America's Sanctuary City Nightmare

A litigation battle is raging between the states and President Barack Obama over his attempt to impose a nationwide “sanctuary” policy for illegal aliens. Yet, there is no question that existing sanctuary policies implemented by numerous towns and cities have victimized innocent Americans. Those sanctuary policies have enabled illegal aliens to commit thousands of crimes –crimes that would not have occurred had their perpetrators been deported in keeping with existing law.

In 2011, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a study on approximately 250,000 illegal aliens locked up in our federal, state, and local prisons. They represent more than a quarter of all of the prisoners in the federal prison system alone. The GAO’s “study population” had been arrested nearly 1.7 million times and committed three million offenses, averaging about seven arrests and 12 offenses per criminal alien. The incarcerated aliens had been arrested for a vast array of crimes:

- 49 percent had been arrested for drugs;

- 37 percent for burglary, stolen property or robbery;

- 35 percent for assault;

- 21 percent for fraud, forgery or counterfeiting;

- 19 percent for weapons violations;

- 13 percent for homicide or kidnapping, and

- 12 percent for sex crimes.

Three states—California, Texas and Arizona—bore the brunt of the crime wave induced by these criminal illegal aliens, although other states—e.g., Florida and New York—suffered significant problems due to criminal illegal aliens, as well. In Texas, drugs, sex offenses, and assault were the top three offenses for which illegal aliens were incarcerated. A recent report from the Texas Department of Public Safety obtained by J. Christian Adams of PJ Media showed that from 2008 to 2014, illegal aliens committed over 600,000 crimes in Texas, including nearly 3,000 homicides and almost 8,000 sexual assaults.

Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies analyzed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) records and found that during just one eight-month period in 2014, sanctuary jurisdictions released more than 8,100 deportable aliens. Of those, 62 percent had a prior criminal record; 3,000 were convicted felons. Of those released, 1,900 were later rearrested a total of 4,300 times on 7,500 different offenses. As Vaughan says, “when local jurisdictions shield aliens wanted by the feds, the aliens can commit more crimes.”

And that is exactly what happened recently in San Francisco. Kathryn Steinle, a 32-year-old resident of the city, was out for a walk with her father on Pier 14. She was shot and killed by an illegal alien who had seven felonies on his record and had already been deported five times.  ICE had already started another deportation process for Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, but the federal government transferred him to San Francisco at the city’s request because he had an outstanding drug charge against him.

Via: National Interest

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MASSACHUSETTS: Amid Surge in Illegal Alien Crimes State Pushes for Broad Sanctuary Law

A surge in serious crimes by illegal immigrants—many repeat offenders—who have been shielded by sanctuary laws isn’t stopping legislators in Massachusetts from quietly pushing for a measure that would protect undocumented aliens statewide.

The move could not have come at a worse time, as the nation reels from a series of atrocious crimes committed by illegal aliens who long ago should have been deported. Instead, they were protected by sanctuary laws despite their criminal histories and illegal status in the U.S. A recent example is the gruesome July 4 San Francisco murder of a young woman by an illegal immigrant thug with seven felony convictions. The Mexican national had been deported five times.

Like a number of municipalities across the nation, San Francisco’s sanctuary law protects illegal aliens and bans any sort of cooperation with federal authorities, even when the perpetrator is guilty of a serious offense. In fact, in the recent San Francisco case Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had issued a detainer for the illegal alien, 45-year-old Francisco Sanchez, but local authorities did not honor it and instead released him. San Francisco’s mayor defended the policy after the senseless murder, saying that it “protects residents regardless of immigration status and is not intended to protect repeat, serious and violent felons.”

More than 200 cities, counties, and states across the U.S. protect criminal aliens from deportation by refusing to comply with ICE detainers or otherwise impede information exchanges between their employees, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. Among them is Cook County in Illinois, Miami-Dade County in south Florida and practically the entire state of California. In Massachusetts only a couple of cities—Amherst and Boston—have sanctuary measures in place and some state lawmakers want to broaden the protection.

The legislature is looking to pass a measure that will offer sanctuary protections to illegal aliens statewide. If approved, all public agencies in Massachusetts will be banned from divulging information on illegal immigrants to federal authorities and state employees will be forbidden from denying any taxpayer-funded assistance, benefits or participation in public programs to those in the country illegally. “This shall include, but not be limited, to education or training, employment, health, welfare, rehabilitation, housing or other services, whether provided directly by the recipient of funds of the commonwealth or provided by others through contracts or other arrangements with the recipient,” according to language in the proposed law.

The measure also offers illegal immigrants assistance in gaining legal status in the U.S., possibly citizenship. “It shall be the policy of the commonwealth to support and encourage any and all residents in their attempts to obtain lawful immigration status and, if they choose, citizenship. Nothing in this section shall prohibit an agency or employee of the commonwealth or recipient of commonwealth funds from requesting the voluntary provision of information or documentation regarding immigration status to the extent necessary to assist an individual in resolving his or her immigration question when such assistance is part of a program’s activities and is consistent with this subsection.”

The bill was introduced by state Representative Byron Rushing, a Boston Democrat who claims his priorities are human and civil rights. The civil rights activist/politician should read this disturbing investigative series in his hometown newspaper about illegal immigrant sex offenders who have been released instead of deported. They include convicted rapists, child molesters and kidnappers. One law enforcement agency calls them “the worst of the worst.” Just a few weeks ago, another local news report revealed that two illegal immigrants charged with drug-related crimes are suspected of murdering a grandmother in Lawrence, which is about 29 miles from Boston.

Via: Judicial Watch

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Chicago weekend shooting tracker for July 24-26

Police investigate after a double shooting and crash late Saturday in South Shore. | Network Video Productions

Chicago gun violence coverage

Friday, 3 p.m. — Man shot, critically wounded in West Englewood

Friday, 6:45 p.m. — Police: Boy, 17, shot to death in North Lawndale

Friday, 7:45 p.m. — Woman shot in Auburn Gresham

Friday, 11:10 p.m. — Boy, 14, shot in Humboldt Park

Saturday, 12:50 a.m. — Police: Man shot to death in Austin

Saturday, 2:10 a.m. — Man shot in Little Village

Saturday, 2:40 a.m. — Woman wounded in Auburn Gresham shooting

Saturday, 4:05 a.m. — Woman grazed in West Town shooting

Saturday, 5:15 a.m. — Man injured in Woodlawn shooting

Saturday, 7 a.m. — Man hurt in Ukrainian Village shooting

Saturday, 5 p.m. — Woman shot in Auburn Gresham

Saturday, 7:30 p.m. — Two shot in East Garfield Park

Saturday, 10:15 p.m. — Man injured in Greater Grand Crossing shooting

Saturday, 10:15 p.m. — 1 killed, 1 injured in South Side shooting

Saturday, 11:35 p.m. — 2 shot in SUV that crashes into South Shore bus stop

Saturday, 11:45 p.m. — Man shot in vacant lot in West Englewood

Sunday, 12:15 a.m. — Boy, 16, shot on South Side

Sunday, 12:35 a.m. — Man shot in Washington Park

Sunday, 1 a.m. — Man shot on Wicker Park sidewalk

Sunday, 2 a.m. — Two women shot in South Shore

Sunday, 2:35 a.m. — 2 killed, 1 hurt in Humboldt Park shooting

Sunday, 5 a.m. — Man shot in Back of the Yards

Sunday, 5:30 a.m. — Man in Little Village

Sunday, 9:13 a.m. — Police: Man, 18, fatally shot in South Chicago

Sunday, 2:20 p.m. — Man shot in Canaryville

Sunday, 3:40 p.m. — Man shot in Ashburn

Sunday, 5:45 p.m. — Man injured in Avalon Park shooting

Sunday, 6:05 p.m. — Man shot during Washington Heights robbery

Sunday, 7:45 p.m. — Police: Boy shot to death in Little Village

Sunday, 11:58 p.m. — Man shot in neck in Englewood

Monday, 12 a.m. — Man hurt in South Chicago drive-by

Monday, 12:20 a.m. — Man shot in back in South Chicago

Monday, 1:55 a.m. — Man seriously wounded in Heart of Chicago shooting

Monday, 2:35 a.m. — 19-year-old shot in Morgan Park

Monday, 3 a.m. — Man critically wounded in Kenwood shooting

Via: Chicago Sun-Times

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CALIFORNIA: Why Crime Is Up in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles Times reported this week that crime is on the rise in the City of Angels after a 12-year decline. “Crime surged across Los Angeles in the first six months of this year,” the story begins, “despite a campaign by the Los Angeles Police Department to place more officers on the streets and target certain types of offenses.” The only mystery about L.A.’s recent crime spike is why anyone finds it a mystery.

Civic leaders have been at pains to explain the reversal. Mayor Eric Garcetti and Police Chief Charlie Beck have blamed a rise in gang violence and homelessness, along with voter approval in November of Proposition 47, which made many “nonviolent” felonies into misdemeanors. All of these have contributed to the increase, but conspicuously missing from their list is a factor both Mayor Garcetti and Chief Beck are surely aware of but are unlikely to address, at least publicly: officer morale in the LAPD is abysmal.

The death of Michael Brown last year in Ferguson, Missouri, touched off a national wave of anti-police hysteria. This despite the fact that every investigative body that examined the case—including the U.S. Justice Department under Eric Holder—concluded that Darren Wilson, the police officer who tried to detain Brown and a companion as they walked down a Ferguson street, acted in self-defense and well within the law when he shot and killed Brown. Wilson was nonetheless hounded from his job and forced into hiding as the “Hands up, don’t shoot” myth was propagated in the media and exploited by the anti-police industry.

The message was not lost on LAPD officers, who came to realize that, like Wilson, they were just one controversial incident away from potential ruin. Two officers in Los Angeles are currently waiting to learn their fate after their involvement in a shooting that occurred just two days after Brown was killed. Though the incident was not as widely covered as the Brown shooting, the police killing of Ezell Ford, a 25-year-old black man, sparked protests in Los Angeles and brought calls for the involved officers to be fired and imprisoned. To his credit, Chief Beck defied the mob and ruled that the shooting was justified, as forensic evidence proved that Ford had tried to disarm one of the officers as they wrestled on a South Los Angeles sidewalk.

But the laws governing the LAPD are such that the chief doesn’t have the last word on shootings. All he can do is make a recommendation to the five-member police commission—all mayoral appointees—and they come to their own conclusions. In a ruling that was stunning for its legal distortions and intellectual contortions, the commission ruled that one of the officers was justified in shooting Ford but the other was not. And now, almost a year after the incident, both officers are still awaiting a decision by the Los Angeles County district attorney on whether they will face criminal charges.

The rise in crime is easily explainable if you proceed from the assumption that police officers and criminals are rational actors who constantly evaluate the risk-reward ratio of any decisions they make. For the criminals of Los Angeles, a good deal of risk has been removed from their calculations, especially now that so many felony property- and drug-related crimes are misdemeanors and the state’s 2011 “realignment” law has achieved its intended goal of easing overcrowding in the state’s prisons. The result has been fewer criminals behind bars and more on the streets without much in the way of a deterrent under the law.

And not only do L.A.’s criminals face lesser penalties if they are arrested, they know that the city’s police officers are less inclined to arrest them in the first place. For the police officers’ part, they’ve seen only an increase in the risks they face. And in this I’m not referring to the risks to their mortal hides posed by some knife- or gun-wielding thug. Police officers, at least those who choose to work the streets, prepare themselves physically and mentally for these challenges. But while a police officer may keep himself physically fit and practice his marksmanship, there is no amount of training that can prepare him for the dangers that emanate from City Hall, the district attorney’s office, or the Justice Department if he should become involved in some controversial incident that has the mob calling for his head on a pike.

Until Mayor Garcetti and Chief Beck are prepared to defend their police officers from the mob, expect crime in Los Angeles to continue to rise.

(Jack Dunphy (@officerdunphy) is the pseudonym of a police officer in Southern California. Originally posted on City Journal.)

Via: California Political Review

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Are We In for Another High-Crime Era After the Response to Ferguson and Baltimore?

Are we seeing a reversal of the 20-year decline in violent crime in America? A new nationwide crime wave?

Heather Mac Donald fears we are, and as a premier advocate and analyst of the policing strategy pioneered by Rudy Giuliani in New York City and copied and adapted throughout the country, she is to be taken seriously. And the statistics she presented in an article in last weekend's Wall Street Journal are truly alarming.

Gun violence is up 60 percent in Baltimore so far this year compared to 2014. Homicides are up 180 percent in Milwaukee, 25 percent in St. Louis, 32 percent in Atlanta and 13 percent in New York in the same period.

Why is this happening? Mac Donald writes, "The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months."

That's a reference to the reactions to the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., last summer, and to the death this spring of Freddie Gray in Baltimore.

The narrative propagated by mainstream media, the Eric Holder Justice Department and the Barack Obama White House was that unarmed innocent blacks were being slaughtered by racist police. "Black lives matter," read the hashtag, as if most cops believed the opposite.

The facts of these cases, as revealed through competent investigations, did not support the meme. In one case in which video evidence did, in South Carolina, the policeman was quickly charged with murder by local authorities.

But the propagation of the racist-cops narrative was followed by days of rioting in Ferguson last year and Baltimore last month. The (perhaps misspoken) response of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake: "We also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well."

Another response: Across the country, Mac Donald notes, "offices scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric." Proactive "broken windows" policing is being replaced by non-benign neglect. The victims of the increased numbers of homicides are almost all black.

Via: Real Clear Politics

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