Illegal Aliens’ Crimes Frustrate Police

On a hilltop in Vista with a million-dollar view of the ocean and the green fields of North County, Sheriff’s Deputy Hernando Torres cautiously approaches five illegal aliens relaxing in an abandoned Ford LTD.

In rapid-fire Spanish, Torres uses a firm but friendly voice to order the five aliens out of the car.

One is reading a pornographic comic book; another is listening to music through a headset; a third is leafing through a Spanish translation of the Book of Mormon. Two are trying to sleep.

Torres orders the five to sit on the ground while he asks their names and what they’re doing in North County.

What happens over the next few minutes atop Strawberry Hill will lead Torres, without prompting, to use the word most commonly employed by residents, beat cops and politicians to describe the problem of illegal alien crime in North County: frustration.

As concern about alien crime increases, area residents--affluent, educated homeowners accustomed to demanding that government heed their wishes--have turned to the Sheriff’s Department and their municipal police departments for help.

The response they’ve received is often the same: North County law enforcement does what it can but it does not have the manpower or tools to eradicate illegal alien crime.

Such crimes present uniquely vexing problems of language and culture that often baffle law enforcement. It is a truism accepted by the authorities and even the angriest of homeowners that most aliens are here only to work and have no intent to commit crime.

Still, arrest figures collected in virtually every community in North County suggest that aliens commit crimes, particularly property and public-nuisance crimes, in numbers disproportionate to their percentage of the population.

Jerry Hargarten, a retired executive from the Du Pont chemical company, says his neighbors in Poway have concluded that the aliens are “unidentifiable, uncontactable and unaccountable.”

“My neighbors believe law enforcement is powerless to remove the cause of their deteriorating quality of life,” Hargarten said matter-of-factly.

Nothing that happened that evening on Strawberry Hill would disturb Hargarten’s assessment.

Torres searches the car and a nearby hooch for stolen property, drugs or weapons. He finds a hunting knife.

After a few minutes Torres decides that, most likely, four of the five aliens are exactly what they claim: impoverished Mexicans fleeing their village near Guadalajara in hopes of finding honest work. He sends the four packing.

The fifth is more defiant in his demeanor, more furtive in his responses. He is taller, bigger, less Indian-looking than the others. He is wearing a Nike T-shirt and a baseball cap with the bill turned upward.

The man says his name is Oscar Briseno, born April 14, 1969. Two weeks earlier he told Torres his name was Jose Ramirez, born April 14, 1966. He has no outstanding warrants under either name.

He also has no identification with him and no address. His hands have no calluses from working the fields or construction sites.

Torres believes the man understands English but is pretending otherwise because he knows few deputies speak Spanish.

Prison Gang Tattoos

More ominously, he has crude tattoos of the kind favored by Mexican prison gangs: a teardrop from his right eye, the word SUR (Spanish for south) near the hairline, and a drawing on his arm of undetermined intent.

This is the second time Torres has found him near an alien encampment on Strawberry Hill where Torres and other deputies a month earlier recovered more than $5,000 worth of stolen jewelry, camera equipment, watches, calculators, and televisions, along with two sawed-off rifles and magnum ammunition for a .357-caliber handgun.

Legally, Torres could arrest this alien for giving a false name to a police officer, a misdemeanor. That would allow him to be fingerprinted and a more thorough background check could be done.

But the Sheriff’s Department, in Vista, Poway or anywhere else, does not have the manpower for such speculative, time-consuming arrests.

Torres has no alternative but to release the man.

As Briseno/Ramirez shuffles down the hill, he is not far from a ranch-style home that represents the North County good life, complete with swimming pool, satellite dish and a back-yard swing set for children.

“Do you see now the frustration of dealing with aliens?” Torres asks a reporter riding with him. “We don’t really even know who that guy is. I doubt that the people in that house know he’s their neighbor.”

Local Lawmen Lack Authority

To the chagrin of residents, neither sheriff’s deputies nor officers from other municipal police departments have the legal authority to cart away aliens merely for being in this country illegally.

The U.S. Border Patrol, an arm of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, does have the authority but it is stretched gossamer-thin, with 40 agents to cover a 2,000-square-mile area of North County and parts of South and East County that is called the El Cajon sector. The Border Patrol has recently opened a station in San Marcos, but plans for additional manpower have been delayed.

Agents are often too busy to respond to calls for assistance from homeowners or police.

“If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Jerry Lipscomb of the Poway station, “we are not the Border Patrol. We cannot just round up aliens for being aliens. If homeowners truly feel threatened and feel a crime is being committed, then we can act. But we do not enforce immigration laws.”

That explanation provides little comfort to harried homeowners, taunted by what they perceive as an increasing number of criminal acts by illegal aliens, ranging from trespassing, public drunkenness, indecent exposure and panhandling to petty theft and burglary.

Along with crimes directed at residents, law-enforcement agencies are also increasingly worried about aliens victimizing other aliens. It is an article of faith among police that many acts of violence against aliens go unreported.

“Many of the aliens are having to arm themselves as protection against predators among their fellow aliens,” said Sheriff’s Capt. John Burroughs, who heads the Vista substation.

Rape Triggers Concern

Violence against residents by aliens is exceedingly rare, but the gang rape of a 15-year-old Poway girl on April 24, in which five aliens have now been charged, sent shivers of fear throughout North County.

“If it can happen in Poway, how long before it happens in Rancho Penasquitos?” asked Kathryn Antus, a Rancho Penasquitos resident, at a recent public meeting in Poway called to discuss illegal-alien crime.

Another homeowner at the meeting described a terrifying night when a drunken migrant pounded on her door, brandishing a gun and firing shots in the air.

“Our system is powerless to hold them accountable for their actions,” said Jeanne Pyeatt. “Our country is being abused.”

At the same meeting, Poway Mayor Bob Emery explained that the Sheriff’s Department, which has a contract with the city, cannot deport aliens and cannot go onto private property to search for health violations in alien camps without the permission of the property owner.

“I know it’s continually frustrating for us to say time and time again that we can’t do anything because it’s out of our jurisdiction,” Emery said.

“But we say that because it’s out of our jurisdiction.”

Barriers of Language, Silence

The problem in North County is made even more baffling by a language barrier, the transient nature of the aliens’ living conditions, a code of silence among aliens, and the fact that Mexican criminal records are virtually unavailable to U.S. authorities.

“They’re so close, but they’re so far away because of the way they live,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Kathy Fulmer of the Encinitas substation.

“We have a different kind of alien coming across the border now,” said Lt. Lipscomb in a comment echoed by officers throughout North County.

“In the old days, the alien was just a guy trying to make a buck to support his family,” Lipscomb said. “But in the past five years we’ve also gotten a more assertive, more aggressive, more con-wise alien who is here to rob and is not afraid of law enforcement.”

Of 52 deputies assigned to the Encinitas substation, only one speaks Spanish well enough to receive bilingual pay; in Poway, 3 of 36 deputies speak Spanish.

Like other police agencies, the Sheriff’s Department has a recruiting drive for bilingual officers and offers bonus pay, but the candidate pool is limited.

The frustration of dealing with aliens continues even after an arrest is made.

Cops complain that aliens--be they defendants, witnesses or victims--often disappear before their cases come to trial, either to a new encampment or back to Mexico.

Judges say that ordering restitution is virtually useless when a defendant is an illegal alien; probation officers say they often must tell a judge that an alien has no record, only to find later that he has a lengthy criminal history in Mexico.

“They are essentially outside the system as we know it,” said Vista Superior Court Judge Tony Maino. “Our system is predicated on knowing who a person is, where they live, what their employment history has been, and where their family lives. With the aliens, we know none of that.”

Although no statistics exist to back him up, Maino said he sees nothing to dispute the idea held by many officers that an alien who commits a crime has a far smaller risk of being arrested, punished and made to pay restitution than a non-alien.

Affluence Magnifies Problem

The overall affluence of North County makes the contrast between alien and resident even sharper, and the emotions of the latter even more volatile.

“If you buy a house for $400,000, you figure on having your neighbors being people of the same economic bracket,” said Sheriff’s Sgt. Joe Lopez. “People get upset when they buy a house and find out their neighbor is a guy living under a rock.”

For political and practical reasons, there are few statistics on the number of crimes committed by illegal aliens.

The Sheriff’s Department stopped issuing statistics on alien crime after a political furor erupted over comments made by County Supervisor Susan Golding, who overstated the amount of alien crime by incorrectly assuming that one station’s figure reflected a trend for the entire county.

The San Diego Police Department agreed to stop gathering crime statistics on illegal aliens after a presentation to the City Council by Chief Bill Kolender caused a vigorous protest by civil rights and Latino groups.

Chicano Federation board chairman Jess Haro, who led the protest, said that, as long as the police or Sheriff’s Department will not allow civilian review of their record-keeping, statistics about alien crime are dubious and could be used unfairly to blame all Latinos for crime.

‘An Easy Scapegoat’

“The undocumented person is an easy scapegoat,” Haro said. “What happens is that police will blame the undocumented for all the crimes they cannot solve.”

A study being done by the San Diego Assn. of Governments may shed some light on alien crime. To be completed in the fall, the study will track 7,000 felony arrests to see what percentage involved aliens.

The study also will assess the overall effect of illegal aliens on the county’s health, social service and justice systems--so county officials will have documentation when seeking federal aid.

Statistics kept by various law-enforcement agencies in recent years, covering such areas as Encinitas-Cardiff, Carlsbad, Vista-San Marcos, Fallbrook, Escondido, and Poway, all strongly suggest that aliens commit a percentage of crimes such as burglary, petty theft, robbery and public drunkenness far exceeding their percentage of the population.

“In 1987, about 22% of our felony arrests were Hispanic, and 29% of misdemeanor arrests were Hispanic,” Carlsbad Police Chief Bob Vales said. “And you can do with that as you will. I don’t know what the population of resident Hispanics is in Carlsbad, but I doubt it’s 29%.”

At the Vista jail, illegal aliens in recent months made up 15% to 18% of the inmate population. Of probation reports done for the Vista courts, 20% involve persons who speak only Spanish.

While no one knows for sure how many illegal aliens are in North County, even the highest estimate, provided by the U.S. Border Patrol, puts the figure at less than 5% of the region’s overall population.

Beyond the numbers, there appears to be agreement among law-enforcement agencies that a small percentage of aliens are devoted not to working but to crime, and that the worst victims are other aliens.

“Many seem to arrive with feuds from their villages,” said Judge Maino. “You add alcohol and a machete, and the result can be very violent.”

The felony most commonly linked to illegal aliens is burglary.

150 Daylight Burglaries

Warrants have been issued for two aliens in the “power-off” burglary spree in Valley Center-Fallbrook-Vista, in which upward of 150 homes, often set amid the groves and fields, have been ransacked during daylight hours.

Detectives believe the burglars have adopted a pose likely to cause little suspicion in the more rural midsection of North County--that of day laborers going door to door in search of work.

If the homeowner answers, the burglar asks about work. If the homeowner doesn’t answer, the burglar turns off the power to disable any alarm, then pries or smashes open a window.

One sign of how little is known about illegal-alien crime is that detectives have yet to determine how the “power-off” burglars are profiting from their loot. Detectives have scoured the usual spots for illegal goods--flea markets and pawn shops--but have come up empty.

“It’s surprising and it’s frustrating,” said Sheriff’s Detective Mike Shelby. “It’s like the stuff has flat-out disappeared.”

Back on Strawberry Hill in Vista, Deputy Torres watches Briseno/Ramirez as he strolls away.

Strawberry Hill could be seen as a microcosm of the North County alien problem. In increasingly close proximity are luxurious ranch homes and primitive encampments of aliens.

Responding to homeowner complaints, the Border Patrol does occasional sweeps, but the aliens move back in within a few hours.

Several days after his encounter with Briseno/Ramirez, Torres again returns to Strawberry Hill. Again he finds the same pattern among the aliens: the many who are honest, the few who are not.

Wallet Returned

He finds two brothers who sleep during the day and work as parking-lot sweepers at night. Torres knows them. A third brother had flagged him down recently to turn in a wallet he had found, fully stocked with credit cards.

A remarkable bit of honesty, Torres concludes, when you consider the financial value of the cards.

At the hilltop, in the same abandoned Ford, Torres finds three younger aliens--a woman and two men. None has a job.

Questioned about where she got her jewelry and what she paid for it, the woman insists that Torres take the jewelry and leave. He did, giving her a receipt and saying she could pick it up whenever she wanted at the sheriff’s station.

None of their names yield any outstanding warrants.

A day later, however, a flyer is circulated by Valley Center detectives showing one of the men, under a different name, as a suspect in the “power-off” burglaries. By this time, he has fled Strawberry Hill.

Torres’ trips to the camps of North County have convinced him that there are two different groups of aliens: a large group here to work, a smaller group here to victimize both full-time residents and fellow aliens.

Telling the two apart is difficult enough for police and probably impossible for Anglos, he concedes.

“In reality, it’s only a few who commit the crimes,” Torres said, “but a lot get blamed for it.”