South Side quieter since 'massacre' of last Easter
Chris Richards / Staff
Belen Solano visits the cross she erected near where her son, Juan Lujan, was shot to death last April 23 on South Sixth Avenue, across from the VA hospital.
|
By Stephanie Innes
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
He was her only child, and he didn't make it to 18.
Belen Solano erected a wooden cross in front of a South Sixth Avenue muffler shop near the spot where Juan Lujan was shot to death Easter morning. Last month she decorated it with Christmas ornaments. On Saturday she brought him birthday balloons.
Solano says her son's death - one of 90 homicides in Pima County last year - was preventable. She expresses some hope that his slaying was an anomaly rather than a trend on the South Side, an area that has shown much improvement in its homicide tally. She is even thankful, she said, that the city is taking a proactive stance against gun violence with the recently passed Project Excaliber.
"I'm not anti-cruising. They are kids. But it's the kids who have weapons - it's a wonderful idea to crack down on guns," she said.
Law enforcement officials and community leaders say much has been accomplished since 1995, when Pima County scored a record homicide tally of 95. The improvements, they say, came primarily through prevention and enforcement programs that target youths, in particular gang members.
And with an onslaught of technology since that tragic year, local and national law enforcers expect to do more strategizing. They also will analyze crime statistics and criminal behavior patterns of the population as a whole in an effort to curb future homicides.
The community and local law enforcement have several plans to cut back on violent crime, including:
* A crime-mapping computer program modeled after New York City's Comstat, which has been credited with helping to dramatically reduce homicides in that city. The program, which Tucson police expect to install, holds police commanders responsible for the number of crimes that occur within their areas.
* The addition of a quality-assurance program that will randomly survey residents about their opinions of the Tucson Police Department.
* A domestic-violence program targeted at children who witness abuse in the home. Babies, tots and toddlers in one north-central Tucson neighborhood will be targeted for special services in a three-year pilot project that is being funded with more than $400,000 in federal money. A local group of law enforcement and social service agencies set up the plan.
* Planning for a fifth Tucson police division to handle population growth in the southeast part of the city.
Project Excaliber, which the Tucson City Council passed last month, includes components such as creating a "gun squad" to go after gun violators and creating a computer database for all gun-related incidents.
"The criminal element changes and mutates as quickly as we put together plans. We are always looking at how we can be more innovative, especially with technology and planning," said Capt. Michael Garigan, who oversees the central investigation unit of the Tucson Police Department.
"But I would submit we have done some things in the last five years to try to minimize violent activities, and I think if you look at aggravated assaults it will give a better picture."
Aggravated assaults within Tucson city limits have gone down each year since 1995.
And while the homicide tally spiked in 2000, the incidents have spread into other parts of the city and its sprawling outskirts rather than increasing in the historically high-crime, low-income South Side.
In 1995, 44 percent of Pima County's 95 homicides occurred in Tucson's southern area and in the city of South Tucson, compared with 27 percent in 2000.
Similarly, while the majority of the suspects connected with last year's homicides are from Tucson, their addresses when plotted on a map do not dominate any one area.
"I think people got scared enough that they took aggressive action with their kids," said Gail Leland, director of the Tucson-based Homicide Survivors Inc. "When you look at the homicides in 1995, there were many more kids killed by gang violence. I think programs that have focused on that area have made a tremendous difference."
Some of the changes that have occurred since 1995:
* The Tucson Police Department has revived community policing, which gives neighborhoods their own "beat" cop.
* The Pima County Juvenile Court Center began a Drug Court to intensely monitor youths with substance-abuse problems, and Juvenile Court officials also began stepping up intervention efforts for first-time offenders.
* Former Tucson cop Sixto Molina, who grew up on the South Side, took over as police chief in South Tucson. He started a Weed and Seed program that included targeting drug houses and prostitution rings and was able to boast a 50 percent reduction in crime in the square-mile city of 6,000 people between 1997 and 1999.
* Several local agencies have come together to attack youth violence through "Safe Streets" and "Safe Summer" programs that deploy extra officers on nights when teens are out cruising. Those deployments have heavily emphasized the South Side.
Juan Lujan was one of three Tucson-area youths to lose his life along South Sixth Avenue last Easter. The body count served as a grim reminder that despite all of the prevention efforts directed at teens who cruise the popular stretch of road, the area has not shaken all of its problems.
After the Easter morning incident, both Tucson and South Tucson increased their patrols along South Sixth.
"I think the efforts of the Tucson Police Department since the Easter massacre have been pivotal," said Molina, the South Tucson chief. "In 1990, when juvenile crime was an epidemic, all kinds of crazy things started to happen. We have had to embrace and increase prevention, education and apprehension and on the whole it seems to be working," he added.
Veronica Torres, who is now 21, was part of that epidemic of juvenile crime. A South Tucson native, she was sent to prison after she was convicted of fatally shooting Monica Perez, an 18-year-old single mother, with a .25-caliber pistol in a drive-by shooting on South Sixth Avenue in September 1994. Torres was 14 and in a gang at the time of the shooting.
Her mother later admitted she'd smoked crack and "wasn't there a lot" for Veronica and her siblings.
Torres, who has been sentenced to stay behind bars until she's 41, said in a telephone interview from prison that she wishes she'd been able to understand herself and the world back in 1994.
"It's all about who you have in your world. You need positive influences and people who understand the pain you are going through, and who have been through your lifestyle," she said.
"While I was here two years ago, they had some juveniles on probation come over and walk around, kind of like a 'Scared Straight' type of program, and I was one of the ones they picked. They were court-ordered to talk to me, and I spoke to these girls on a high level. Out of all those girls that came, only one violated, and I think I had an effect."
Torres said that although she'd had a juvenile record when she was arrested, she never understood the consequences of breaking the law. Her homegirls thought it was cool to be on probation. And though she owned her first gun when she was 14 - someone gave it to her - she didn't comprehend that the bullet would ever really kill someone, she said.
"I think we've done some awfully good prosecution of gangs since the mid-'90s," said Garigan, the Tucson police captain.
Garigan pointed to a program in which prosecutors with the Pima County Attorney's Office have, since 1996, begun to work with police on "vertical prosecution" of gang members. That means the same prosecutor is always handling the same gang members - people who often turn up as both victims and suspects.
And he said that police designated as federal agents have been working to charge youngsters under a federal firearms law that can penalize them until the age of 21, Garigan said.
Seventy-five percent of last year's 90 homicides were committed with firearms.
Some of the cities nationwide that boasted drops in homicides last year cite community policing, improved cooperation between police and prosecutors, prevention work and an aging population that's more mindful of the law.
In Phoenix, where homicides dipped to 172 last year from 235 in 1999, officers have formed a task force specifically aimed at eliminating drug-related violence.
Sgt. Randy Force, a spokesman for the Phoenix Police Department who spent eight years in the homicide detail, credits a degree of his city's drop in homicides to better enforcement at the Arizona-Mexico border.
"We probably had the weakest border when comparing California, Texas and Arizona. They stepped it up, and we believe a lot of our violence is related to the drug trade," he said.
San Diego, a city that has a population and geographical size almost identical to Phoenix's and is near the Mexican border, had just 55 homicides last year compared with the Phoenix tally of 172. Both cities' populations are about 1.2 million.
Jim Duncan, who is in charge of the San Diego Police Department's homicide division, said his city regularly eclipsed 100 homicides per year during the late 1980s, primarily due to the popularity of crack cocaine. He said undercover sting operations that concentrated on known gang members helped reduce the problem.
At about that same time, the city started community policing, he said.
"It does take a few years for community policing to kick in. And unless you have a chief of police that promotes and pushes it, officers will do what they want to do. That's a nice feature of the job. You have lots of independence, so you have to keep pushing it so you are making arrests and not just writing tickets."
California, unlike Arizona, also has a three-strikes law that mandates harsher penalties for repeat offenders.
Baltimore, a city of about 632,000 people, recently dropped its homicide tally below 300 for the first time in a decade. Police there have credited, among other things, back-to-basics policing and the hiring of a prosecutor specifically to handle gun offenses.
Force noted that Phoenix and other cities, including Tucson, have seen a decrease in the number of juveniles committing violent crimes, including homicide.
"There are sociologists also saying that the lull is due to the number of adolescents. Some of them warn that another large group is coming into their killing years."
But Richard Block, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at Loyola University in Chicago and coordinator of the Homicide Research Working Group, noted that population fluctuations do not necessarily mean that a homicide rate will increase.
"Look at the population that is increasing fastest in the U.S. It's the elderly population, and they are not very prone to killing or being killed," he said.
Block also said that across the country the ability to detect killers and serial offenders has improved. He cited as examples automatic fingerprinting, DNA banks and geographical analyses through computer programs.
"Many cities that once treated every incident as just an incident are much more aware of continuing patterns, and that may help in the long run quite a bit. It may be that some of this stuff will actually reduce the homicide rate."
Molina, of South Tucson, is hopeful that such tools will reduce local violence in future years. He said on the whole, the South Side of Tucson and the city of South Tucson are "on an upswing." Schools no longer have to pick up dirty condoms and syringes from their yards in the mornings, he said, and businesses and residents are making concerted efforts at getting to know one another.
But he's careful about overconfidence.
"It wasn't as violent when I was growing up, but when I look at my Little League picture from when I was 12 - that would have been in 1963 - three of my teammates were murder victims," he said, recalling the baseball team that used to play at the Rodeo Grounds. "I keep it as a reminder."
For Belen Solano, the reminder is her grandson, who was born four months after her son died.
"He was just so proud that he was going to be a father. He was really looking forward to that," she said. "It's not fair that he was taken from me. I miss him dearly."
* Star reporter Joseph Barrios contributed to this report.
* Contact Stephanie Innes at 573-4134 or at sinnes@azstarnet.com.
