Newsweek is currently running an interesting article on how Hispanic gangs, such as the Mexican Mafia, have been targeting not only African-American gang members, but African-Americans simply. Here in North Carolina, we have seen a similar trend — as the murder of Chanda Brown Mwicigi may suggest.
Indeed, over the past several years North Carolina has experienced a disturbing surge in gang activity. Between 1999 and 2004, Wake County saw a 5,743.3 percent increase in gang membership. During the same period, the city of Durham saw a 333.3 percent increase. A 2005 report by the Governor’s Crime Commission estimated that 22.2 percent of all gang members in North Carolina are Hispanic (with ethnicity unknown for another 19.4 percent). By contrast, Hispanics accounted for only 7 percent of total state population in 2004. Nationally, Hispanics are thought to comprise 49 percent of total gang membership. Many of these gang members — in some cases, as much as 90 percent — are illegal aliens.
The simple fact is that far too many illegal aliens are not here to “get a good job and raise a family.” Illegal immigrants are no more virtuous than any other people. And given the fact that they have to: 1) break the law in order to enter the United States; and 2) break the law again (often through stealing someone’s identity) in order to be employed in the United States, it is reasonable to suppose that illegal immigration fosters a culture of lawlessness, not to mention disdain for American culture.
In any case, we’ll never solve the problem of criminal illegal aliens until we secure the border.
“But Mark Edwards, one of Manacer-Herrera’s lawyers, said Friday it was lamentable that “a retarded kid will be in prison the rest of his life at taxpayers’ expense. That’s a costly proposition.”
Would life imprisonment truly be more costly than the aggregate cost to society of all the crimes that this piece of human debris he would commit until he finally died of natural causes? As a former Durham policeman, who dealt with people like this, I doubt it! It is difficult to account for this, as the costs of imprisonment can be (more or less) accounted for fairly easily, and are borne in a single budget. The destruction of a career criminal who is out on the street is diffused throughout society, and it is difficult or impossible to track the entire length and breadth of it. It hurts many people a little bit, and some quite a lot. But, between low detection and reporting rates of crime, low case clearance rates, and a byzantine hodge-podge of data sources and systems in the justice system, the true aggregate economic cost of leaving one career criminal on the streets is simply not definable. But I assure you that the toll is gigantic, both in terms of economics and community pride. In my mind, life in prison for this malefactor is only appropriate because they did not go for the death penalty.
Civilized people do not form or belong to criminal gangs. Uncivilized people do. If we civilized people wish to reclaim our society from this evil, we need to make things tough for gangs. We need to get confrontational. Every time a known gang member commits any crime, no matter how trivial the matter, he needs to get locked up. And fingerprinted. And his car towed, if legal. And, most of all, run through the ICE database to see if he is legally here. And deported at the end of his sentence. Period. The end.
People who have declared their intention to live outside of the rules and laws of decent society, such as street gang members, do not need to be treated nicely by the police or the legal system. They need to be treated legally and constitutionally, of course. (And this assumes that constitutional protections ought to apply to illegal aliens, which I disagree with, but that is another argument for another time.) There is a LOT more that the police could do to raise the cost of doing business for these gangs. Perhaps they are doing it in Raleigh. But I assure you that they do NOT do this in the liberal sanctuary city of Durham.
The cops know where these gangs roost. The average patrolman is not scared of them. With the right leadership, the police could take the fight to the enemy and make the cost of doing business in Durham (or anywhere else) high enough to make the gangs go elsewhere. (Back to LA sounds good. Back to Mexico or Central America sounds even better.)
This would be difficult and costly. And it would require us to admit that one sort of culture (American, English-speaking, gainfully employed, and law-abiding) is better than another, wouldn’t it?