Fulton Brock's wife arrested for having an affair with a 17-year-old
Susan Brock was arrested yesterday and charged with sex with a minor and child molestation.
The involvement went on for three years, the Republic says:
According to a police report, Brock is accused of picking the Chandler teen up from his home or school, and committing as many as 30 sexual acts in her car, her home, her mother’s home and secluded areas of the city. The acts did not include intercourse, police said.
The alleged affair came to light when family friends intercepted messages on the boy’s iPod Touch that included references to sex acts and the discovery of a relationship between the victim and Brock, the report said.
Brock’s a Republican Maricopa Country supervisor from Chandler.
6:59 AM
Finally—a beheading!
You’ll remember that Governor Brewer has been obsessed with beheadings. Such gruesome activity at the border, she said, is one of the impetuses behind her signing SB 1070.
There actually weren’t any, creating priceless moments like this one, which comes at the 1:16 point in the video below:
At any rate, we are happy for Brewer’s sake that there finally has been a beheading reported, and that at least one of the culprits, police say, is a genuine illegal immigrant.
The Republic:
Chandler police are investigating the bizarre case of a man who was stabbed, decapitated and left in a pool of blood in a central-city apartment.
One man has been arrested and police are seeking three more suspects in what appears to be the city’s first beheading.
“We don’t go to many cases where the victim has been decapitated,” said Chandler police Detective Frank Mendoza.
The story, incredibly, doesn’t mention the ongoing role the act has had in the recent political race.
7:40 AM
Crime in Arizona—down again
The Blog for Arizona has posted about the FBI’s new national crime numbers.
The full national overview is here.
Arizona had an extraordinary drop in crimes per 100,000 people, down to 408.3 from 481.2, a 15 percent drop.
That is as opposed to 6 percent nationally.
The chart does not break out kidnappings; Arizona’s uneasy relationship to that particular crime statistic is detailed here.
8:00 AM
Jan Brewer, her criminally insane son, the Arizona Republic, and prior restraint
The lede story in the Republic today is a look at how Jan Brewer’s approach to mental health funding has been shaped by her son, who is in a state hospital after being charged with sexual assault and kidnapping.
He was found not guilty by reason on insanity and has apparently been in the hospital for most of that time, though the paper is vague on this point. (Earlier, it said that the son had attended Brewer’s inauguration.)
Nowhere in either of the two stories about the case does it say what it was her son actually did.
New Times reported this a few weeks ago:
According to a Phoenix Police Department report dated July 29, 1989, Brewer, then an unemployed 25-year-old, forced his way into a woman’s apartment on West Indian School Road and threatened to hurt her “real bad” if she didn’t engage in sexual acts, including performing fellatio.
The Republic story says Brewer lost her other son three years ago:
Other personal family tragedies, such as the death of son John Brewer in January 2007 from cancer and AIDS are spoken of [by Brewer] only briefly.
A related story in the paper today is about a backstage battle to keep Brewer’s son’s criminal record out of the public eye. A judge yesterday stated the obvious, that the matter was part of the public record.
New Times broke the story a few weeks back; the Republic, in keeping with its idiosyncratic approach to journalistic niceties, kept the issue under wraps:
“I believe The Republic has been sensitive to the issues involved in this case and responsible in its reporting while, at the same time, working diligently to protect the public’s essential access to criminal-case files,” said Randy Lovely, Republic editor and vice president for news. “Obviously, we’re appreciative of the court’s ruling.”
The Republic decided not to publicize the story until the ruling was finalized on Monday.
Emphasis added. The story is confusing. Apparently, the son, who is apparently sane enough to worry about his mother’s political career, requested and got his files sealed.
The Republic got a copy of them this year, apparently through a mistake in the clerk’s office. Then the governor learned, in an interview with a republic reporter, than the file was open.
Then things get opaque:
… [Brewer’s] son’s attorney, Reginald Cooke, asked a judge to force Phoenix Newspapers, the newspaper’s parent company, to return the case file and prevent the paper from printing anything contained in it. PNI asked the judge to unseal the file.
On one level, this doesn’t make any sense, because this would seem to be a case of prior restraint. A judge can’t stop a paper from printing something in the public record.
It’s possible that the the paper’s lawyer’s decided that the matter turned on a slightly different issue; that since, whether rightly or not, the case was sealed, the paper could have been liable for publishing it, and that the smarter tack was to just make the case that the file was wrongly suppressed.
That’s a defensible argument, I suppose.
Suppressing the story about the actual battle while it was going on, during an election campaign?
That’s not defensible at all.
7:54 AM
The Republic follows up on its searing story on unprosecuted rapes on Indian reservations
Dennis Wagner’s story today details the bureaucratic confusion and lack of federal oversight that allows so many crimes, rape prominent among them, to go without punishment.
Ronet Bachman, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware who analyzed Indian rape data for the DOJ two years ago, said confusion and enforcement shortcomings allow repeat offenders.
Asked if the failure is due to poor training, jurisdictional issues, a lack of resources, mismanagement, complacency or incompetence, Bachman said, “It is botched because of all those things.”
Yesterday it was a case study—done after two years of legal wrangling to get access to police files—argued with some evidence that a man who assaulted more than a dozen White Mountain Apache women was never caught.
The story today has one weird note:
Native American women suffer from violent crime at a rate 2 ½ times the national average. More than one-third are raped during their lifetimes, according to the Department of Justice, compared with a national figure of one in five.
Emphasis added. That seems an extreme statistic.
A cursory check of such numbers on the internet seems to indicate that the story is conflating sexual assaults in toto with rape specifically.
On the other hand, most rape cases go unreported, and it could be that Wagner is actually using valid justice department figures. But the numbers are so high they deserves to have been explained better.
7:21 AM
A bicyclist hurt in Mesa; police need witnesses
The EVT says a bicyclist was found seriously injured on a Mesa street last night.
The accident happened near the intersection of N. Country Club Drive and Brown Road in west Mesa.
The man, who was not wearing a helmet, suffered serious head injuries and a broken back, according to police.
Police are continuing to investigate the incident because it is not known at this time how the man fell off his bicycle, and are seeking the public’s assistance in locating any witnesses.
Anyone with information on this incident can call police at (480) 644-2211.
6:44 AM
Russell Pearce: "Phil Gordon is an anarchist!"
Arizona’s goofiest state senator faced off on John Stossel’s Fox show with Nick Gillespie, the longtime editor of Reason magazine, the leading Libertarian publication, and now the head of Reason.TV.
After Stossel asks Pearce about the Phoenix police chief Jack Harris’s opposition to SB 1070, Pearce starts sputtering that Harris is a political appointee “of an open-border, anarchist mayor.”
Hilarity, as they say, ensues:
Later Gillespie and Stossel try to get Pearce to address the plain fact that crime in the state has been dropping steadily for a decade.
If you listen carefully to Pearce’s sputterings in response, you can hear him assert that “child molesters” are coming over the border.
8:22 AM
This isn't going to help Mexico's tourist industry
The WSJ this morning has a damning story about two Americans on a day trip to Mexico picked up in Ciudad Juarez by Mexican army officers.
The pair say police planted two suitcases of marijuana in their truck and then tortured them for five or six hours that evening before turing them over to the civilian police.
The Journal does a good job reconstructing the pair’s movements that day—and, more disturbingly, describing their accounts of being shocked and beaten after they were arrested.
[The pair] say they’ve never been involved with drugs and would never have tried to cross the border with two suitcases of marijuana. During their trial, they produced three witnesses who testified that they saw soldiers put suitcases into Mr. Huckabee’s truck. A verdict is expected this month. Each man faces up to 25 years in prison.
ONe of the mitnesses was later shot and killed.
7:00 AM
Jan Brewer doubles down on lying
The governor said last week that the majority of illegal immigrants were smuggling drugs.
In the face of the predictable outcry—even John McCain distanced himself from the statement over the weekend—Brewer could have acknowledged an overstatement and moved on.
Instead, she’s doubling down on the lie, getting shriller and making even less sense.
Her original quote:
“The majority of them, in my opinion and I think in the opinion of law enforcement, is that they’re not coming here to work. They’re coming here and they’re bringing drugs, and they’re doing drop houses, and they’re extorting people, and they’re terrorizing the families.”
Asked in an interview whether he agrees that most illegal immigrants are “drug mules,” the Republican senator said: “No.”
With the media continuing to press her on the statement, Brewer’s office released a slightly unhinged followup. From the PBJ:
“There has been some media attention in the last several hours regarding statements I made this morning regarding the level of drug and crime activity being perpetrated by illegal immigrants coming into and residing in Arizona,“ Brewer’s said in the statement. "The simple truth is that the majority of human smuggling in our state is under the direction of the drug cartels, which are by definition smuggling drugs.”
Notice how she’s blurring the issue from “illegal immigrants are smuggling drugs” to “they are being smuggled by drug cartels.”
The story continues:
“It is common knowledge that Mexican drug cartels have merged human smuggling with drug trafficking. For example, the Los Angeles Times on March 23, 2009, reported, ‘The business of smuggling humans across the Mexican border has been brisk, with many thousands coming across every year. But smugglers affiliated with the drug cartels have taken the enterprise to a new level — and made it more violent — by commandeering much of the operation from independent coyotes, according to these officials and recent congressional testimonies.’ This article and many federal government reports have drawn the same conclusions.
“The human rights violations that have taken place victimizing immigrants and their families are abhorrent. Border crossers are used by drug cartels as commodities. Mexican drug cartels have merged human smugglers who use their expertise in gathering intelligence on border patrols, logistics and communication devices to get around even tighter controls. U.S. border officials have stated that traffickers are gaining control of much of the illegal passage of immigrants from Mexico to the United States.”
As with so many debates in this state, the real issue here isn’t what it seems.
Of course Brewer is lying. She knows it’s not true that a majority of illegal immigrants are smuggling drugs. We know from numerous government reports that a big chunk of them are just people who’ve overstayed their visa, and we know that most of the rest are doing menial labor, a lot of it outside in incredible heat, just from simple observation.
The real issue is the state of politics in this state. Brewer’s campaign strategy is now apparent. She’s just going to repeat her mantra:
“Illegal immigration, illegal immigration, drugs, violence, illegal immigration, drugs, violence, illegal immigration, drugs, violence, illegal immigration, drugs, violence, child porn, tax cuts blah blah blah.”
And the question for the future of the state is whether Terry Goddard can come up with an effective enough campaign to combat it.
7:16 AM
More on the "Do illegal immigrants cause crime?" debate
The occasionally off-balance Espresso Pundit links to Tom Maguire’s conservative but rigorous Just One Minute blog, debating the premise of the NYT’s Sunday piece looking at Arizona crime figures.
(While the anti-immigrant forces harp on the supposed crimes committed by immigrants, the facts show that crime in the state has been trending broadly down for a decade.)
Maguire makes an interesting point:
That while crime is down greatly in cities like Phoenix, a careful parsing of FBI figures shows that crime is up in non-city and rural areas:
Now, note that the number of crimes is down even in smaller cities, though declining population forces the crime rate higher.
The steep rise in crime in rural areas, though, is interesting. The rate rise is nearly 50 percent. Is that due to alleged crimes committed by illegal immigrants?
Neither Greg Patterson nor Maguire make that case.
As the debate continues, these, it seem to me, are the central questions:
1) First, obviously, are the crimes committed by illegal immigrants … or just good old-fashioned god-fearing, gun-toting, wife-beating thoroughly Caucasian and all-American Arizona stock?
2) Similarly, what kind of crimes are they—car thefts, armed robbery, the sort of things that might be associated with the lurid idea of a predatory immigrant moving north?
3) Rural Arizona is a big place. Are the crimes happening in border towns or up north?
4) What number of crimes are we talking about, anyway? Again, the rate of increase is high.
In sheer numbers, though, the increase totals a bit more than 100 new crimes committed in an area the size of … well, the size of Arizona.
Ninety-nine percent of the state is rural—and the rural population totals about 4 percent of the state’s.
And 100 crimes equals … one third of one percent of the number committed in Phoenix and Tucson.
7:25 AM
New York Times to Jan Brewer: Why won't you free William Macumber?
The Times today has a story about a legal case from Arizona.
There’s a guy in prison the state’s clemency board says is there because of a “miscarriage of justice.” Jan Brewer could accept the board’s recommendation but hasn’t—and according to the Times, won’t say why.
… Ms. Brewer rejected the board’s recommendation without explanation in November. It is possible that politics played a role in her decision; Ms. Brewer, a Republican who became governor last year, is running for a full term in November.
“She denied the application right after she announced that she was running for governor,” said Katherine Puzauskas, a lawyer with the Arizona Justice Project at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. […]
There is little political upside to granting clemency, but there is a substantial risk, as Mike Huckabee learned when a man whose sentence he commuted as governor of Arkansas in 2000 killed four police officers last year.
P. S. Ruckman Jr., a political science professor at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill., has been fuming about Ms. Brewer’s handling of the Macumber case. “I have been following state clemency for 30 years,” Mr. Ruckman said, “and this is easily, easily, the most disturbing. It’s borderline despicable.”
Emphases added.
The case is a doozy—the man’s son says his mother framed the father. She testified originally he had said he’d killed two people in the desert outside Scottsdale in 1962. Macumber was sentenced to life without parole.
In the story, the Times talks to the wife:
In the course of a half-hour conversation, Ms. Kempfert accused Mr. Macumber of terrible and disturbing crimes beyond the killings in the desert. Asked if he deserved clemency, she said, “Absolutely not.”
7:13 AM
"The border is safer now than it's ever been"
That’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling, quoted in an extensive AP investigation into crime at the bordor.
The upshot:
MEXICO CITY — It’s one of the safest parts of America, and it’s getting safer.
It’s the U.S.-Mexico border, and even as politicians say more federal troops are needed to fight rising violence, government data obtained by The Associated Press show it actually isn’t so dangerous after all.
The top four big cities in America with the lowest rates of violent crime are all in border states: San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin, according to a new FBI report. And an in-house Customs and Border Protection report shows that Border Patrol agents face far less danger than street cops in most U.S. cities.
The story has lots of stuff like this:
Even residents of the border region who want more security are surprised by the talk of violence.
“I have to say, a lot of this is way overblown,” said Gary Brasher of Tuboc, Arizona, who is president of the Coalition for a Safe and Secure Border.
Jan Brewer makes a knuckle-headed cameo, too:
In Arizona, a stringent new immigration law takes effect next month, requiring police to question suspects' immigration status if officers believe they’re in the country illegally. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said in a televised interview last weekend: “We are out here on the battlefield getting the impact of all this illegal immigration, and all the crime that comes with it.”
There’s one big flaw in the story: No mention of the supposed 300-plus kidnappings a year alleged to occur in Phoenix alone.
Previously in PHXated:
About all that immigrant-fueled crime…
Phoenix murders drop by nearly half in two years
9:04 PM
Jan Brewer's big day in DC!
Arizona’s conscienceless governor, cynically ridding a wave of ungenerous and unpleasant anti-immigrant fervor, takes a trip to DC to meet personally with Barack Obama.
Based on the story in the Republic this a.m. it looks like she’s going to use the meeting as a chance to further spread misinformation about the issue:
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said she will paint a picture of her state as “under siege” by Mexican drug cartels and illegal immigrants when she meets today with President Barack Obama.
[…]
“We are the gateway to America for (cross-border) drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and crime, and we in Arizona are no longer going to put up with it,” Brewer said at a Capitol Hill hotel on the eve of her meeting. “People along the border are living in fear daily. I don’t think the president really understands that.”
Has anybody yet asked Brewer how she reconciles such language with the facts of Arizona’s crazily low crime rate?
Brief CNN interview here:
7:05 AM
About all that immigrant-fueled crime ...
Latest FBI figures, 2008 and 2009 crime:
Bottom line: Overall violent crime in Phoenix dropped more than 15 percent—and that’s 15 percent lower than the already low rates prevailing last year.
For example, in 2003 Phoenix had 247 murders. Two years ago, it had 167, and last year had 122.
And note that those are hard numbers, not murder rates, meaning that the numbers are going down even in the face of steady population growth, not to mention all those crime-crazed immigrants.
(Fortunately, however, the bureau’s stats don’t includes kidnappings …)
9:31 AM
Those nutty Colorado City polygamists...
Two guys overseeing a fire district in Colorado City were arrested yesterday for allegedly using department funds for their own use, “the Republic says”:http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/04/08/20100408polygamy-colorado-city.html:
warrants [were] executed Tuesday against Town Manager David W. Darger and Fire Chief Jacob “Jake” Barlow. In an affidavit filed with Mohave County Superior Court, investigators accuse the two of looting money for personal use from the local Fire Department.Based on information submitted to the court, prosecutors received permission to search the suspects’ homes, offices and computers for evidence of fraudulent schemes.
Darger and Barlow have not been charged with any offense. They did not respond to phone messages.
The town and its sister city HIlldale, in Utah, is known as the home of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a polygamist sect that despite its name isn’t formally associated with the Mormon Church.
The paper includes this litany of trouble the town’s gotten itself into:
• The imprisonment of FLDS leader Warren Jeffs, known as the “prophet,” for rape as an accomplice in connection with the marriage of an underage girl to an adult. Jeffs, already convicted in Utah, is awaiting trial on similar charges in Arizona and Texas.
• The conviction of about a dozen other men on charges involving sex with child brides.
• The seizure, via civil litigation, of United Effort Plan, an FLDS trust that controlled most of the property in Colorado City/Hildale, once valued at more than $100 million.
• The takeover of Colorado City’s school district, replacing FLDS board members who controlled it.
• The removal and decertification of about a half-dozen Colorado City peace officers.
6:49 AM
More random Kidnappings R Us news
It’s apparently true that Phoenix endures about a kidnapping a day, though as I have written before it’s not clear how reliable the figures are; whether they apply just to Phoenix or include the rest of Maricopa County; how many others go unreported; and so on.
It sees that the kidnappings are almost exclusively related to drug trafficking in town, and by extension to Hispanics, creating a hidden class of victims that almost never get referenced in the papers.
It seems random when the crimes do get covered. There’s a story about one in today’s Republic, a five-graf affair with practically no information, not even the victim’s name. Isn’t there a kidnapping like this every day in the Valley? Why is this one getting ink? Would the story be treated this way if the victims were Paradise Valley residents?
Phoenix Police have arrested two men who they say held a 26-year-old man ransom for two days.
Police said the victim was apparently kidnapped by men he knew on Wednesday. The kidnappers immediately began calling the victim’s girlfriend demanding money for his return, said Luis Samudio, a Phoenix police spokesman.
He said the men gave the girl directions how to wire money to their account in Mexico.
After two days of calls, the girlfriend arranged for the victim to be returned with the help of detectives. Investigators on Friday arrested two men, ages 29 and 43.
Police did not say how the men knew each other. Information on the victim’s condition and how he was released was unavailable.
7:50 AM
More on "Kidnappings R Us"
The Arizona Republic reports this a.m. that kidnappings were down in the city last year—slightly:
Phoenix police anticipated a drop in kidnapping reports in 2009 compared with the previous year, though with 302 filed through November, the numbers haven’t decreased significantly.
2008’s total of 359 earned Phoenix the nickname “kidnapping capital” of the U.S.
The story, irritatingly, doesn’t answer or drops a couple of tangential issues readers would like to know the answers to.
One, the LA Times last year reported on the Phoenix kidnapping problem—basically one a day—and finished it with this disturbing sentence: “Police estimate twice that number go unreported.”
That would be about a thousand of these incidents occurring each year. That’s a mind-blowing figure when you consider that they are all taking place in a limited part of the valley. They aren’t happening at the Biltmore; that means that life in the less-swanky parts of town is correspondingly dangerous.
Two, the story doesn’t discuss the kidnapping rates in the rest of the valley or in Maricopa County as a whole. As I read it, it carefully makes clear the figures are for the city only. There’s no reason to think the kidnappings stop at the city’s edge. Based on crude population figures, we could expect at least double that number are occur in the county as a whole.
And here’s the depressing prognosis:
Phoenix Home Invasion and Kidnapping Enforcement investigators say they have dismantled dozens of small gangs involved in kidnappings and home invasions, which led to a small drop in the overall numbers.
“Dozens” of gangs dismantled … and the rate has gone down less than 20 percent.
7:00 AM
Phoenix murders drop by nearly half in two years
The front page of the Republic this a.m. featured this hed:
Phoenix Shootings leave 3 dead in 1st murders of ’10
The hed is accurate, but it obscures the real news in the story, which is that police expect to report that there were 130 murders in the city last year—down from 222 in 2007.
According to crime stats here, the city’s murder rate isn’t trending up or down overall. Rather, oddly, it bounces:
216 in 1999, 247 in 2003 and 234 in 2006 …
… but 152 in 2000, 183 in 2002, and 168 in 2008.
Still, given the rise in the area’s population, the drops over the last two years are solid improvements. (For 2009, the rate per 100,000 people will have dropped by half from the prevailing rate at the turn of the last decade.)
7:00 AM
Kidnappings R Us!
If a blonde Paradise Valley High schooler were to be kidnapped, chances are almost certain it would be pretty big news, and 6-5 or better that it would be really big news. You can imagine the hedlines:
“Search for Megan continues.” “A Vigil for Megan.” “Megan’s parents wait stoically for a call that still hasn’t come.” “The Megan They Knew.”
Earlier this week, I questioned whether a widely noted statistic—that Phoenix has become, after Mexico City, the kidnapping capital of the world—was true. In this ABC news report, for example, the assertion isn’t sourced, nor is the rate of kidnappings, 370 last year.
Le Templar of the East Valley Tribune sent along this LA Times report, which uses a case study of one kidnapping investigation.
A serious reporter, Sam Quinones, explains the numbers. Kidnappings in Phoenix as well as the rest of the country were traditionally rare. In Phoenix that’s changed, because of the border drug wars:
One result is an epidemic of kidnapping that many residents are barely aware of. Indeed, most every other crime here is down. But police received 366 kidnapping-for-ransom reports last year, and 359 in 2007. Police estimate twice that number go unreported.
That last line, if true, is notable; that means there could be three drug-related kidnappings a day in the Valley.
(For the record, I still think the figures are sketchy; Phoenix police figures are always cited, with no mention that the city is only a third of the area’s population, and no mention of the county sheriff’s office, which you think would be handling a lot of the cases as well.)
In any case, this is all rarely touched upon in the Republic or the local TV stations. I don’t mean they don’t talk about the issue in general terms, but the effect on the family is the same if it’s a high-schooler named Megan or a guy named Luis. But of course, it’s very infrequent that we see anything about these crimes—the lame Republic story on a kidnapping I noted this week is an exception—much less anything like “A Vigil for Luis.”
Not surprisingly, the New Times’ Ray Stern has looked at this and gone a little deeper. We know the media doesn’t care about these crimes. Turns out the FBI doesn’t either:
Let’s say John White, a U.S. citizen, gets thrown into a van by masked kidnappers, and his wife — who sees the crime — calls Phoenix police. Imagine that no one ever sees White again. Which federal agency, FBI or ICE, do you think would be more likely to help local police investigate that crime? The FBI, right? Bingo.
Now imagine the same scenario, except the guy has four names of a Spanish origin and his wife is an illegal immigrant from Mexico. In that case, apparently, the understanding among law officers is that ICE would get a call instead of the FBI.
Anyway, you can watch local TV news with its fixation on tawdry offenses and car accidents and come away thinking it’s barely safe to go outside. But of course Phoenix, like most big cities, has benefited from a major drop in crime, and the coverage is mostly scare-mongering. (The older people in town—Fox News watchers to a man—I know are obsessed with crime.)
Yet here’s something that really does have an extraordinary effect on the Valley’s population. (Some percentage of these guys have families here, as do the perpetrators, and the cost of investigations, prosecutions and incarcerations isn’t incidental.) It could be that there are assaults or home invasions resulting in kidnapping for ransom three times a day in town—and we barely hear about the victims or their families.
7:00 AM