnels are of the “gopher” variety, dug quickly and probably by small-time smugglers who may be engaged in moving either people or limited amounts of drugs across the border. But more than a dozen have been fairly elaborate affairs like this one, with lighting, drainage, ventilation, pulleys for moving loads and other features that point to big spending by drug cartels. Engineers have clearly been consulted in the construction of these detailed corridors. The tunnel here has drawn additional scrutiny because just hours after it was discovered, the deputy police chief of the twin city across the border, Tecate, Mexico, was killed in a fusillade at his home, in what appeared to be a cartel assassination. The deputy chief had helped find the passage’s Mexican end. A Border Patrol agent on routine patrol discovered the tunnel when his drug-sniffing dog reacted to the smell of marijuana several hundred feet away. When the agent entered the container, the Border Patrol said, a man with a pistol in his waistband disappeared deep into the opening. The tunnel, like the others found, will be sealed at the border and eventually filled with cement slurry. Though few people have been prosecuted for activities related to the construction of these tunnels, a federal law enacted this year makes it a felony to design or build one, or to participate in smuggling involving it. There was no answer at the telephone number listed for the owner of the lot where the tunnel was discovered on the American side. But The San Diego Union-Tribune identified him as Flavio Aguirre, an auto broker in Tecate, Mexico, who told the paper that he rented the site a couple of years ago to men who said they operated a furniture-moving company. The building where the tunnel opens on the Mexican side has been closed by the police. People who work nearby say that drug trafficking is common in the area but that they never saw anything unusual at the building, at least during working hours. “They are all over here,” one man said of drug smugglers, “but you don’t see anything.” Not likely that they don't see anything. What he may be saying is that if you tell anyone anything you get killed so it's best to pretend you don't see anything.
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Ideas & Trends
Reporting While Black
THE police officer had not asked my name or my business before grabbing my wrists, jerking my hands high behind my back and slamming my head into the hood of his cruiser.
“You have no right to put your hands on me!” I shouted lamely.
“This is a high-crime area,” said the officer as he expertly handcuffed me. “You were loitering. We have ordinances against loitering.”
Last month, while talking to a group of young black men standing on a sidewalk in Salisbury, N.C., about harsh antigang law enforcement tactics some states are using, I had discovered the main challenge to such measures: the police have great difficulty determining who is, and who is not, a gangster.
My reporting, however, was going well. I had gone to Salisbury to find someone who had firsthand experience with North Carolina’s tough antigang stance, and I had found that someone: me.
Except that I didn’t quite fit the type of person I was seeking. I am African-American, like the subjects of my reporting, but I’m not really cut out for the thug life. At 37 years old, I’m beyond the street-tough years. I suppose I could be taken for an “O.G.,” or “original gangster,” except that I don’t roll like that — I drive a Volvo station wagon and have two young homeys enrolled in youth soccer leagues.
As Patrick L. McCrory, the mayor of Charlotte and an advocate of tougher antigang measures in the state, told me a couple of days before my Salisbury encounter: “This ganglike culture is tough to separate out. Whether that’s fair or not, that’s the truth.”
Tough indeed. Street gangs rarely keep banker’s hours, rent office space or have exclusive dress codes. A gang member might hang out on a particular corner, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, but one is just as likely to be standing on that corner because he lives nearby and his shirt might be blue, not because he’s a member of the Crips, but because he’s a Dodgers fan.
The problem is that when the police focus on gangs rather than the crimes they commit, they are apt to sweep up innocent bystanders, who may dress like a gang member, talk like a gang member and even live in a gang neighborhood, but are not gang members.
In Charlotte’s Hidden Valley neighborhood, a predominately African-American community that is home to some of the state’s most notorious gangs, Jamal Reid, 20, conceded that he associates with gangsters. Mr. Reid, who has tattoos and wears dreadlocks and the obligatory sports shirts and baggy jeans, said gangsters are, after all, his neighbors, and it’s better to be their friend than their enemy.
Sheriff’s records for Charlotte-Mecklenburg County show that Mr. Reid has been arrested several times since 2004 for misdemeanors including driving without a license, trespassing and marijuana possession. Despite his run-ins with the law, Mr. Reid said he had never been in a gang and complained that the police had sometimes harassed him without a good reason.
“A police officer stopped in front of my house and told me to come to his car,” he told me. “I said, no. They got out and ran me down. They did the usual face-in-the-dirt thing.”
Maj. Eddie Levins of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police said that officers are allocated to different areas based on the number of service calls they receive, so high-crime areas are likely to get more police attention.
“Where there are more police, expect more police action,” Major Levins said. “Some people think ‘I can just hang out with this gang member as long as I don’t do any crime.’ Well, expect to be talked to. We can’t ignore them. In fact, we kind of want to figure out the relationship between all these gang members and their associates.”
Major Levins said that his fellow officers aren’t perfect and that he was aware of occasional complaints of harassment, but he said that most residents would like to see more police officers on the streets, not fewer.
Even Cairo Guest, a 26-year-old who complained he was handcuffed in his backyard, acknowledged that gang members in his neighborhood were “out of control.”
“There are a lot of guys out here doing stuff they shouldn’t have been doing,” Mr. Guest said.
Still, some civil rights advocates complain that the definition of a gang member is vague. Gang researchers find that most active members usually cycle out of their gangs within about a year. Even active participants might only be marginal members, drifting in and out of gangs, said Kevin Pranis, a co-author of “Gang Wars,” a recent report on antigang tactics written by the Justice Police Institute, a nonprofit research group.
Harsh penalties could actually reinforce gang membership by locking peripheral gangsters in jail with more hardened criminals, he said.
Suburban Salisbury, population 30,000, is about as far from the traditional ganglands of Los Angeles, Chicago or even Durham as you can get. But it has had an outsize voice in pushing for tougher antigang measures since a 13-year-old black girl was inadvertently killed there in a gang shootout after a dance party in March.
I arrived in Salisbury at midnight, figuring that gang members would be more visible after dark, and found a local hangout with the help of a cabdriver.
Striking up a conversation with young gang members in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar town is always a tricky proposition, but the one advantage I figured I had was that I am African-American. Brown skin can be a kind of camouflage in my profession, especially if you do a lot of reporting in minority neighborhoods, as I do. Blending in visually sometimes helps me observe without being observed.
But even when my appearance has been helpful, the benefits rarely survive the first words out of my mouth, which usually signal — by accent or content — that I’m not from around wherever I am.
“What’s The New York Times doing down here?” asked an incredulous black man. He and about a dozen other men were standing in front of a clapboard house in Salisbury. I observed several drug sales there within minutes of arriving.
“Man, you a cop,” said another. “Hey, this guy’s a cop!”
“You’ve got me wrong,” I said trying to sound casual as the men looked at me warily. I started to pull my press identification out of my wallet. “I’m a reporter. I’m just trying to talk to you about your neighborhood.”
In the distance I heard neighborhood lookouts calling: “Five-O! Five-O!” — a universal code in American ghettos for the approaching police. I thought they were talking about me, but thought again as three police cars skidded to a stop in front of us.
A tall white police officer got out of his car and ordered me toward him. Two other police officers, a white woman and a black man, stood outside of their cars nearby. I complied. Without so much as a question, the officer shoved my face down on the sheet metal and cuffed me so tightly that my fingertips tingled.
“They’re on too tight!” I protested.
“They’re not meant for comfort,” he replied.
While it is true that I, like many of today’s gang members, shave my head bald, in my case it’s less about urban style and more about letting nature take its course. Apart from my complexion, the only thing I had in common with the young men watching me smooch the hood of the black-and-white was that they too had been in that position — some of them, they would tell me later, with just as little provocation.
But here again I failed to live up to the “street cred” these forceful police officers had granted me. As the female officer delved into my back pocket for my wallet she found no cash from illicit corner sales, in fact no cash at all, though she did find evidence of my New York crew — my corporate identification card.
After a quick check for outstanding warrants, the handcuffs were unlocked and my wallet returned without apology or explanation beyond their implication that my approaching young black men on a public sidewalk was somehow flouting the law.
“This is a dangerous area,” the officer told me. “You can’t just stand out here. We have ordinances.”
“This is America,” I said angrily, in that moment supremely unconcerned about whether this was standard police procedure or a useful law enforcement tool or whatever anybody else wanted to call it. “I have a right to talk to anyone I like, wherever I like.”
The female officer trumped my naïve soliloquy, though: “Sir, this is the South. We have different laws down here.”
I tried to appeal to the African-American officer out of some sense of solidarity.
“This is bad area,” he told me. “We have to protect ourselves out here.”
As the police drove away, I turned again to my would-be interview subjects. Surely now they believed I was a reporter.
I found their skepticism had only deepened.
“Man, you know what would have happened to one of us if we talked to them that way?” said one disbelieving man as he walked away from me and my blank notebook. “We’d be in jail right now.”
“You have no right to put your hands on me!” I shouted lamely.
“This is a high-crime area,” said the officer as he expertly handcuffed me. “You were loitering. We have ordinances against loitering.”
Last month, while talking to a group of young black men standing on a sidewalk in Salisbury, N.C., about harsh antigang law enforcement tactics some states are using, I had discovered the main challenge to such measures: the police have great difficulty determining who is, and who is not, a gangster.
My reporting, however, was going well. I had gone to Salisbury to find someone who had firsthand experience with North Carolina’s tough antigang stance, and I had found that someone: me.
Except that I didn’t quite fit the type of person I was seeking. I am African-American, like the subjects of my reporting, but I’m not really cut out for the thug life. At 37 years old, I’m beyond the street-tough years. I suppose I could be taken for an “O.G.,” or “original gangster,” except that I don’t roll like that — I drive a Volvo station wagon and have two young homeys enrolled in youth soccer leagues.
As Patrick L. McCrory, the mayor of Charlotte and an advocate of tougher antigang measures in the state, told me a couple of days before my Salisbury encounter: “This ganglike culture is tough to separate out. Whether that’s fair or not, that’s the truth.”
Tough indeed. Street gangs rarely keep banker’s hours, rent office space or have exclusive dress codes. A gang member might hang out on a particular corner, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, but one is just as likely to be standing on that corner because he lives nearby and his shirt might be blue, not because he’s a member of the Crips, but because he’s a Dodgers fan.
The problem is that when the police focus on gangs rather than the crimes they commit, they are apt to sweep up innocent bystanders, who may dress like a gang member, talk like a gang member and even live in a gang neighborhood, but are not gang members.
In Charlotte’s Hidden Valley neighborhood, a predominately African-American community that is home to some of the state’s most notorious gangs, Jamal Reid, 20, conceded that he associates with gangsters. Mr. Reid, who has tattoos and wears dreadlocks and the obligatory sports shirts and baggy jeans, said gangsters are, after all, his neighbors, and it’s better to be their friend than their enemy.
Sheriff’s records for Charlotte-Mecklenburg County show that Mr. Reid has been arrested several times since 2004 for misdemeanors including driving without a license, trespassing and marijuana possession. Despite his run-ins with the law, Mr. Reid said he had never been in a gang and complained that the police had sometimes harassed him without a good reason.
“A police officer stopped in front of my house and told me to come to his car,” he told me. “I said, no. They got out and ran me down. They did the usual face-in-the-dirt thing.”
Maj. Eddie Levins of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police said that officers are allocated to different areas based on the number of service calls they receive, so high-crime areas are likely to get more police attention.
“Where there are more police, expect more police action,” Major Levins said. “Some people think ‘I can just hang out with this gang member as long as I don’t do any crime.’ Well, expect to be talked to. We can’t ignore them. In fact, we kind of want to figure out the relationship between all these gang members and their associates.”
Major Levins said that his fellow officers aren’t perfect and that he was aware of occasional complaints of harassment, but he said that most residents would like to see more police officers on the streets, not fewer.
Even Cairo Guest, a 26-year-old who complained he was handcuffed in his backyard, acknowledged that gang members in his neighborhood were “out of control.”
“There are a lot of guys out here doing stuff they shouldn’t have been doing,” Mr. Guest said.
Still, some civil rights advocates complain that the definition of a gang member is vague. Gang researchers find that most active members usually cycle out of their gangs within about a year. Even active participants might only be marginal members, drifting in and out of gangs, said Kevin Pranis, a co-author of “Gang Wars,” a recent report on antigang tactics written by the Justice Police Institute, a nonprofit research group.
Harsh penalties could actually reinforce gang membership by locking peripheral gangsters in jail with more hardened criminals, he said.
Suburban Salisbury, population 30,000, is about as far from the traditional ganglands of Los Angeles, Chicago or even Durham as you can get. But it has had an outsize voice in pushing for tougher antigang measures since a 13-year-old black girl was inadvertently killed there in a gang shootout after a dance party in March.
I arrived in Salisbury at midnight, figuring that gang members would be more visible after dark, and found a local hangout with the help of a cabdriver.
Striking up a conversation with young gang members in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar town is always a tricky proposition, but the one advantage I figured I had was that I am African-American. Brown skin can be a kind of camouflage in my profession, especially if you do a lot of reporting in minority neighborhoods, as I do. Blending in visually sometimes helps me observe without being observed.
But even when my appearance has been helpful, the benefits rarely survive the first words out of my mouth, which usually signal — by accent or content — that I’m not from around wherever I am.
“What’s The New York Times doing down here?” asked an incredulous black man. He and about a dozen other men were standing in front of a clapboard house in Salisbury. I observed several drug sales there within minutes of arriving.
“Man, you a cop,” said another. “Hey, this guy’s a cop!”
“You’ve got me wrong,” I said trying to sound casual as the men looked at me warily. I started to pull my press identification out of my wallet. “I’m a reporter. I’m just trying to talk to you about your neighborhood.”
In the distance I heard neighborhood lookouts calling: “Five-O! Five-O!” — a universal code in American ghettos for the approaching police. I thought they were talking about me, but thought again as three police cars skidded to a stop in front of us.
A tall white police officer got out of his car and ordered me toward him. Two other police officers, a white woman and a black man, stood outside of their cars nearby. I complied. Without so much as a question, the officer shoved my face down on the sheet metal and cuffed me so tightly that my fingertips tingled.
“They’re on too tight!” I protested.
“They’re not meant for comfort,” he replied.
While it is true that I, like many of today’s gang members, shave my head bald, in my case it’s less about urban style and more about letting nature take its course. Apart from my complexion, the only thing I had in common with the young men watching me smooch the hood of the black-and-white was that they too had been in that position — some of them, they would tell me later, with just as little provocation.
But here again I failed to live up to the “street cred” these forceful police officers had granted me. As the female officer delved into my back pocket for my wallet she found no cash from illicit corner sales, in fact no cash at all, though she did find evidence of my New York crew — my corporate identification card.
After a quick check for outstanding warrants, the handcuffs were unlocked and my wallet returned without apology or explanation beyond their implication that my approaching young black men on a public sidewalk was somehow flouting the law.
“This is a dangerous area,” the officer told me. “You can’t just stand out here. We have ordinances.”
“This is America,” I said angrily, in that moment supremely unconcerned about whether this was standard police procedure or a useful law enforcement tool or whatever anybody else wanted to call it. “I have a right to talk to anyone I like, wherever I like.”
The female officer trumped my naïve soliloquy, though: “Sir, this is the South. We have different laws down here.”
I tried to appeal to the African-American officer out of some sense of solidarity.
“This is bad area,” he told me. “We have to protect ourselves out here.”
As the police drove away, I turned again to my would-be interview subjects. Surely now they believed I was a reporter.
I found their skepticism had only deepened.
“Man, you know what would have happened to one of us if we talked to them that way?” said one disbelieving man as he walked away from me and my blank notebook. “We’d be in jail right now.”
