It is a reminder of how hard the past is to leave behind
(especially when your leading politicians belong to it). By now the whole nation knows the basic
facts. Francisco Sanchez, a 45 or 52-year-old
Mexican national shot and killed Kathryn Steinle, 32 year old resident of a
nearby suburb in a chance encounter along San Francisco’s popular and seemingly
safe waterfront Embarcadero Boulevard last week. It had all the makings of what criminologists
call a “moral
panic” an untoward event, small or large, that becomes a vehicle for vast
social and political anxieties over race, class, and national identity. A low status villain---non-White, poor,
non-citizen, long criminal record, multiple incarcerations, kills a high status
victim--White, middle class, citizen, mother of children, never been in trouble
with the law. It occurs where it should
not, in a place associated with comfort and recreation. Events like this sometimes stay just local
news, but given the right conditions, they can blow up into a policy storm of
significant magnitude. Will this one?
It comes at a time when White anxiety over the growing
Latino population in the US has become a dominant obsession with the Republican
party. Indeed Republican politicians
have found themselves in something of a dilemma over which to attack among two
of their favorite targets; liberal cities like San Francisco, or the Obama
administration. Since the dominant media
narrative has focused on the San Francisco Sheriff’s Departments decision to
release Sanchez after the marijuana possession warrant he was being held on was
dismissed, without notifying ICE (the Immigration Control and Enforcement
agency) as requested, Republicans and now Senator Diane Feinstein have decided
to focus their rage on the City’s sanctuary policy, which mandates
non-cooperation with the aggressive detention and deportation policies of
recent years. Feinstein
wrote SF Mayor Ed Lee yesterday, excoriating the City and its sanctuary
policy, and all but blaming them for the crime.
The story line is a familiar one to politicians of
Feinstein’s generation who rose to maturity and power addressing it. In Feinstein’s case this was quite literal, as
she became mayor of San Francisco in 1978 after the high profile City Hall
murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor and civil rights leader Harvey
Milk. According to the logic that became
common sense during the high crime eras of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, state
and local justice systems were overwhelmed by crime and prone ignoring criminal
threats by dumping known threats on the streets. According to this thinking (which I described
at length in my 2007 book, Governing
through Crime) only tough laws limiting judicial discretion, and federal
mandates requiring that felons serve the vast majority of their sentences and
protect Americans. The result: mass
incarceration and mass deportation.
A closer look at the narrative surrounding the Sanchez case
reveals it for the ideological construction it is. In fact Sanchez epitomizes why the logic of
exclusion and segregation that undergird our wars on crime and terror can never
achieve public safety. Start with the
focus on San Francisco’s Sheriff and the City’s sanctuary policy. It seem obvious and outrageous to Senator
Feinstein that Ms. Steinle would not have been killed that night but for the
Sheriff’s and the City’s failure to incarcerate him until he could be deported. But who was really the proximate cause of
Mr. Sanchez’s presence in San Francisco? He didn’t start here, but instead in
federal prison where he was serving time for repeated unlawful entries to the
United States. Nothing in federal law required ICE to bring Sanchez to San
Francisco to address a twenty-year-old warrant for marijuana possession. Such charges are routinely dismissed in San
Francisco and other cities, and the feds had apparently deported him five times
during that period without feeling compelled to bring him to answer justice in
San Francisco. Most likely the
overworked ICE staff found the warrant and realized it would be easier to dump
him on San Francisco then complete the paper work necessary to deport him
promptly (or even generate the kind of immigration warrant rather than “hold”
that would have prevented Sanchez’s release even under the sanctuary policy).
A second phony element is the idea that Sanchez was
obviously dangerous because of his seven felonies. In fact, as the media realized pretty early,
all but one of these felonies are for drugs or illegal reentry, one was for
assault (the least serious form of crime against the person, the equivalent of
a fist fight). If anything, Sanchez’s
record is monument to how stretched the felony concept has become in our
time. Seven felonies sure sound scary,
until you actually look at them. There
is nothing about his record that would have signaled to San Francisco
Sherriff’s deputies that Sanchez posed a serious threat. He appeared to be a not untypical inmate in
the jail: poor, disorganized, a drug user without a stable family or work life,
and probably some mental illness (indeed I suspect he has a chronic mental
illness and decompensated for lack of proper treatment during his federal
imprisonment). The shooting of Kathryn
Steinle appears to be a tragic escalation of this lifestyle. The weapon was apparently found on the beach
(the latest reports suggest it belonged to a federal
agent). He admits to having been
high on cannabis and sleeping pills. She
was shot in the back, consistent with his “accident” defense. His
most persistent deliberate pattern was apparently returning to the United
States; not to prey on its citizens ala Donald
Trump, but to support himself and perhaps to stay in contact with family here.
So what to conclude from the Sanchez case? Trying to protect ourselves from random
violence by incarcerating and deporting people on the basis of race and often
inflated criminal records is deeply flawed (and far from the slam dunk solution
that Senator Feinstein believes). The underlying
theory here is that crime is a product of dangerous people. Lock up or deport the dangerous people and
problem solved. But criminology now
suggests that crime is situational, a product of people with chaotic lives,
substance abuse, and chance encounters in environments that provide either
accelerants or de-accelerants (think of the gun that Sanchez found). There is no perfect solution, save for the
ideal of fixing all our “broken toys” (and even unbroken ones break in the spur
of the moment). Instead careful mental
health screening of the jail population and attentive post-release efforts to
keep people with mental health needs and drug abuse histories on the right
medications and off the wrong ones could do far better than incarceration for people
like Sanchez (what about his previous imprisonments protected us?). Nor quite clearly is deportation a
solution. For two decades now we’ve been
aggressively deporting people we label “criminal aliens”, creating significant
gang problems in countries like Guatemala and El Salvador (as many of them have
recreated the same gang milieus they used to survive in the US) without doing
much to reduce crime here.
I suspect this moral panic will run its course without
uprooting San Francisco’s sanctuary policy or placing Donald Trump in the White
House. The general trend is away from harsh
and exclusionary policies in both criminal justice and immigration. Sadly, the punitive storm that has arisen
around the Francisco Sanchez and killing of Kathryn Steinle is a reminder of
how powerful the hold of crime panic journalism, and hyperventilating crime
warrior politicians like Feinstein remains on our public policy and how slow
reform will probably be.
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