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From the Los Angeles Times

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Immigration from Mexico in fast retreat, data show

Census figures show that fewer people are leaving and many are returning as a lack of jobs in the U.S. and tighter border enforcement dissuade many who might have entered illegally.

by Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times

November 15, 2011

Reporting from Mexico City

North of the U.S.-Mexico border, Republican presidential candidates are talking tough on illegal immigration, with one proposing — perhaps in jest — an electrified fence to deter migrants.

But data from both sides of the border suggest that illegal immigration from Mexico is already in fast retreat, as U.S. job shortages, tighter border enforcement and the frightening presence of criminal gangs on the Mexican side dissuade many from making the trip.

Mexican census figures show that fewer Mexicans are setting out and many are returning — leaving net migration at close to zero, Mexican officials say. Arrests by the U.S. Border Patrol along the southwestern frontier, a common gauge of how many people try to cross without papers, tumbled to 304,755 during the 11 months ended in August, extending a nearly steady drop since a peak of 1.6 million in 2000.

The scale of the fall has prompted some to suggest that a decades-long migration boom may be ending, even as others argue that the decline is only momentary.

"Our country is not experiencing the population loss due to migration that was seen for nearly 50 years," Rene Zenteno, a deputy Mexico interior secretary for migration matters, has said.

Douglas Massey, an immigration scholar at Princeton University, said surveys of residents in Mexican migrant towns he has studied for many years found that the number of people making their first trip north had dwindled to near zero.

"We are at a new point in the history of migration between Mexico and the United States," Massey said in a Mexico City news conference in August hosted by Zenteno.

Experts in Mexico say the trend is primarily economic. Long-standing back-and-forth migration has been thrown off as the U.S. downturn dried up jobs — in construction and restaurants, for example — that once drew legions of Mexican workers.

About 12.5 million Mexican immigrants live in the United States, slightly more than half without papers, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

These days, Mexicans in the United States have discouraging words for loved ones about prospects for work up north. U.S. contractors who used to recruit in Mexico likewise have little to offer.

"What stimulates migration is the need for workers," said Genoveva Roldan, a scholar at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "Right now, the migrant networks are functioning to say, 'Don't come — there's no work.' "

Juan Carlos Calleros, a researcher at Mexico's National Migration Institute, said the agency's surveys have found that a large share of Mexican migrants coming home on their own or sent back by the Border Patrol had spent just a month or two on U.S. soil and returned because they had no work.

Alongside the bleak jobs picture is a trek that has grown riskier and more expensive because of stepped-up enforcement on the U.S. side, a crackdown that at the same time has prompted many migrants to stay in the United States rather than try to cross back and forth. Migrants also cite an increasingly hostile political climate north of the border, as expressed in state laws targeting undocumented immigrants.

"It keeps getting harder and harder," said 35-year-old Joel Buzo, who returned to the central state of Guanajuato after a three-month search in the U.S. turned up only irregular, poorly paid work tearing up old railroad tracks in Utah. He lasted six more months before giving up.

Buzo, a musician, said it's easier to get by in Mexico, even though jobs are also scarce. He has no plans to travel north again.

"What's happening up there is happening here," he said by telephone from the migrant-heavy town of Romita. "But it's worse there."

In Guanajuato, long one of the country's biggest migrant-sending states, thousands of Mexicans have come back, but "it hasn't been a massive return," said Susana Guerra, who heads the state's migrant affairs office. She calls the decline in northward migration a "spasm" — not a lasting reality.

Safety in northern Mexico has also become a growing worry for would-be migrants.

Nearly 200 people, many of them U.S.-bound Mexican migrants, were killed in the northern state of Tamaulipas last spring after being seized from buses by gunmen believed to be tied to the Zetas drug gang. A year earlier, 72 migrants from Central and South America were massacred in the same area.

"It's not worth it — for now," Calleros said.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon's administration has sought a measure of credit for the migration decline by promoting the idea that improved social conditions and services in Mexico, such as broadened health insurance, are easing "push" factors that encourage would-be migrants to go. Mexican officials say falling birthrates have helped by relieving population pressures on communities.

But skeptics point to a stubborn shortage of jobs in Mexico, lingering huge gaps in pay between the two countries and figures that show a growing number of Mexicans in poverty. A drop in the flow of Central American migrants is a further sign that the U.S. labor market — not conditions at home — determines whether migration is up or down, some experts say.

And some migration specialists say there are still many parts of Mexico, especially in the impoverished south, with a ready supply of people willing to make the journey.

The real test of whether the migration drop represents a lasting change will come when the U.S. economy gets back on its feet.

Carlos Mireles, who lives in the town of Manuel Doblado, Guanajuato, said two nephews moved to Mexico City after they lost their restaurant jobs in Chicago and spent six months without work. But the young men, in their 20s, haven't given up on life north of the border.

"Their idea is to go back to Chicago when things get better, because wages are so little here in Mexico," Mireles said. "That's why they want to return to the United States."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-migration-20111115,0,5636230,print.story

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From Google News

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Living with murder:

The agony of Detroit's neighborhoods -- and their cry for help

She lives with murder.

Detroit homicide investigator LaTonya Brooks sees the faces of the grieving. She recalls the crime scenes and reluctant witnesses, all standing around, fearful of talking -- nobody's snitching here.

And she feels the pressure shared by her colleagues: the weight of too many cases, the frustration of not catching all the killers, the long hours and strain on families, and the outrage over innocent victims lost to vengeance.

"Everybody wants to use violence," Brooks said.

Or, as Detroit homicide Sgt. Kenneth Gardner put it: "There's a sense of helplessness and hopelessness out there. And that's a dangerous combination."

One that burdens the city.

Although parts of Detroit are feeling the boost of a renaissance, with new residents moving into Midtown and businesses adding thousands of jobs downtown, residents in many neighborhoods say they're not sharing in the revival.

Murder is the most devastating reminder.

From January 2003 through Nov. 6, more people were killed in Detroit -- 3,313 -- than have died among U.S. forces in 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan.

Detroit's homicide rate led the nation's 25 largest cities last year and is on track to repeat this year. Killers also get away with murder here more often than elsewhere.

The city's homicide investigators carry a far heavier case load than the national average. Meanwhile, their homicide closure rate, ranging from 35% to 45% in recent years, lags the 65% average nationwide.

"I'm just tired," said Lola Way, 56, who lives on Detroit's east side. "I know there is crime everywhere, but this is no way to live."

Carl Taylor, a Detroit native and Michigan State University sociology professor who studies urban violence, said of the city: "The very fabric of our community has changed -- violence has become acceptable. We have to do better."

For Brooks, the numbers and growing apathy are numbing, professionally and personally. She's especially tormented by one unsolved murder: the case of Russell Marcilis Sr.

Her father.

Detroit cries out for help: As body count rises, so does city's frustration

Three nights before Christmas last year, Detroit homicide investigator LaTonya Brooks raced through the city's east side after taking a call from her screaming, crying mother.

"I almost couldn't make out what she was saying, but I knew to get my butt up and go over there," Brooks said.

Lights from fire trucks illuminated the sky as she arrived at her parents' home on Manistique. Smoke hung in the air. Her hysterical mother was surrounded by neighbors and officers.

"Where's my dad?" Brooks asked as panic washed over the veteran officer who normally relishes her tough-as-nails demeanor.

Her parents' brick bungalow had been torched, one of three houses firebombed on the block that night.

Her mother escaped but could only watch as neighbors tried to rescue her husband of 35 years. The scorching flames melted the metal security door shut -- keeping rescuers at bay.

"She said he was literally trying to get out of the house, but his body was burning and he collapsed in the doorway," Brooks said.

Russell Marcilis Sr., 70, was dead, Detroit's 304th homicide of 2010.

An unintended target.

His killer, police say, had a three-year dispute with a resident on Manistique and lobbed Molotov cocktails into three homes because he was unsure where his enemy lived.

'Crime is just getting worse in the city'

Marcilis, a retired city inspector, was the kind of guy Detroit needs.

He welcomed generations of neighborhood children into his home. Most of them called him Grandpa. He mowed neighbors' lawns. He helped shovel their snow. He wanted to help transform neighborhood boys, especially those with absent fathers, into responsible men. He was that man on the block who told younger men to "Get a job," "Don't wear your pants sagging on your waist," and "Take care of your kids."

His death strikes at the frustration felt among residents in many neighborhoods, who say it's time for more to be done -- by the mayor, the police chief, the City Council and residents themselves -- to stem the killings.

"We're not getting what we need, and crime is just getting worse in the city," said James Hardman, a 64-year-old retired autoworker who lives on the city's east side. "They need to tear down all these abandoned houses, because if they just board them up, the drug dealers are going to go in there.

"And they just go at it killing each other."

The challenge of quelling violence comes as city leaders seek to build on the momentum in the city's core, where Quicken Loans has relocated its headquarters downtown, adding more than 3,000 jobs; where an expansion of the Detroit Medical Center in Midtown, near Wayne State University's growing campus, has helped fuel a burst of businesses and an influx of residents; where the redeveloped Detroit riverfront offers walkable green space in a former industrial wasteland, and where plans are forging ahead for a 9-mile, $550-million light-rail line along Woodward.

These areas and others don't experience the homicide levels plaguing the city's hardest-hit neighborhoods. And overall, violent crime has declined in the city. But as Detroit's population has fallen, the murder rate has not. It was the highest among America's 25 largest cities last year -- more than twice as high as cities such as Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia.

Many victims are innocent bystanders killed by random violence. They include children and grandparents. And people simply going about their lives when they were killed -- maybe visiting a barbershop, maybe walking down the sidewalk, maybe even lying in bed.

Marcilis' longtime neighborhood, near Coleman A. Young International Airport, is one of the three pockets in Detroit most devastated by murders in recent years, according to a Free Press analysis of homicide records dating to 2003. The others were Brightmoor in the northwest part of the city and a pocket just northeast of the airport.

From 2003 through June, those neighborhoods led the city in the number of homicides per block group -- U.S. census boundaries that encompass a cluster of city blocks and about 1,500 people. When killings in surrounding neighborhoods were taken into account, the areas stood out as homicide hot spots.

But other parts of the city largely escaped killings, including the Grandmont and Rosedale areas on the city's west side. There, residents have set up their own patrols and work closely with police.

Mayor Dave Bing, who has repeatedly called public safety the city's No.1 issue, has pitched a plan to strengthen neighborhoods and improve safety. The plan, known as the Detroit Works Project, envisions the entire city getting short-term intervention and enhanced city services for a six-month period. The city then will analyze best practices in three targeted areas and apply them elsewhere. No residents will be asked to move, as suggested in an earlier version of the plan. It would be costly and difficult to execute -- and there's no plan for how to pay for it.

Lola Way, 56, said the threat of crime is making life intolerable in the east-side neighborhood where she lives, near the city's airport, with her two grown daughters and three grandchildren.

"The rent is nice, the house is nice," she said, "but it's not worth it to stay here. I don't feel safe, even when the police come quickly."

The Police Department, much as the Free Press did in identifying areas with a lot of homicides, is using crime statistics to identify high-crime areas in need of increased patrols. That information is shared with other city departments to steer non-police resources toward fighting crime, such as demolishing abandoned homes. The U.S. attorney also has stepped up federal prosecutions of gun crimes, with tougher penalties, and is targeting a high-crime ZIP code, 48205.

"We realize at the end of the day that we have some resource challenges," Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. told the Free Press. "But ... that is no excuse not to give a level of service to the citizens of Detroit that they deserve, especially as it relates to violent crime."

He and other authorities bemoan a street culture in which arguments too often are considered settled only when a body ends up on a slab in the morgue.

"My frustration," Godbee said, "is with the senseless loss of life -- someone dying over a pair of Cartier glasses, young people, instead of having dispute-resolution skills and anger management, settling disputes with guns. To me, those are the things that just tear at your heart."

Senseless violence hits one of their own

The call came into a Detroit 911 operator at 11:42 p.m. Dec. 22, 2010.

"Please send somebody; somebody threw a cocktail Molotov through my door. My husband is trapped in a fire....Get him! Get him! Get him! Get him! Open the door! We can't even get in the house.... My husband is dead."

Marie Marcilis, 65, made the frantic call after escaping the engulfed house. She watched neighbors try to rescue her husband, Russell, as he lay inside the front door, dying from burns and soot inhalation.

Neighbors on Manistique had already called for help. One resident reported that she thought someone was shooting at her house, but what she heard was the sound of bottles crashing through the windows of three homes.

"I immediately came through the yellow tape and wanted to know what was going on," Brooks recounted. "I went on the porch, and I saw my dad.... I needed answers at that point, so I just went into work mode. And obviously I was upset, but I wanted to know why this happened."

Brooks' colleagues, hopped up on coffee, sadness and anger, began rolling in, too -- Christmas vacation be damned -- when they heard of Marcilis' death. Brooks was family, a homicide detective who worked daily alongside those who would be responsible for investigating her father's murder.

Sgt. Kenneth Gardner, a Detroit homicide investigator for 12 years, felt rage.

"They violated my sister's father, our father," he said. "So you want to come in, and you want to do whatever is necessary and whatever's appropriate to help bring this person into custody."

Nobody has been charged with Marcilis' murder, despite the intense efforts of investigators. No witnesses have come forward, and evidence is lacking.

To get job done, they've got to be tough, realistic

Homicide takes its toll on neighborhoods and citizens and the people charged with trying to hunt down the killers.

The 30 investigators in Detroit's homicide unit carry a badge, a Smith & Wesson M&P .40-caliber gun and a full arsenal of cockiness and confidence.

In a job like this, they need it.

Until last month, they worked in the old 2nd Precinct, near Schaefer and Grand River. There, the detectives' investigative worth was posted on the walls of the offices for all their colleagues to see. Dry erase boards listed the cases assigned to each detective.

The cases are written in green (charges pending); red (closed), and blue (open). Last year, each detective carried 11 cases on average, a 57% heavier workload than the national average of seven.

At times, when homicides soared to 400 a year and above in the last decade, detectives were responsible for as many as 14 cases a year.

They move fast and with swagger.

"Being a homicide detective, I guess you have to be a little arrogant," said Theopolis Williams, one of the unit's investigators. "You have to have a lot of confidence in yourself to want to take on a task like this.

"You have to look at a case and start off with nothing and say, 'I can solve this,'" he said. "But you can't be down when you fail, because every case is not going to be solved."

Williams, 40, joined the department 16 years ago after a stint in the Marine Corps. He returned to Detroit to study auto body design and engineering.

When he learned from a friend that the Police Department was recruiting, he decided to apply and follow in his uncle's footsteps.

He had always admired his uncle, a Detroit police sergeant who died in a boating accident in 1986, because his uncle kept Williams in line as a teen by threatening, if he ever got in trouble: "Don't let me get to you before your parents."

Williams got two calls on the same day: one saying he'd been accepted to a General Motors apprentice program, the other from the police academy.

He chose the academy.

He worked his way up to homicide, considered an elite detective unit. Although Williams can be a loud-mouthed prankster, he takes his job seriously. A typewritten label is taped to his chair. It reads: "T. WILLIAMS 'THE CLOSER.'"

He put it there.

Only thing more painful than an unsolved killing

Unsolved cases can hurt the reputation and egos of some homicide investigators, but the discomfort can be compounded when detectives have to look in the eye of a colleague and tell her they still haven't found who killed her father.

Moises Jimenez, the detective in charge of investigating the Marcilis case, wants to get the killer, to give his fellow officer Brooks and her family closure.

Jimenez and Brooks don't discuss her father's case, even when sharing a cigarette break outside the office. When Brooks learned that "Mo" was the officer in charge of the case, she said she had only one thing to say: "I know it will be done right."

"She has trust in me," said Jimenez, who has investigated murders for 11 years. "The pressure is about the same as on my other cases. The only difference is I don't see a family member of the deceased every day, and here I do.

"I wish I could say, 'Look, guess what? It's done; I got it.' But at this point I don't."

Jimenez, 45, is proud of his work. He ticks off his successes like a slugger recounting home runs. He has solved 69 of the 113 homicide cases assigned to him since 2000.

"I got cases from 2000 that I'm still answering that phone to Mom who still calls about her daughter or her son," he said.

Jimenez is a fast-talking, joke-cracking, Harley Davidson-riding cop who points out with pride that he's the only Mexican American working in Detroit homicide.

Before joining the unit in July 2000, he spent nearly eight years as an undercover patrol officer in southwest Detroit. Although he now wears a suit, Jimenez will never be caught in hard-soled dress shoes. Soft soles, he said, ensure that he'll always be able to chase a suspect who may run. The two pairs of socks he wears daily -- even in summer -- add extra cushion.

As one of the more seasoned detectives in homicide, Jimenez complains of the computerized paperwork that comes with solving murders these days. For all the advancements that police departments have made, he still believes a pencil and blank witness statement forms are the only tools needed during investigations. That and the right attitude.

"Sometimes talking soft to somebody will work, but sometimes, you know, you've got to say a couple four-letter words and talk hard to somebody, and that seems to work, too," Jimenez said of his police work. "It's the old and the new."

Police say they believe 28-year-old Robert Jamar Hall killed Brooks' father because he had an ongoing feud with somebody on the block where Marcilis lived.

Hall isn't freely walking the streets, though. In August, he was convicted of assault with intent to murder and with being a felon in possession of a firearm in connection with a shooting at a club three years ago. He was sentenced to 25-40 years in prison.

"The people I work with are still working on the case," Brooks said. "I try to remove myself from that to allow them to do what they need to do -- not to add any personal pressure for them, but in the end, I believe that he will be charged with my dad's death and my mom and family and everybody else will have a certain amount of closure and peace."

Detroit homicide unit must do more with less

This year has been a struggle. Two dozen killings happened over two weeks in April. In August, an alarming spree of 16 shootings in 36 hours, with seven deaths, prompted Godbee to reassign officers from desk duty to patrol the streets. The department closed nearly all the cases, a success Godbee attributed to strong police work and tips from citizens.

But overall, homicide investigators have been overwhelmed this year.

Spread thin, they are forced on some days to make a quick canvass of a murder scene and take hasty witness statements before rushing to the next scene. During a deadly 16-hour stretch in May, investigators were juggling two killings when they were called to another scene, on the west side where a woman was found shot dead in a street. They had barely begun their investigation of that slaying when they were summoned to the nonfatal shooting of a police officer at a gas station on Michigan Avenue. They left without knowing whether the woman had been killed in the neighborhood or dumped there. They returned hours later to complete their investigation.

"You have a window that's real small to be able to get as much as you can," Jimenez said. "You do your best work on a case in the first 48 hours because it just happened. Your witnesses are fresher. Your witnesses haven't talked to other people." In the past decade, Detroit's yearly homicide closure rate has ranged from 35% to 45%, but climbed to 54% in 2010, Godbee said. The national average is 65%. For cities with populations of 500,000 to 1 million, the closure rate was 57% in 2010. In 2010, the city recorded 308 homicides, according to the department -- a 15% decline from 2009 and the fewest since 1967, a year of rioting and accelerated flight from the city.

But the number of killings has spiked this year. The department recorded 301 homicides through Nov. 6, a 19% increase for the same period year over year.

"When you slow down the bodies coming in the front door, it gives your investigators more time to actually work on cases," Godbee said. "But when you got two, three, four bodies coming in a night and you have to stop your workload to go triage those cases and start your investigation on those, that has an effect on the ability for the homicide investigator to really dig into their cases."

When people won't talk, murders remain mysteries

The homicide unit meets every Wednesday at 8:30 a.m.

Inspector Dwane Blackmon, the commanding officer, takes the floor. After dispensing with housekeeping, he turns to the business of solving murders.

The gathering does nothing to defy cop stereotypes. They eat doughnuts. They crack crude jokes. They lightheartedly complain about overanxious uniformed officers who arrive first at murder scenes.

But the detectives, generally wearing suits or dress pants, shirts and ties, spend most of the time sharing information about suspects and offering colleagues tips they may have run across. They throw around street names and gang names of potential suspects.

"There are not many men out there who pull the trigger," said Sgt. Gardner, 49. "Usually in our investigations, names of the same people come up time after time after time."

But building cases is often thwarted by a no-snitch mind-set among fearful witnesses.

Officers hear it all the time: "Snitches end up in ditches" or "Snitches get stitches."

Police are left with the challenges that criminals don't turn on each other, surviving victims are often reluctant to identify a shooter, witnesses are afraid of retaliation, and often, forensic evidence alone isn't enough to convict a suspect.

Detroiters must stand up and say, 'No more!'

On Dec. 30, the day of Marcilis' funeral, most of the homicide unit piled into Bethel Baptist Church to pay their respects. The usually sharp dressers took it up a notch, another way of showing respect. They took turns hugging their sister, who wore a brave face for her colleagues, even while feeling like a lost little girl inside.

Brooks knows she can hang with the boys. Strikingly tall, she struts with confidence around crime scenes and the homicide department and can curse with the best of them. Still, her designer fingernails, lavish eyelashes and talk of clothes shopping with girlfriends expose a softer side.

Deep down, she was a daddy's girl.

"My dad was a great man," Brooks said. "Generally, everybody says that about a loved one. But my dad was my best friend, and I was obviously devastated, and ironically to work homicide and your dad dies as a result of a homicide, that just doesn't sit well."

Speaker after speaker at the funeral described him as a hero, one lost to senseless violence in a city that at times can be senselessly violent.

"We need to make it clear: These horrible incidents, the abnormal has now become the normal, and we cannot, we will not accept that," Minister Malik Shabazz, a Detroit activist, said at the funeral. Brooks nodded in agreement. "In the name of brother Russell, in the spirit of brother Russell, in honor of brother Russell, all of us have to stand up and say, 'No more! No more!'"

http://www.freep.com/article/20111113/NEWS01/111130533

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(Part 2)

Living with murder: Killers steal lives of unintended victims, shatter the survivors

In the Detroit neighborhood where DeMonté Thomas lived and died, friends walked from door to door carrying buckets to raise more than $6,000 to bury him.

In this community, one filled with good people fighting to push out the bad, Thomas was every young person's brother and every older person's son.

Yet he still became a victim, doing something as innocent as going to get his weekly haircut.

Investigators have no idea why Thomas was gunned down, though they believe the barber, not Thomas, was the intended target.

Thomas was the 131st person killed in 2010, one of 3,313 killed in Detroit since January 2003.

Included in those numbers are grandparents, mothers, children, babies, teenagers. Some were bad guys -- the drug dealers or gangbangers whose activities were silenced with a bullet. Others were everyday people doing everyday things, like Thomas or Aarie Berry, whose 3-year-old life was taken when a stray bullet ripped into her family's apartment July 10 after feuding neighbors ignited chaos on Canton Street. It is the randomness of lives cut short that deepens survivors' emotional wounds.

"He wasn't a thug," Mark Covington, a friend and neighborhood activist said of Thomas. "The discouraging part is that, talking to him, the dreams and the goals that he had. He wanted to raise his daughter. That's all he thought about, that's all he wanted to do was raise his daughter."

Thomas, 24, was called Monte. He was a beloved family man and was known as the friendly and smiling guy who loved music and cracking jokes, and who could never say no to a dice game. He worked in maintenance at the Fox Theatre and was a self-described mamma's boy.

And he was a doting father. For months after his death, his then-2-year-old daughter, Monteasha, toddled about, often saying, "Where's Daddy? I've got to find him. I'm looking for Daddy."

Thomas also was a pretty boy. And proud of it. In his neighborhood, people joked that he always kept his fade and lines tight, meaning his hair was always trimmed just right.

His weekly pleasure was a trip to the barbershop.

On a sunny Monday in June, Thomas walked the few blocks from his mother's home on Bessemore to the sports-themed All Stars Barber & Beauty Shop on Harper near Gratiot. The shop was normally closed on Mondays, but Thomas talked his barber, Jajuan O'Neal Harrison, into meeting him there. Thomas sat waiting on the steps of the shop with a T-shirt draped over his shoulder.

Thomas and Harrison had been in the shop for no more than 40 seconds before a man wearing a black-hooded sweatshirt emerged from the shadows behind a counter and fired six to eight rounds from a gray steel gun.

Thomas never even got to sit down. On June 14, 2010, he became Detroit homicide case No. 1006140332, his body sprawled near the third barber chair in a pool of blood.

The killer's .45-caliber bullets missed the barber, the only other person inside the shop, but one struck Thomas in his left upper chest and pierced both his lungs before lodging in his right arm. That same bullet pierced the hearts and souls of his mother, sister, fiancée, brother, daughter and the many friends in his neighborhood.

"I never thought, in a million years when he left here, that would be the last time I would see my baby," said Thomas' mother, Andrea Alexander, 45. "I still remember what he had on. The pain is so overwhelming. If I didn't have my grandchildren or other children, I would have took my own life by now to be with my son."

Pain and frustration over these senseless killings

Detroit Police Officer LaTonya Brooks had just gotten off work and was visiting her parents' house on the city's east side when she got a call that someone had been killed less than five minutes away. Brooks was next up on the homicide unit rotation that determines who the lead investigator will be for each case.

Brooks responded to the scene on Harper.

A growing crowd gathered outside the tiny red, white and blue shop as Thomas lay dead inside. The barber had run across the street to a party store, seeking safety.

Word traveled like wildfire through the neighborhood that Monte had been shot. Someone knocked on his mother's door with a simple message: "Your son is dead."

Alexander ran barefoot to the shop, unable to believe the news.

"When I saw her face -- out of the crowd of people -- I knew she was the mom," Brooks said. "It was her demeanor. I mean obviously upset, hysterical, and my heart went out for her. I wish I could have hugged her. She kept asking me, 'Is that my son?' And deep down, I think I knew it was her son."

In her seven years in homicide, Brooks had seen senseless murders many times before. But the frustration never fades.

"We come in contact with people, and I always tell them, 'I meet you at the worst point of your life when I tell you that your loved one was murdered -- not just died -- was murdered,' " Brooks said. "You look in their face and you can see the pain, and there's really nothing you can say to them."

Though Thomas died under unusual circumstances, he fit the profile of most murder victims in Detroit: young, male and black. Of the 3,184 murder victims from 2003 through June 30, 88% were black; 86% were male. The average age was 32.

Like her dead son, Alexander was taken from the chaotic scene at the barbershop by EMS technicians that day. Overcome by grief, she was unable to breathe and passed out.

"I never got to see him," she said.

Little comfort to survivors: Many murders go unsolved

Statistically, Alexander is luckier than most survivors of homicide victims in Detroit. Police found her son's killer.

After months of uncertainty, including dismissed charges against one suspect who was cleared through DNA, Thomas' homicide case was closed with a first-degree murder conviction June 13 -- a day before the first anniversary of his death.

Brooks, ironically, would find herself among the unlucky group of grieving survivors. Only six months after being called to investigate Thomas' murder, she would be called to a deadly scene in the same neighborhood, one of the city's homicide hot spots. That time, her father was the victim -- killed in a firebombing. He wasn't the intended target, either.

Detroit homicide investigators closed 54% of the city's murders last year -- a marked improvement over recent years. But their closure rate hovered well below 50% in prior years, lagging the national average of 65%. The closure rate was 57% in 2010 in cities with populations of 500,000 to 1 million.

The 2010 success came as homicide numbers fell. The city experienced the fewest killings, 308, since 1967 -- although murder is up again this year. As of Nov. 6, the department had recorded 301 homicides, a 19% increase for the same period year over year.

"For those crimes that have not been solved ... I think it's important for the public to know we haven't forgotten and that we care," said Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. "For a 50% closure rate, that means 50% of them we didn't close and there's still work to do."

A factor in many unsolved murders is the silence in the streets that keeps witnesses from coming forward.

"The no-snitching rule makes our jobs very difficult," Brooks said. "And I hate the term. I hear little kids say it: 'Snitches get stitches.'

"I just don't understand the term 'snitching.' To bring a bad person off the street or to bring closure to a family ... (is it) snitching or is it doing the right thing?"

Police still have no motive for the Thomas murder, but they linked DNA and fingerprints to the killer. A Wayne County Circuit Court jury took less than two hours to convict Frank Hardy, 28, of first-degree murder.

A good man in the wrong place at the wrong time

Testimony showed that Hardy camped out inside the barbershop, eating Cheetos, Doritos, Skittles and a Hershey's bar from the vending machine and reading magazines -- a page torn from a Vibe magazine was later found in his pants pocket, along with six snack wrappers -- until Thomas and Harrison, the barber, walked in. There was no evidence of forced entry; police and prosecutors surmise that someone with keys to the shop let Hardy in to lie in wait.

During the preliminary examination and trial, Harrison, 34, testified that Thomas was sitting on the steps of the barbershop when he arrived.

"He was a close friend," Harrison testified at the preliminary exam. "He liked my music. He used to come up here and play video games with us. I know him from the neighborhood. He was a good kid -- never really didn't get in no trouble."

Harrison said he unlocked the shop door and was headed to a CD player. Thomas was walking to Harrison's barber chair -- the third from the door -- when Harrison heard Thomas say, "Jay."

Harrison said he saw in the wall of mirrors someone come from the shadows of the shop counter with a gun raised and begin shooting. "They didn't say it was a robbery -- they just started shooting," he testified.

Harrison said bullets continued to fly as the gunman chased him firing. He ran from the shop to safety.

"At that point in time, I felt like this guy was trying to kill me," Harrison testified. "There was no doubt about it -- that he was there to kill me."

Hardy's first-degree murder conviction was based mostly on science, but still offers few answers.

"We know he wasn't the intended target," Brooks, the investigator, said of Thomas. "The investigation revealed that this was a good young man. ... People in the neighborhood spoke highly of him. Basically wrong place, wrong time."

At his sentencing, Hardy maintained his innocence: "I didn't commit the crime, but what can I say? It's life. I always get the short end of the stick."

Closure in murder cases helps ease the pain a little

Brooks felt a connection with Thomas' mother from the moment she spotted her at the murder scene. That bond would grow, even as Brooks hit dead end after dead end during the nearly yearlong investigation. Alexander called her almost daily for updates, her voice dripping with disappointment. Often, she cried.

As the investigation progressed, Brooks held back some information from the family, though she knew the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office was close to signing an arrest warrant for Hardy. She didn't want to give the grieving mother false hope.

"I told her, 'It's coming together,' " Brooks said of her conversations with Alexander.

During Hardy's trial, Brooks sat in court every day, holding back her own emotions. The hardened detective almost broke down when Alexander and her other son, DeMario Alexander, 29, told Wayne County Judge Timothy Kenny how much had been taken from them the day Monte was gunned down.

"I spent more time with him than anybody on Earth," DeMario Alexander said. "He was the type of person who brought everybody together. He was a wonderful person while he was here. He left a tremendous impact on everybody."

Brooks understood. Someone dear had been stolen from her, too.

"I looked into her face -- I could actually look into her eyes and I knew how she felt because I knew how I felt," Brooks said of Alexander. "It felt good because when you look into the family members' face, you realize nothing is going to bring their loved one back, but the closure kind of helps ease the pain a little bit for them."

1 killing leaves a void in lives of so many people

When someone dies, especially when it's murder, the milestones come fast and often for survivors. The pain doesn't end.

Thomas' family clings to the good memories: Monte rapping; Monte snuggling with his daughter; Monte cracking jokes; Monte sharing hugs with those he loved.

"He was a great guy, like really great -- awesome," said his sister, Elizabeth Thomas, 23. "He was a great father, brother, cousin, son, everything. If you wanted to have a good time or brighten up your day, just call Monte, because he's going to say something crazy. You may hang up the phone and think, 'That boy is crazy,' but you got your smile."

Last October, to celebrate what would have been his 25th birthday, friends and family held an event in his east-side neighborhood, one filled with poor people who are rich in generosity, to raise the remainder of the money needed to buy a headstone for his gravesite at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Detroit.

Then this June, on the anniversary of his death and one day after Hardy's conviction, Thomas' family and friends gathered at the cemetery on another sunny and warm day to remember him. They released 24 black and gold balloons -- and his daughter, Monteasha, released a single white one -- for the 25 years he would have lived.

Monteasha sang her favorite song, "My Daddy Loves Me," a sweet tune cobbled together with the help of her mother and grandmother. As she ran around the cemetery playing with her cousins and friends, she stopped occasionally to say, "Hi, Daddy" and wave to the headstone bearing Thomas' picture.

Now 3, Monteasha still can't grasp the enormity of losing a father to a violent and unexplained shooting. But the void certainly hasn't escaped the girl's mother.

"I lost a lot that day -- he was more than just my fiancé or my daughter's dad," said Maria Fisher, 23. "He was my best friend, my confidant.

"I know for a fact, I'll never find anybody like him," she said. "Monte, I just felt like he was made for me. He wasn't perfect, but he was definitely perfect for me."

His headstone reads:

"Beloved son, brother, grandson, uncle & friend. DEMONTÉ L. THOMAS Oct. 28, 1985-June 14, 2010. Truly missed and loved by all."

http://www.freep.com/article/20111114/NEWS01/311140003

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(Part 3)

Living with murder: Detroit neighborhoods push back against criminals

As Detroit police investigators do their part to catch murderers and other violent criminals roaming the streets, residents in the Grandmont and Rosedale Park neighborhoods are determined to work to keep homicides from creeping into their west-side communities, and so far, they've been largely successful.

Among the tactics: Volunteers keep watch daily with citizen patrols and work closely with police.

Between them, the neighborhoods recorded some of the lowest homicide clusters from 2003 through June 2011, the period analyzed by the Free Press.

Police are calling on these communities to serve as models for others when it comes to neighborhood patrols.

"I believe in community policing," said Clarenda Webb, 68, a North Rosedale Park resident who organizes neighborhood safety meetings for Rosedale Park, Grandmont, North Rosedale Park and Minock Park. "We work as a team with the surrounding communities, and we believe it is important to work very closely with the police department. But I think one of our biggest strengths is neighbors -- neighbors watching out for neighbors."

Residents in these areas approach keeping their neighborhoods safe with a disciplined style of self-policing in cooperation with the police department. Among their strategies:

On a recent Wednesday morning, longtime Grandmont residents Muhsin Muhammad I, 61, and Jim Campbell, 69, cruised their neighborhood in Muhammad's Cadillac CTS, looking for suspicious activity. Muhammad organizes the neighborhood patrol for Grandmont and volunteers about 30 hours per month.

The patrols begin with a call to the police precinct to get the names of the officers on duty. A typical patrol lasts about two hours.

On this day, Muhammad drives while Campbell snaps pictures using a long lens to record anything or anyone who appears out of place. The technique allows those patrolling to share accurate information with police and sends a warning to anyone thinking of committing a crime: You're being watched.

"The criminals are very smart -- they go to crime college," said Muhammad, who retired from General Motors as a manufacturing manager and management education and training coordinator in 2004. "It takes only two to three minutes to burglarize a house effectively."

Detroit Police Lt. Vicki Yost, commanding officer of the city's 8th Precinct, said police welcome the help and want to cultivate a healthy relationship with residents.

"There's a great sense of spirit and there's a great sense of fight in the community," she said of the Grandmont and Rosedale Park areas.

The Southfield Freeway slices through the neighborhoods near Grand River and Fenkell, but the eyes-and-ears approach seems to keep many violent criminals away. As in most Detroit neighborhoods, though, residents still must contend with some home break-ins, car rim thefts and other crimes.

Webb, a retired clinical social worker who has lived in the area for 37 years, acknowledges that residents have adopted the squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease mentality. But it has worked: The police department has responded with grease.

Police brass and community officers from the 6th and 8th precincts and the Northwestern District attend monthly community meetings and beef up patrols when needed.

"The cooperative effort that you have shown with the police department has just been super," Detroit Police Cmdr. Stephen Carlin told a crowd at a March neighborhood safety meeting. "The arrests that are being made are all with interaction with the community. A lot of other communities don't offer that. It is a big tribute to you, and it's very much appreciated."

Residents take their responsibilities seriously -- whether they're participating in radio patrols, serving as community security coordinators, removing graffiti almost before it dries, boarding up abandoned or foreclosed homes, or organizing identity theft-prevention workshops.

The neighborhoods also benefit by having residents with higher household incomes and education levels and a healthy housing stock -- all factors that typically contribute to lower crime rates.

Two areas within those neighborhoods with the lowest homicide clusters -- comprised of about 70 city blocks -- had nearly 5,900 residents in 2010 with a 2009 median household income of about $71,000, compared with a U.S. median household income of about $51,000 and a Detroit median of about $29,500 for the same time period. The vacant housing rate is nearly 10%, lower than those block groups hit hardest by murder near city airport (20%) and Brightmoor (39%).

The residents, too, are resigned that the police cannot patrol the city with the frequency seen in even 2005, when the force, now at 2,900 people, had 1,000 more officers.

"We've just got to look out a little bit more -- there isn't much more they can do for us," Muhammad said of police protection.

"Some of our best recruits are victims," he said. "It wakes you up and you realize how vulnerable you are, and that you need to work to keep the neighborhood safe."

Residents said they're not immune to crime or even homicides, but they will do all they can to avoid falling victim to what has occurred in so many other neighborhoods.

"This kind of a program needs to be throughout the city," Webb said of community policing. "What affects one community is eventually going to affect another community. We need to spread it out -- the city of Detroit belongs to all of us, and I care about my community."

http://www.freep.com/article/20111115/NEWS01/111150394/Detroit-neighborhoods-push-back-against-criminals?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

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From the FBI

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Hate Crimes Remain Steady

2010 FBI Report Released

11/14/11

Intimidation…vandalism…assault…rape…murder. These are crimes by anyone's definition. But add an element of bias against the victims—because of their race or religion, for example—and these traditional crimes become hate crimes.

And based on data from the FBI's Hate Crime Statistics report for 2010, the 6,628 hate crime incidents reported to us by our law enforcement partners stayed consistent with the 6,604 incidents reported in 2009.

Today, we're releasing on our website the full 2010 report, which contains information about the types of biases that motivate hate crimes, the nature of the offenses, and some information about the victims and offenders . It also breaks down hate crimes by jurisdiction and includes data by state and by agency.

The hate crimes report is fairly reflective of the country—agencies that participated in the Uniform Crime Reporting Hate Crime Statistics Program effort in 2010 represented more than 285 million people, or 92.3 percent of the nation's population, and their jurisdictions covered 49 states and the District of Columbia. Of the 14,977 agencies that submitted data, 1,949 reported that hate crime incidents had occurred in their jurisdictions.

Here are some of the report's highlights:

• 
  Law enforcement reported 8,208 victims of hate crimes—a “victim” can be an individual, a business, an institution, or society as a whole.
  
  
• Of the 6,628 hate crime incidents reported to us for 2010, nearly all (6,624) involved a single bias—47.3 percent of the single-bias incidents were motivated by race; 20 percent by religion; 19.3 by sexual orientation; 12.8 percent by an ethnicity/national origin bias; and 0.6 by physical or mental disability.
  
  
• As a result of the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crime Prevention Act, the FBI is implementing changes to collect additional data for crimes motivated by a bias against a particular gender or gender identity, as well as for hate crimes committed by or directed against juveniles.
  
  
• A reported 4,824 offenses were crimes against persons—intimidation accounted for 46.2 percent of these offenses; simple assault for 34.8 percent; and aggravated assault for 18.4 percent.
  
  
• There were 2,861 reported offenses of crimes against property—the majority (81.1 percent) were acts of destruction/damage/vandalism.
  
  
• Of the 6,008 known offenders, 58.6 were white and 18.4 percent were black.
  
  
• 31.4 percent of reported hate crime incidents took place in or near homes.

The FBI takes its role in investigating hate crimes very seriously—it's the number one priority of our civil rights program. “Almost a fourth of our 2010 civil rights caseload involved crimes motivated by a particular bias against the victim,” said Eric Thomas, our civil rights chief in Washington, D.C., “and we frequently worked these cases with state and local law enforcement to ensure that justice was done—whether at the state level or at the federal level.”

This report, and the FBI's hate crime data collection effort as a whole, would not have been possible without the support of national and state criminal justice organizations and the thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide whose officers investigate, identify, and report hate crimes to us.

http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/november/hatecrimes_111411/hatecrimes_111411

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