Miami Aims for Guns at Roadblocks

In the same week that a national survey revealed American youngsters were 12 times more likely to die by gunfire than children in the rest of the world, police chief Donald Warshaw announced he had had enough. A 16-year-old ninth-grade girl shot a classmate in the head in front of their high school last Tuesday, days after a 5-year-old was killed by a stray bullet.

Surprise roadblocks would go up in violence-plagued neighborhoods, the chief said, and police would check motorists for illegal weapons.

“Roadblocks are to intimidate,” Warshaw said. “We want to intimidate. We’re going to make life miserable and difficult if you’re riding the streets of Miami with a gun.”

Sure, gun roadblocks are illegal, police later admitted. The roadblocks are really drunk-driving checkpoints at which police simply ask drivers if they have a gun in the car. And if they happen to be drunk, or admit they have a gun, then bingo: They’re under arrest.

As soon as the first checkpoint went up in a mixed black and Latino neighborhood last week, some community activists and the American Civil Liberties Union cried foul. “Police state,” said Miami ACLU Chairman Benjamin Waxman.

Others wondered how the city of Miami--already $68 million in debt and under state financial supervision--could afford any extra police efforts.

Even more questions were raised when police disclosed that the first roadblock had produced only two illegal firearms.

No matter, said Warshaw, who insists he has a mandate from the community to stop the handgun slaughter. “It is hard to measure the success of this program on the number of guns seized.

“The weapons are out there,” he said. “And we have to change the notion that it is acceptable that everybody is carrying a gun.

“This girl [who wounded her classmate] was carrying a gun in the waistband of her dress, like she was in the Wild West. We have to say it is not OK to carry a gun in Miami.”

Miami isn’t the only community in South Florida, let alone the nation, where guns are claiming kids. A 16-year-old girl in Hallendale, south of Fort Lauderdale, was fatally shot Sunday in the front yard of her home. On Saturday, a 3-year-old girl was wounded in both legs in a drive-by shooting as she rode in a car with relatives in Dade County. A 14-year-old boy was shot and killed by a classmate during a schoolyard fight Jan. 27 in West Palm Beach.

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But Miami is the city that Warshaw says he wants to make “a model for safety and nonviolence,” and he emphasized that the roadblocks, which continued through the weekend, were just the most visible and most controversial aspect of the crackdown. Officers also were conducting truancy sweeps in areas known as gang hangouts, drug busts, bar checks and gun-shop license inspections.

In addition to the two guns seized during the first roadblock, officers that day also took 27 truant students to school, made 12 felony arrests, issued 110 traffic tickets and cited 10 Little Havana bars for license violations.

Warshaw says Waxman and other critics have charged that police are targeting black neighborhoods. Not so, says the chief: “Nobody has a corner on the market in guns and drugs. They are in every ethnic enclave in Miami.”

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Nonetheless, Warshaw admits that residents of Miami’s predominantly black Liberty City area “have pleaded with me to increase the level of enforcement. To me, that’s a mandate from people of goodwill who want to live in peace.”

In the last 18 months, Warshaw says, Miami has instituted what’s called community policing, dividing the city into 12 neighborhoods patrolled by the same officers who make an effort to get to know the residents. And crime is on the decline, down 27% in Miami over the last three years, the largest drop since the 1960s, according to the chief.

“But we did have this rash of shootings,” Warshaw says. “And when you do something like this [anti-gun campaign], you take the risk of profiling yourself as a crime-ridden city.”