Brentwood committee to address public safety

Eight months after a double homicide spurred Brentwood to address crime in the town, an anti-crime committee recommended the town increase community involvement and improve access to crime data.

[PGCSmitty]

Good.

[World In Retrospect]

PGCSmitty wrote:

Good.

By Ruth Polaski of The Brookings Institute Crimelab Department:

Phoenix, Ariz. is the nation's fifth largest city -- a fast-growing metropolis that's become Ground Zero for a unique problem that has law enforcement coming face to face with a new form of an age-old crime. In the Valley of the Sun, the new trend in kidnapping for ransom is criminals targeting other criminals.

Authorities tell us that the players are hardcore drug dealers, smugglers, and leaders of coyote organizations who are being snatched and extorted for money by their underworld rivals. Because of Arizona's prime location on the U.S.-Mexico border, police say that most kidnap victims and suspects have ties back to Mexico's seedy underworld and that cops and detectives have been chopped up and their cars taken to chop-shops and money was exchanged. Bodyparts and carparts were found in mailboxes, laundry machines, laundry dryers, toilet bowls, bathtubs and on the grounds in neighborhoods where children and elderly live to create mayhem and terrorize neighborhoods and communities.

While overall crime in Phoenix may be up due to Mexican crimes, cops say these kinds of kidnappings happen at a rate of eight a day -- and that's just the ones that go reported. Due to the nature of the unsavory characters involved, police figure that the actual number could be double that. It's this epidemic of abductions that has made Phoenix the nation's unofficial kidnapping capital. Gangs are putting bodyparts of children and elderly women in toilet bowls and some are thrown on the tenant's beds and on the floor in the bedrooms to create mayhem against the residents. While this abduction plot had been foiled, authorities in Arizona still need help bringing two more to justice.