The border fear index: How to measure border security
and sheriffs just up or down the Rio Grande River from El Paso may experience increasing drug violence.
One measure of the impact of violent crime on a population is fear among local residents. It is fear that keeps local citizens in Brownsville, for example, from dining en el otro lado, on the other side of the river, in the once popular tourist district of Matamoros. Just walk these Matamoros streets and you will see one restaurant and business after another boarded up. And in Reynosa, thirty miles upriver from Brownsville, if you dare walk the empty streets of this once prosperous tourist district, you cannot help but observe the abandoned businesses.
What we really need are other ways to measure violent crime in border communities beside the inadequate and biased FBI Uniform Crime Reports or national media accounts of random border crimes. We need ways, in short, to measure unreported and underreported violent crime along with the use of American children as young as ten to commit drug-related crimes. We need better methods to measure the impact of drug violence on border residents.
It is impossible, in short, to ignore the emotional impact upon border residents who see bodies hanging from fences as they cross into Mexico, or public signs specifically threatening Border Patrol agents along with signs touting the power of the Zetas, or newspaper reports of yet another police officer, sheriff’s deputy, or Border Patrol agent arrested for drug trafficking.
Border residents, of course, know just how violent their communities and Mexican communities actually are or are not: assertions by representatives of both political parties provide little to comfort them one way or the other.
Clearly, solutions like the border wall, a notable increase in Border Patrol agents, the presence of the American military, and increased deployment of sophisticated surveillance all have had a positive influence on reducing the impact of drug violence. But just ask border residents: the fact remains , that the majority of border communities are and remain dangerous places in which to reside.
The recent estimate by the National Drug Threat Assessment Report that drug trafficking costs our economy a whopping $193 billion a year in crime related expenses, job performance, and health care is nothing but disheartening.
Isn’t it about time to hear new and concrete solutions from President Obama and all presidential candidates, specific solutions fueled less by ideology than pragmatism? Let all solutions be based on fact, not the illusions provided by the FBI Uniform Crime Reports or lone acts of violence overdramatized by national media. Let us admit that there is no single technological fix to drug-related violence – even drones are but a small piece of the puzzle to controlling drug violence along the Mexican border. The facts are that this puzzle remains unsolved.
Lee Maril is a professor of Sociology at East Carolina University and the director of its Center on Diversity and Inequality Research. He specializes in U.S.-Mexico borderlands with a particular focus on the people who live along the border, their history, and the public problems they face on a daily basis. Maril has authored six books on the border including The Fence, his most recent work which focuses on the government’s continuing efforts to build a virtual and physical fence along the southwestern border. He blogs at LeeMaril.com.
