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From Los Angeles Times

Hate-crime arrests in Azusa evoke memories of attacks years ago

More than 50 gang members were indicted two weeks ago on charges that include waging a terror campaign against Azusa's black population. Relief is mixed with memories of racial attacks that remain unsolved.

by Abby Sewell, Los Angeles Times

June 19, 2011

Dion Smith moved to Azusa because he liked the sleepy suburb, nestled at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, with easy access to canyon trails where he would go walking.

The small San Gabriel Valley city felt like home — until the night of Dec. 5, 2001. That night, someone hurled a Molotov cocktail through the window of the house where Smith and his family were sleeping. The bottle did not ignite, and Smith, his wife and their 6-year-old daughter were unharmed. But soon after, they decided to leave Azusa for nearby Covina.

The Smiths were one of three black families attacked that night in what police described as brazen racially motivated crimes. Police long believed that a predominantly Latino gang hell-bent on getting blacks out of Azusa was behind the firebombings — but they could never prove it.

Federal authorities two weeks ago released an indictment of 51 members of the Azusa 13 gang on a host of charges that include waging an organized terror campaign against Azusa's black population beginning in 1992.

The indictments and subsequent arrests brought a sense of relief to Azusa's small black community — only 3% of the city's population — and to victims such as Smith who have moved away. But it was also a reminder of racial attacks that remain unsolved.

At least eight black families had their houses firebombed from 1996 to 2001, including the attack on Smith's house, according to police files.

And in 2000, a Cedars-Sinai Medical Center nurse named Ge'Juan Sallee was gunned down in broad daylight as he left an auto parts store.

"That's one of the ones that still kind of haunts us," said Azusa Police Sgt. Bruce Badoni, who was among the officers called to the scene when Sallee was shot.

To police, Sallee was an innocent person in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had no gang ties and did not even live in Azusa. At 24, he was the pride of his family. He had graduated from nursing school when he was 19 and moved from Ohio to Los Angeles to look for a job. Later, he bought a house in Covina — in part to get away from the crime in the city — and moved his mother, Carol Sallee, out to live with him.

More than mother and son, Carol said, they were "best friends." He was her only child.

"He was doing everything they wanted a young black man to do, and in the end, it didn't come out right," she said.

On the afternoon of Aug. 8, 2000, Sallee and his cousin made a run to a store in Azusa to find some parts for the radio in Sallee's classic 1968 Oldsmobile Delta. They had just left the store and were about to get back in the car when some people drove into the lot and opened fire without warning.

Sallee was shot in the head and died at the hospital.

Witnesses described the suspects' vehicle as a small white sedan with a black stripe and three people inside. Police set up surveillance in the area looking for the car but didn't find it. They showed lineups to witnesses but were not able to conclusively identify a suspect. The city pooled with other agencies to offer a $65,000 reward for tips. No one stepped forward to claim it.

Badoni said the hate crime investigations, like many involving Azusa 13, were stymied by the lack of witnesses willing to cooperate with police. People were afraid of reprisals by the gang. In some cases, such as the attack on Smith's house, there were no eyewitnesses and little evidence to go on.

Officials believe it's likely that some of the people responsible for the firebombings and Sallee murder are among those charged in the indictment. But they may never know for sure.

Smith, a 42-year-old copy machine technician, said he sees black families when he goes back to Azusa these days — to hike or to take his car to the mechanic — and wonders about their safety. The recent arrests give him hope that the people who attacked his family will be unable to target others.

"I would really like them out of the streets," Smith said. "That way I know people should be a lot safer going in and out of the city."

Carol Sallee agrees that it's good to hear that so many gang members are now off the streets. But even that brings her little personal comfort.

"It doesn't bring my son back," she said. "They all should get what they're going to get, but it doesn't help me any. I'm still lonely. I'm still miserable."

By all accounts, the number of racially motivated crimes in Azusa has decreased dramatically over the last decade. In 1999 and 2000, police investigated 17 hate crimes each year. Over the last several years, the number has remained in the low single digits, and some years there have been none.

In the wake of the firebombings and Sallee's murder, the city formed a hate crimes task force that morphed into the still-active Human Relations Commission, which focuses on hate-crime prevention and outreach to youth. Each year, the commission convenes a youth conference. And the city's annual Hands Across Azusa celebration, held the Sunday before Martin Luther King Day, draws hundreds to the lawn in front of City Hall.

Logan H. Westbrooks, a founding member of Human Relations Commission and pastor of Faith Temple Church of God in Christ, moved his church to Azusa in 2000. The church then moved to Los Angeles a few years ago, in part because of parishioners' fears of the gang violence, he said.

Westbrooks called the indictment a "godsend" because it showed people who had lived in fear of the gang that federal as well as local authorities were taking their plight seriously.

"Some felt as if no one cared" about the violence and threats, Westbrooks said. "And now this has happened. Someone does care."

Police and community leaders agreed that the community needs to remain vigilant. The indictment mentioned at least one attack as recent as 2010: Gang members assaulted a black high school student as he walked home from a track meet.

One former Azusa 13 member who spoke on condition of anonymity said he hoped the recent arrests and federal charges will help to break the culture that brought one generation after another into the gang.

"We were all brainwashed. Some of us got to realize it and some of us didn't. The [gang] culture's so deep you don't give it a second thought," the former gang member said. "Maybe the cycle will be broken now and future generations will not see color."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-azusa-hate-20110619,0,3459731,print.story

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Mexico launches high-profile crackdown on lower-grade crime

The eight-day push by state and local police targets car thefts, muggings and other offenses. It makes for great PR, but Mexicans are skeptical.

by Ken Ellingwood and Daniel Hernandez, Los Angeles Times

June 19, 2011

Reporting from Mexico City

Police across Mexico have awakened in recent days to a bold new assignment: enforcing the law.

The country's 31 governors and the mayor of Mexico City are leading an eight-day offensive aimed at lower-grade offenses that most irk ordinary Mexicans, like car thefts and muggings.

The high-profile crackdown, which began Monday, is being touted as an unprecedented bid by state authorities across Mexico to join hands, if temporarily, against the nation's crime epidemic. The drive, named after the acronym of the governors' association, is called CONAGO 1, sounding more like a deep-space probe than a splashy hunt for bad guys.

But it comes wrapped in pretty bows and ribbons. There have been photo opportunities of police in pressed uniforms posing next to rows of freshly buffed cruisers. Officials have held regular press briefings to explain how big a bite they've taken out of crime.

State and local police in convoys have set up roadblocks, checked motorists' papers and swapped information with one another across state lines through electronic databases. The push is paying off, they say. By Saturday, authorities had arrested 3,305 suspects, seized 116 guns and recovered 1,122 stolen cars, including a Hummer from Miami.

The government of Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, who heads the governors' group this year, said the sweep marked the first effort by the states to fight crime together. Mexico City is formally a federal district and is treated like a state.

Ebrard said the chief goal is combating crimes such as car theft, robberies of bus and subway passengers and kidnappings, as well as seizing weapons and breaking up gangs. In Mexico City, 22,000 officers have taken part in CONAGO 1, at times creating a conspicuous presence on street corners and parks.

That may sound like welcome news. But although many Mexicans long for safer streets — especially amid a bloody drug war that has killed nearly 40,000 people — the governors' vaunted rollout has been met with skepticism.

After all, many residents wondered aloud, isn't fighting crime what cops are supposed to do?

"Why should something surprise us or make news when it should be the everyday work of our police?" wrote Alejandro Marti, a sporting goods magnate whose son was kidnapped and slain three years ago in a crime that gripped the country.

Another commentator groused on Twitter: "This week, yes, the police will do their jobs, later it's the same impunity."

At a tree-shaded park in downtown Mexico City, a higher-than-usual number of police officers in flak vests and baseball caps were on patrol Friday. At newsstands, headlines told of a spate of recent killings in the northern state of Nuevo Leon.

Jesus Alfredo Vallejo, a 45-year-old magazine vendor, said he had been pulled over and searched twice on the city's east side during the crackdown.

"They get you out of your car, pat you down," Vallejo said. "It's OK. Well, sometimes it can be bad, because sometimes there are bad cops."

Police graft is rampant in Mexico, and so is public mistrust.

A 58-year-old ice cream vendor who gave his name only as Roberto said police had stopped him and demanded to search his cart, asking: "What you got there? What drugs you got?"

High-profile sweeps such as CONAGO 1 mean little in the long run, said Roberto, wearing a tucked-in golf shirt.

"This just comes when it's in season," he said.

And what season is it?

For one, the 2012 election campaign to be Mexico's next president is starting to take shape. Ebrard plans to vie for the nomination of his leftist Democratic Revolution Party and would love the chance to win points on public safety.

In addition, politicians all over Mexico are grasping to answer growing discontent over drug-related violence, which has soared since President Felipe Calderon launched the war against trafficking groups more than four years ago.

In the latest reminder of the extreme violence, the dismembered bodies of two bodyguards of Nuevo Leon's governor, Rodrigo Medina, turned up Tuesday outside the industrial city of Monterrey. Ebrard said the slayings probably came as retribution for the states' crackdown.

Federal officials are happy to see Mexican governors step up. Drug trafficking — a federal crime — yields the most headlines in Mexico. Yet the vast majority of crimes, including most homicides, are under the jurisdiction of state authorities, long a weak reed in Mexican law enforcement.

Although final tallies aren't yet known, there is already talk of CONAGO: The Sequel. Encouraged by early results, the governors are discussing making the operation permanent — meaning they will fight crime next week too.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-police-20110619,0,6471034,print.story

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Op-Ed

Drug war: One cartel falls, another rises

The crushing of Colombia's powerful Cali cartel was a triumph, but it left a power vacuum that Mexico's brutal drug lords were only too willing to fill.

by William C. Rempel

June 19, 2011

Forty years after President Nixon declared war on drugs, the soaring body count from narco-violence in Mexico seems to mock the very notion of progress in that effort. But what is most discouraging about the rampant brutality across our border is that it's largely a consequence of one of the drug war's greatest triumphs.

Colombia's Cali cocaine cartel, once the richest and most powerful crime syndicate in the world, fell as a direct result of U.S.-led law enforcement and diplomatic pressure about a decade ago. Its toppling remains one of the most significant blows inflicted on modern organized crime.

But the giant cartel's collapse left a power vacuum, and Mexican drug gangs are still fighting, with often grisly methods, to determine who will fill it.

The Cali cartel could be as ruthless as any other, but it preferred bribery to violence in the normal course of business. The vertically integrated corporate-style enterprise was run by four billionaires who reigned over a global monopoly that controlled every aspect of the drug trade, from jungle coca production to New York street sales.

In its prime, the cartel was a $7-billion-a-year criminal masterpiece that had bought off an entire country. Colombia was the original "narco-democracy" and a haven for narco-gangsters.

During the 1990s, Cali cartel lawyers rewrote portions of the national constitution outlawing extradition. Drug bosses picked who ran the Cali telephone utility and secretly donated $6 million to elect presidential underdog Ernesto Samper.

Millions of cartel dollars were spent building community police stations. The bosses financed a hospital and a law library. They owned and operated Cali's professional soccer team. In a nod to civic sensibilities, they refrained from carrying out most contract killings within the city limits. Over time, they came to be known as "the gentlemen of Cali."

But the gentlemen were deadly serious about removing impediments to their business. The cartel had its own intelligence force and the capacity to tap any telephone in Cali. Its paid sources included street cops, senators and members of the elite anti-narcotics task force. American drug enforcement agents complained that the cartel seemed always to be a step ahead of them. They called its intelligence wing "the Cali KGB."

Besides a staff of local lawyers, the bosses hired top U.S. defense lawyers, including several former federal prosecutors in Florida and a onetime Justice Department official from Washington, who was later convicted of racketeering.

The cartel accounting department tracked and processed massive volumes of cash. Paper currency from sales around the world was shipped by the ton, often aboard disposable aircraft. Old jetliners, typically stripped-down Boeing 727s, were bought for a few hundred thousand dollars and abandoned on airfields from Bogota to the Amazon jungle after discharging multimillion-dollar loads of $10's, $20's and $100 bills.

A revolving door of former legislators, governors and mayors formed the cartel's lobbying division. They were paid to arrange meetings for the bosses with politicians and to spread the word that the gentlemen of Cali would be generous to friends. Elected officials were constantly wooed with cash, cars, women and luxury vacations.

And the cartel had its own war department. The bosses once paid more than $1 million to hire a team of British mercenaries to hunt down rival drug lord Pablo Escobar, outfitting the commandos with better arms than those of most Colombian military units. They also employed about 150 bodyguards to protect the godfathers and their families.

Armed employees included a small team of sicarios , or assassins, paid to enforce cartel discipline and eliminate security risks. Whenever possible their victims were to "disappear." Unlike beheaded Mexican corpses, often left on prominent display, victims of the Cali cartel typically went into the Cauca River, never to be seen again.

What made the Cali cartel most dangerous, and the greatest menace to U.S. interests, was the way it bought off the Colombian government.

Imagine a country in which its president sends an emissary to apologize to drug lords when American diplomatic pressure forces him to crack down on traffickers. Or where police hotlines for anonymous crime tips are monitored 24/7 by the traffickers themselves. That was Colombia in the 1990s.

So far, there is no evidence that Mexican drug gangs are financing presidential elections. Traffickers are not picking who runs the national telephone company. And gangland lawyers aren't drafting legislation to block extradition of their bosses. Mexico is not the sanctuary that Colombia once was.

But Mexico remains in jeopardy. So does much of Latin America. Unless cocaine demand and its enormous trafficking profits fall, drug war successes are likely to generate similar patterns: simply forcing major narco-operations from one country to another.

And after Mexico, who's next?

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rempel-drug-war-20110619,0,6730768,print.story

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Promoting rehabilitation for criminals

The notion that rehabilitation should play no role in sentencing or the length of incarceration needs to be revisited.

June 20, 2011

You don't have to be soft on crime to believe in the rehabilitation of criminals. But a federal judge who tried to ensure that a convicted defendant would participate in a drug rehabilitation program had his wrist slapped last week by the Supreme Court. The ruling was a faithful application of federal law, but it should motivate Congress to rethink its approach to incarceration.

After a federal jury convicted Alejandra Tapia of smuggling illegal immigrants across the U.S-Mexico border, U.S. District Judge Barry T. Moskowitz sentenced her to more years in prison than called for under federal sentencing guidelines. The rationale, Moskowitz said, was to enable Tapia to enter an inmate drug rehabilitation program with a long waiting list. The judge's heart was in the right place, but the Supreme Court found that lengthening Tapia's sentence for that purpose was illegal.

Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Elena Kagan held that "a court may not impose or lengthen a prison sentence to enable an offender to complete a treatment program or otherwise to promote rehabilitation." The reason was simple: Federal law says that "imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation."

The decision makes sense. But the larger principle behind it is troubling: the notion that rehabilitation should play no role in sentencing or the length of incarceration.

That principle emerged in response to complaints about the previous system of indeterminate sentences, in which judges often gave different defendants unequal sentences for the same crimes. The length of a prisoner's incarceration also depended on whether he or she was thought to be sufficiently rehabilitated to be released. As a result, critics say, minorities ended up serving more time in prison than whites.

The controversy over sentencing highlights a perennial debate about the nature of a just punishment system: Is fairness furthered by treating every similarly situated defendant the same or by paying attention to individual differences? Taking rehabilitation into account is an example of the latter philosophy — and wise public policy in our view.

A generation after it removed rehabilitation as a factor in incarceration, Congress needs to take another look at the issue. One possibility is to make more generous a current provision allowing prisoners to earn limited time off for good behavior. Another is to allow judges to impose lesser sentences on defendants who agree to rehabilitation. (Kagan's opinion noted that this policy was not before the court.) Finally, sentencing guidelines could be revised to take account of a defendant's agreement to enter an in-prison rehabilitation program.

It was wrong for a judge to extend a defendant's sentence to allow her to enter a rehabilitation program. But the courts should be free to provide prisoners with incentives for rehabilitation. Action by Congress, not the courts, is necessary to bring that about.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-rehab-20110620,0,2393946,print.story

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Either scrap or revamp Secure Communities

The program was meant to nab dangerous illegal immigrants with criminal histories. It hasn't worked out. It's time to scrap it or revamp it.

June 15, 2011

Gov. Jerry Brown is under increasing pressure to suspend California's participation in the controversial federal immigration enforcement program known as Secure Communities. The program requires state and local police to share the fingerprints of anyone who is arrested with federal officials, who then check them against their own databases to determine the arrestee's immigration status.

In theory, Secure Communities sounds like a sensible idea. It was sold to Congress as a way for the federal government to use its limited resources to nab dangerous immigrants who have a history of criminal convictions. But that's not the way it has been used. Instead, nearly half of those deported under the program since 2008 have been undocumented immigrants with no criminal records at all, or who had been convicted of misdemeanors. In California, more than 8,000 people deported between October 2008 and January 2011 under the program had never been convicted of a crime.

Instead of making communities more secure, Secure Communities may actually make them less so. Police in San Jose, San Francisco and elsewhere insist that the program will make their jobs harder because immigrants will be reluctant to report crimes or cooperate with investigations for fear that any contact with the authorities could lead to their arrest and deportation.

In any case, it makes little sense to waste scarce law enforcement resources tracking and deporting law-abiding immigrants, even if they are in the U.S. illegally. What this country needs is comprehensive reform that deals simultaneously with border security, enforcement and the future of the 11 million illegal immigrants already here. Treating all illegal immigrants as dangerous criminals doesn't address the underlying issues.

Last week, seven members of California's congressional delegation joined a growing chorus of elected officials, including most of the members of the Los Angeles City Council, to demand that the state suspend participation in Secure Communities. And this week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called the program a waste of taxpayer money. But even if the governor agrees to pull out, which would be fine with us, it would be a mostly symbolic gesture. The Obama administration has already nixed such efforts by Illinois, Massachusetts and New York, arguing that states don't have the authority to stop sharing fingerprint information with the federal government.

Ultimately, immigration is a problem that states can't fix. It's a federal issue. President Obama should either scrap or revamp Secure Communities. Until then, he should instruct Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to limit the scope of the program to illegal immigrants convicted of serious felonies.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-secure-20110615,0,1639745,print.story

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