Sanctuary Cities: “A Serious Impediment to Stemming Crime”

August 26th, 2007 at 07:50pm Mike McGarry 214

Sanctuary Cities 

“A Serious Impediment to Stemming Crime”

By Mike McGarry

“Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”— Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame�
 

"We are a sanctuary city, make no mistake about it.”— San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom�
 

"If you don’t like it, leave the state”’—Los Angeles police chief, William Bratton on LA’s sanctuary policy. 

During the 15^th Century in Western Europe, the Church and the royals made power tradeoffs. One benefit the Church enjoyed was that the royal courts would respect the “sanctity” of  the Church, that the church’s grounds were a “sanctuary.” All the king’s horses and all the king’s men were barred from entering the grounds for anything other than worship. So when Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, swept  Esmeralda from her appointment with the gallows and sheltered her within the confines of the cathedral, he confidently evoked: “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”          

In recent U.S. history a “sanctuary movement" developed when hundreds of cities declared themselves sanctuaries during the 1980’s, a time of U.S.-involved wars in Central America. Aliens fleeing those conflicts began showing up illegally in fairly large numbers in many cities. During the war in El Salvador, the then-policy of the Regan Administration was to return them to their home countries, but a hue-and-cry went out, San Francisco being the most vocal, that the returnees would face persecution, torture and possibly even death if they were forced to return.

Hence, cities declared them sanctuary cities, cities that would not cooperate with immigration authorities in the detection and apprehension of illegals from warring countries—not an ignoble motivation.                     

More recently, however, the sanctuary city concept has been extended in many U.S. cities to providing sanctuary for all illegal aliens, regardless of their reason for entering the country. Laws, ordinances and resolutions have been promulgated which bar police officers from inquiring into the immigration status of suspects during police contacts and, in many cases, even when those contacts result in arrests and convictions for serious crimes. (In March, 2005, in Muelher v. Mena the U. S. Supreme Court  unanimously affirmed that inquiring into immigration status during police contacts was as fundamental a question as asking name, address and date of birth.) 

Sanctuary Cities are in violation of Federal law (Sect. 642, of the Illegal Immigration Reform Act of 1996) That law provides that “States and localities may not adopt policies, formally or informally, that prohibit employees from communicating with DHS regarding the immigration status of individuals.”  But in our selective pick-and-choose system of which laws to prosecute and which to ignore, there has been no attempt to date by DHS to challenge any of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” declared and de facto sanctuary cities.      

Sanctuary cities come in degrees; San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago  and Houston are some of the more in-your-face. Indeed, there is very heated competition for what city  can most flout federal law, but Los Angeles and San Francisco are always setting the pace in that race to the bottom.

Last April, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, as if moralizing from the pulpit on a Sunday morning,  declared this about ICE agents who were searching for  criminal fugitive aliens in the San Francisco area: "I will not allow any of my department heads or anyone associated with this city to cooperate in any way shape or form with these [immigration] raids. We are a sanctuary city, make no mistake about it.” 

Two months earlier, Newsom The Moralizer was caught with his pants down, porking the wife of his close friend and then-campaign manager, something for which the mayor  expressed  his disingenuously delivered “regrets.”    �
 

While Los Angeles police chief William Bratton was blathering on last Thursday at the Aspen Institute about terrorism and what a friggin’ genius cop he is, he eluded to his use of the "Broken Windows” theory of law enforcement and how he used that approach to drastically reduce serious crime while he was police chief of New York City.  Essentially, the Broke Windows theory says that if you aggressively prosecute the petty crimes, that will discourage more serious criminal activity from developing. Bust the bums from jumping the subway turnstiles, and the hold-up thugs will not show up. Immediately replace vandalized broken windows in a neighborhood and pop the vandals, and serious criminals will be less likely to set up business in that community. �
 

(When I was in high school it was the purposeful practice of the police who patrolled the area—I much latter discovered— on the first few days of the new school year, to find a student was driving a mere  two miles over the speed limit and ticket him for that speed. The word would immediately zoom around campus that the cops would get you for the slightest infraction. Broken Windows law enforcement works.)   �
 

What Bratton omitted to include in his ode to himself is that LA is the home of the notorious sanctuary policy, Special Order 40  

Heather McDonald is an attorney and a Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research who has written extensively on alien crime—especially gang crime—and sanctuary cities. In 2005 she testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims:  “Sanctuary laws,” McDonald asserted, “are a serious impediment to stemming gang violence and other crime…Let’s say a Los Angeles police officer sees a member of Mara Salvatrucha hanging out at Hollywood and Vine. The gang member has previously been deported for aggravated assault; his mere presence back in the country following deportation is a federal felony. Under the prevailing understanding of Los Angeles’s sanctuary law (Special Order 40), if that officer merely inquires into the gangbanger’s immigration status, the officer will face departmental punishment.”
 

Chief Bratton apparently thinks that Broken Windows law enforcement, while relevant and applicable to citizen low-level law offenders, is just not appropriate for foreign criminals. In a not-so-veiled swipe at Bratton, McDonald testified that “Sanctuary laws violate everything we have learned about policing in the 1990s…getting criminals off the streets for seemingly “minor” crimes such as turnstile jumping or graffiti saved lives.” Gang crime, she rightly observed, “which exploded 50% from 1999 to 2002, is too serious a problem to ignore this lesson.”

McDonald told me in a telephone interview that I could add terrorism to those preventable crimes. Take into custody identified illegal aliens discovered during all police contacts, and illegal alien crime will perforce diminish.         

As McDonald’s research has uncovered, what Bratton’s boneheaded, intransigent support for Special Order has led to in Los Angeles is that 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide in the first half of 2004 were for illegal alien suspects. Nearly two-thirds of fugitive felony warrants were for illegal alien suspects.

Not content with making LA a comfortable place for alien criminals, Bratton, a New York transplant, not that long after he became the top cop in LA, arrogantly told a caller who challenged him about Special Order 40 on a radio talk show, “If you don’t like it, leave the state.”         

Here are a three examples where sanctuary policies exist that have enabled horrific illegal-alien criminality:

• The recent gangster style murder of the three aspiring black college students in Newark, New Jersey. The lead suspect, a Peruvian illegal alien, had been previously charged with raping a 5-yerar-old child over several years, but he was allowed to bond out while he was awaiting trial. Newark has an extant sanctuary resolution passed by its city council, and Newark’s Mayer Booker aggressively refuses to rescind the practice of sanctuary.  Sanctuary! Sanctuary! 

Last week Colorado’s congressman Tom Tancredo, who is running for president, was in Newark protesting the favorable climate of alien sanctuary in that crime-ridden city, a climate he believes contributed to the murders of the students.  

• In Oregon, a  de facto sanctuary state, the rape and murder last month of 15-year-old Dani Countryman by two illegal aliens. One raped her while the other put his foot on her neck with such duration and  force that it killed her. Both suspects, cousins,  admitted to being in the US illegally, and one avoided deportation even though he has been arrested for drunk driving four times since 2000! Sanctuary! Sanctuary!

•  Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper denies Denver is a    sanctuary city, never mind that his predecessor, Wellington Webb, publicly declared it to be—he just didn’t use the word “sanctuary” in his declaration. (It all depends on what the word “is” is.) In 2005, Chickenlooper employed an illegal alien, Raul Garcia-Gomez, as a dishwasher at his Cheery Cricket restaurant. Garcia-Gomez ambushed and killed Denver Police Detective Donnie Young. A Police spokesman said the documents the now-convicted murderer used to gain his employment at Chickenlooper’s restaurant  were a “joke” they were so obviously phony. Indeed, the Social Security Administration month earlier had notified the restaurant that Garcia-Gomez’s social security number did not match his name. In addition, Garcia-Gomez had had three Denver police contacts before he committed the wanton murder. Chickenlooper has also enthusiastically done fundraising for an illegal- alien employment hall in Denver. Sanctuary! (by any other name is) Sanctuary!        

After seven futile years of trying to get legislation passed in the U,S,House that would deny federal funds to sanctuary cities Colorado’s U.S. congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) finally succeeded,with the bipartisan support from 50 Democrats. 

It remains to be seen what the more open-borders- inclined U.S. senate will do with the bill. But the senators should know that an August 18, 2007 Rasmussen pole showed only 29 percent of those polled were against cutting off such funds.                  

The always outspoken Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo will be interviewed about sanctuary cities on "Con Games" (KNFO 106.1) Wednesday morning, August 29. The congressman has promised not to change his style for the interview.    

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Entry Filed under: Immigration, Basalt, Aspen, Colorado, Pitkin County, Garfield County, Eagle County, Denver, The West