By Tim Vandenack, Truth Staff
tvandenack@etruth.com
ELKHART -- The spike in Elkhart County's Hispanic population hasn't changed the complexion of just the neighborhoods and schools here.
It's also led to a jump in the number of Latinos spending time in the county's jail and passing through the local court system.
"It is a significant number," said Curtis Hill, the Elkhart County prosecutor.
That's not to say Hispanics here -- many of them immigrant newcomers, legal and illegal -- are more criminally inclined than anyone else.
In fact, some key Elkhart County law enforcement officials believe the explanation for the increase in Latino contact with the criminal justice system is simple, and hardly insidious.
"We have arrested more Hispanics only because there are more Hispanics in the area," said Lt. Ed Windbigler, spokesman for the Elkhart Police Department.
Several academic studies show that immigrants actually have lower incarceration rates, per capita, than native-born Americans, dispelling what some experts say are popular perceptions to the contrary. The lower incidence of jailing "holds true especially for the Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans, who make up the bulk of the undocumented population," sociologist Ruben Rumbaut and immigration expert Walter Ewing said in one of the studies last year.
Still, the fact remains -- the growing number of Hispanics here has created new challenges for law enforcement and the courts.
Hill and Windbigler said Hispanics seem to account for a disproportionate number of drunken driving cases and a much larger share of gang activity than other racial and ethnic groups.
Hill also noted many other offenses attributable to undocumented immigrants -- using stolen identification, driving without driver's licenses, driving without insurance -- that, while not matters of life or death, burden law enforcement and wreak havoc on the everyday lives of others.
"It's not the high, flashy stuff, but it's enough (of an) undercurrent that it's disruptive to the flow of everyday life," he said.
Hill also wonders if use of false documents by illegal immigrants, driving without proper operating licenses and other such misdeeds, increase the possibility that they'll break the law in other, more serious ways.
"Once they get used to it, where does it stop?" Hill said. "You've now created a pattern in the person's mind where doing the right thing may not be a part of the equation."
'A tremendous burden'
Elkhart County Sheriff Mike Books emphasizes that white males, ages 18 to 35, account for the biggest percentage of inmates in the county jail.
"We have seen growth in the female population, but white males still are what we expend the majority of our resources addressing on the streets and in our jail," he said in an e-mail response to a query on the matter.
Likewise, most everyone admits that no one segment of the population has a monopoly on breaking the law and that bad guys are hardly representative of the racial and ethnic groups to which they belong.
"I have dealt with a lot of Hispanic families and they have been the most decent people on earth," said Windbigler. "Even the people who are here illegally, they're the most decent people."
At any rate, with the surge in the number of Hispanics here since the 1990s -- many drawn by work in area factories -- law enforcement officials, the prosecutor's office and the courts are left to deal with a whole new set of issues.
Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but a glimpse at the Elkhart County Jail inmate population suggests a rise in the number of Hispanics there that coincides with the segment's increase in the overall population in the county. The Hispanic jail population measured about 2.5 percent of the total here on July 1, 1990, according to a review by The Truth of jail inmate rosters, rising to 12.1 percent on July 1, 2006.
Hill said the influx places "a tremendous burden" on the back of law enforcement, not just because of the crimes the newcomers commit but also due to language and cultural barriers.
The increased drunken driving cases, for instance, stem from differing cultural mores in offending Hispanics' home countries, Hill suspects. He notes the rigorous push here in the United States in recent years by groups aiming to halt drinking and driving, campaigning that may not have been noticed by someone who's been here for only a short time.
He saves his strongest comments, however, for the illicit trade here in Mexican-made methamphetamine and Hispanic gang activity.
Meth dealers from Mexico, he says, can easily blend into Elkhart County's Hispanic community, and even plow their earnings into legitimate businesses.
As for gang activity, many members may only be in their teens, but he says the fighting, tagging and other activity they engage in can reverberate around the community.
"Unfortunately, the public doesn't seem to recognize -- nor the media -- the gang problem until someone gets their brains blown out," Hill said.
Similarly, Windbigler speaks ominously about Hispanic gang activity here.
"I would say it's something that's getting worse," the Elkhart police official said. "It's gone from just graffiti to other things. It seems to be escalating."
Working, helping their families
Still, Judge Stephen Bowers, who heads up Elkhart County Superior Court 2, said aside from cases involving the use of false documents, Hispanics don't account for a disproportionate number of crimes, at least in his courtroom, which hears fraud and burglary matters. Moreover, those who do come before him on false document and other related charges frequently don't have anything else on their records, suggesting they aren't career criminals.
Members of the Latino community here, meanwhile, warn against negative stereotypes, particularly with regard to immigrants.
"The majority of us are looking for a better future, work, trying to help our families," said Yesenia Nava, an immigrant from the Mexican state of Jalisco now living in Elkhart and working in the recreational vehicle industry.
Irma Ortiz, originally from Mexico City but now living here and studying at Indiana University South Bend, complains that young male Hispanics with shaved heads sometimes get singled out as gang-bangers, even if they aren't.
"Just because there's one bad guy, you're going to judge all of them?" adds Amilcar Martinez, originally from Honduras but now a U.S. citizen, also working in the local RV industry.
There's good reason for such questioning.
In their study, published by the Immigration Policy Center, a pro-immigrant think tank, the academics Rumbaut and Ewing note that in 2000 just 0.7 percent of immigrant males ages 18 to 39 were jailed, citing U.S. Census Bureau stats. That compares with 3.5 percent of native-born men, a difference a 2005 Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago study attributed to relatively low criminal propensities among those who choose to migrate here.
"The problem of crime in the United States is not 'caused' or even aggravated by immigrants, regardless of their legal status," Rumbaut and Ewing wrote. "But the misperception that the opposite is true persists among policymakers, the media and the general public, thereby undermining the development of reasoned public responses to both crime and immigration."
Alvaro Marquez, who heads the Hidalgo Community Center here, echoes that, noting that most immigrants here, the undocumented ones anyway, do all they can to avoid brushes with the law, lest such contact lead to deportation.
"They try to be invisible, as if they didn't exist," said Marquez, whose group works with Mexicans and Mexican-Americans here with roots in the Mexican state of Hidalgo.
That's not to say incarceration rates among successive generations are as low, because they aren't. In another report on the matter that Rumbaut led in 2006, the University of California-Irvine sociologist noted that the incarceration rate for U.S.-born Hispanics of Mexican descent is 5.9 percent, much higher than the 0.7 percent rate for Mexican immigrants here.
Whatever the numbers, Marquez worries that misconceptions about Hispanics and crime negatively color relations with the larger community. Rather than just a law enforcement response, he counsels increased interaction between Latinos and the rest of the community to keep things in proper perspective.
"They don't know our roots, our culture, what it is we want here. Since they don't know us they catalog us as bad," Marquez said. "I think the important thing is to let the natives know who we are."