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

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

None of the stories that report these statistics--and few do--bother to ask how much the statistical increase is due to improved reporting methods. Representatives from police departments across Arizona have lamented the difficulty of keeping accurate tabs on the number of kidnappings given that many go unreported.

Numbers for the Phoenix Police Department show that there has indeed been an increase in drug-related kidnappings, but it's not as dramatic as the numbers from the prosecutor's office might indicate. Since 2006, when the conflict in Mexico began to heat up, the number of drug-related kidnappings increased from 232 to 343 in 2007, to 359 in 2008. So far this year, there have been 140.

Even if it can be established that Phoenix is in the midst of a kidnapping crisis (and there are reasons to tread carefully here), linking this activity to drug cartels in Mexico is another matter. Sergeant Tommy Thompson, a public information officer with the Phoenix Police Department, told the student newspaper for Arizona State University that it has not been able to tie a single kidnapping to drug cartel activity in Mexico. Kidnappings and home invasions aside, crime in Phoenix has remained steady.

The violence isn't farther south, either. On the Arizona-Mexico border is my small hometown of Nogales, Arizona, which shares a name with its sister city across the border. Residents and police seemed mystified when asked about an uptick in border violence. While the drug-related crime wave is a well-known fact in Nogales, Sonora, the American side has not seen a single murder this year; there were also none last year. Recently, there have been several more armed robberies in the area than in the past (three in 2007, ten in 2008, eight so far this year), but these have occurred primarily outside of town, among illegal immigrants in the forests and canyons used to cross into the country.

Life there, by all accounts, is as placid as it ever was.

The logic underpinning the New York Times's and other reports shows the degree to which the media have strained to wrest a conclusion from data that do not support it. One statistic that is often thrown around involves the number of US cities where drug cartels "maintain drug distribution networks," which increased from 100 cities in 2006 to 230 by the end of 2008. However, the Justice Department says this increase is the product of better data-collection methods and the broadening of antidrug efforts and does not necessarily reflect an increase in violence in the United States.

What is especially striking is that the February and March stories in the Times concede that violent crime is down in Arizona, but conclude nonetheless--even in the same sentence--that the state is "bearing the brunt of smuggling-related violence":

Although overall violent crime has dropped in several cities on or near the border...Arizona appears to be bearing the brunt of smuggling-related violence. Some 60 percent of illicit drugs found in the United States--principally cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine--entered through the border in this state.

But the percentage of drugs that travel through Arizona has no bearing on whether the amount of drugs--or related violence--has increased.

Media reports on the supposed crime wave are riddled with these types of tenuous connections. They are held together with a string of conditional statements--"seems as though," "might indicate." Few contain police data, which is continuously available to those seeking public information. Barely any reports present the ample countervailing evidence that the United States has yet to be substantially affected by Mexican drug violence.

Arizona is not the only state where reporters have scraped for evidence of increased violence. In March, CNN host Anderson Cooper did a live broadcast from El Paso, Texas, dressed in military garb. El Paso Mayor John Cook, who spoke with several news organizations at the time, lamented the mischaracterization of crime in the city by the media.

"I'll speak with [news reporters] and tell them there hasn't been any spillover of violence into El Paso," Cook told the Texas Observer, "and then they will turn around and report that there is. Mostly I feel like I've wasted my time."

In one incident, Richard Cortez, the mayor of McAllen, Texas, told a CNN anchor that the violence had not spilled over to his city. Despite having elicited the information, the anchor, Don Lemon, refused to accept the response.

"Since you're the mayor of the city, you have to put the best foot forward," he said. "I know your city is affected, but you have to put a good face on it."

Area journalists, while stressing the potential danger posed by violence in Mexico, said cartel-related crimes in Texas's Rio Grande Valley have been isolated and that residents feel safe.

"As far as innocent people being pulled into it--not yet," said Marisa Treviño, a veteran journalist and founder of news and analysis blog Latina Lista. "It's a serious situation, but [these incidents] are isolated."

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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