Phoenix Police Chief: Don’t Just Treat the Symptoms, Fix the Problem

Posted 03/24/09 at 08:22pm

The Washington Post's George Will has a great column on Police Chief Jack Harris, who argues that Washington's failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform directly affects his ability to fight crime in Phoenix.

According to Will, Harris fits the profile of a top cop, "is stolid and patient, but there are limits." He writes:

Clearly, he is weary of explaining that this is one of America's safest large cities, with declining rates of violent crime and property crime. Unfortunately, there are the kidnappings.

For them, Harris says, "The answer is not in Phoenix. The answer is in Washington. "We know how to close a border," says Harris with acid dryness: "build a wall" and deploy "machine gun nests."

But "I personally think that is stupid." For now, however, the U.S. "has turned immigration policy over to Mexican thugs." So, we have reached a point at which barbed wire, car batteries and acid become the business tools of kidnapper-torturer-extortionists.

What does Harris suggest as an alternative to turning our nation's immigration policy over to "thugs?" Simple: if you want to crackdown on crime, deal intelligently with the borders, get folks out of the shadows, and create a system that people want to go through and not around.

Pass comprehensive immigration reform.

Will describes the situation in vivid imagery:

With a force large enough to police the nation's fifth-largest city, Harris can deploy 60 officers to deal with one kidnapping. That would be impossible in smaller cities, to which such crime might be driven by success here. But "don't give me 50 more" officers to "deal with the symptoms."

Rather, Harris says, who was raised in a rough Phoenix neighborhood, give me comprehensive immigration reform that controls the borders, provides for whatever seasonal immigration the nation wants, and one way or another settles the status of the 12 million who are here illegally - 55 percent of whom have been here at least eight years.

For those whose profession it is, law enforcement sometimes seems like bailing an ocean with a thimble. Harris wants not a bigger thimble, but a smaller ocean.

Bailing an ocean with a thimble is an apt metaphor for how local cops have had to deal with the tumultuous effects of Washington's failure to pass immigration reform.

Enough is enough, it's time to fix the problem.

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