Border Violence
According to the FBI, the four cities with populations of at least 500,000 with the lowest violent crime rates are San Diego,California; Phoenix, Arizona; El Paso and Austin, Texas. They’re all in border states and according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection: "The border is safer now than it's ever been."
In Arizona, whose illegal-immigrant population is believed to be second only to California's. The state's overall crime rate dropped 12% last year; between 2004 and 2008 it had plunged 23%. In the metro area of Phoenix, violent crime, which includes murder, rape, assault and robbery, dropped by a third during the past decade and by 17% last year. The border city of Nogales, an area rife with illegal immigration and drug trafficking, hasn't logged a single murder in the past two years.
It’s true that Phoenix has in recent years seen an increase of kidnappings. However in almost every case those kidnappings involved drug traffickers targeting other narcos for payment shakedowns. Furthermore, the 318 abductions reported last year were actually down 11% from 2008.
Unfortunately, those facts about Phoenix didn’t prevent Senator McCain from erroneously claiming, that Phoenix was: "the No. 2 kidnapping capital of the world" behind Mexico City.
The Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, suffered almost 2,700 murders last year, most of them drug-related, making it possibly the world's most violent town. El Paso, Texas is a stone's throw across the Rio Grande, had just one murder. U.S. law-enforcement officials insist that the Mexican drug cartels' bloody turf wars generally end at the border and don't follow the drugs into our country. El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles points out that "the Mexican cartels know that if they try to commit that kind of violence here, they'll get shut down."
In Arizona, whose illegal-immigrant population is believed to be second only to California's. The state's overall crime rate dropped 12% last year; between 2004 and 2008 it had plunged 23%. In the metro area of Phoenix, violent crime, which includes murder, rape, assault and robbery, dropped by a third during the past decade and by 17% last year. The border city of Nogales, an area rife with illegal immigration and drug trafficking, hasn't logged a single murder in the past two years.
It’s true that Phoenix has in recent years seen an increase of kidnappings. However in almost every case those kidnappings involved drug traffickers targeting other narcos for payment shakedowns. Furthermore, the 318 abductions reported last year were actually down 11% from 2008.
Unfortunately, those facts about Phoenix didn’t prevent Senator McCain from erroneously claiming, that Phoenix was: "the No. 2 kidnapping capital of the world" behind Mexico City.
The Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, suffered almost 2,700 murders last year, most of them drug-related, making it possibly the world's most violent town. El Paso, Texas is a stone's throw across the Rio Grande, had just one murder. U.S. law-enforcement officials insist that the Mexican drug cartels' bloody turf wars generally end at the border and don't follow the drugs into our country. El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles points out that "the Mexican cartels know that if they try to commit that kind of violence here, they'll get shut down."
posted by Jim O'Leary | 1:41 AM
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