There's No Drug Crime Wave at the Border, Just a Lot of Media Hype

By Gabriel Arana, The Nation. Posted May 29, 2009.

Nevertheless, within weeks the New York Times jumped on the story: "Wave of Drug Violence Is Creeping Into Arizona From Mexico, Officials Say," the paper reported on February 23 in an article by Randal Archibold, concentrating on an increase in the number of residential robberies and kidnappings in Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located. This article and a mere handful of other reports shot through the media pipeline and were widely re-reported at places like CNN, Fox, USA Today and the Huffington Post, as well as in regional papers, a testament to the increasing paucity of firsthand news reporting.

The news reports on the increase in drug-related violence in the United States rely heavily on anecdotes, impressionistic quotes from police or politicians, and bare statistics presented without context. Most of the reporting examined violence in the border states of Arizona and Texas.

Tucson, Arizona, an hour's drive north of the international border, served as the centerpiece for another New York Times report on March 22 ("Mexican Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over, Alarming U.S.," also by Archibold). The story claimed that Tucson "is coping with a wave of drug crime the police suspect is tied to the bloody battles between Mexico's drug cartels and the efforts to stamp them out."

Public information officers who track crime statistics for the city say this is simply not true.

According to Chuck Rydzak, a public information officer with the Tucson Police Department, the number of violent crimes in the city from January to March of 2008--excluding robberies--was 651. For the same period this year, it's 632. The number of robberies is also down, from 333 to 307. The home invasions have also decreased: from thirty-four in the first four months of 2008 to thirty-three for the same period this year. It is also difficult to assert that this is a Mexican problem affecting the United States: only 10 percent of those involved in home invasions thus far this year have been undocumented immigrants. Kidnappings, too, are holding steady: there were twenty-seven in 2008 and seven so far this year.

"The statistics speak for themselves and they are not indicative of a spike in violent crime," said Sgt. Mark Robinson, another public information officer with the Tucson Police Department. "The violence is in Mexico."

Representatives of the police department say they have spent the past few months trying to correct misperceptions stemming from sensational media reports. "[The reports] just cost us a bunch of trouble because of a misinterpretation of what somebody said," Robinson added.

In theory, a precipitous drop in non-drug-related crime could mask an increase in drug-related crime, but officers at the Tucson Police Department and other municipalities say this is not the case. Even Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona and current secretary of homeland security, tried to allay public fear in February by saying that drug-related violence from Mexico had not spilled over to the United States.

An April 26 piece in the Arizona Daily Star also called reports of escalating violence in Tucson "more hype than reality." In it, Tucson Assistant Police Chief Roberto Villaseñor, who was also quoted in the New York Times story, said "not one" of the arrests related to home invasions had involved "an active cartel member from Mexico."

The February 23 report from the New York Times on the drug-related violence in Phoenix was notably devoid of statistics. According to the police department, the number of violent crimes in the Phoenix area is also down: there were 11,194 violent crimes in 2006, 11,168 in 2007 and 10,466 in 2008. The number of robberies in 2006 was 4,363, spiked to 4,924 in 2007, then decreased again to 4,835 in 2008.

The Times story, however, focused primarily on the supposed increase in the number of kidnappings and home invasions. It cites the Maricopa County Attorney's Office as saying that "border-related kidnapping or hostage-taking in a home" increased from 48 in 2004 to 241 last year. Representatives for the County Attorney's office said the spike only represents incidents reported to the prosecutor's office--not the number reported to the police. Given the strong-arm anti-immigrant tactics of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his political allies in the prosecutor's office, there is reason to question whether these numbers are indicative of a spike in crime or merely an increase in prosecution and enforcement, for which police departments across the state have received boosts in funding in the past few years. Both Tucson and Phoenix have set up special task forces to deal with home invasions in the last year or so.

See more stories tagged with: mexico, border, drug war, southwest

Gabriel Arana is a Spring 2009 intern at The Nation, a graduate student at Cornell University and a contributor to Box Turtle Bulletin. He can be reached via his website GabrielArana.com.

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