It’s been a slowly unfolding nightmare for the people of Brentwood, New York. Four teenagers were murdered in two weeks in September, most likely at the hands of MS-13. According to court and police records, the notorious Salvadoran gang has been accused of at least 14 murders in Brentwood, a hamlet in Suffolk County, since 2009.
The year 2009 also happens to be when the U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation into the Suffolk County Police Department over allegations of discriminatory policing against Latinos.
The DOJ issued a technical assistance letter in September 2011 recommending a broad array of reforms designed to improve policing in Suffolk County. The primary goal was to promote trust between the police department and the Latino community.
The county cooperated with the investigation, instituting many of the recommendations from the letter. Then, in December 2013, the SCPD agreed to a settlement with the Civil Rights Division of DOJ and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
The agreement, according to a DOJ, memorialized the earlier recommendations and committed the SCPD to significant changes in how it engages the Latino community.
Jeff Roorda, a retired police chief from St. Louis, is all too familiar with how the DOJ interferes in local police departments. He watched as the DOJ opened an investigation into the police department in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, after Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in August 2014. That investigation ended with the DOJ slapping a “consent decree” on the Ferguson PD, which will cost the police agency about $3 million a year.
Based on his experience, Roorda, author of the forthcoming book “The War on Police: How the Ferguson Effect is Making America Unsafe,” wonders if Suffolk County police were guilty of anything more than proactive policing against Latino criminals.
“First of all, these so-called ‘settlements’ with the DOJ are more accurately surrenders,” Roorda told WND. “Local police agencies almost always succumb to the might of oppressively crushing federal authority and cede their local control.”
According to the DOJ, the settlement in this case called for the SCPD to make sure it polices “equitably, respectfully and free of unlawful bias.”
It also called for enhanced training and investigation of allegations of hate crimes and bias incidents, “meaningful” access to police services for those who don’t speak English well, increased SCPD outreach efforts in Latino communities, and the implementation of a Community Oriented Policing Enforcement program throughout the county.
In April 2016, more than two years after the settlement was reached, the DOJ rated the SCPD as being in only “partial compliance” with a majority of the provisions, including the requirement that “members of the public receive equal protection of the law, without bias based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or sexual orientation, and in accordance with the rights, privileges, and immunities secured or protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States.”
That may sound good, but Roorda believes the Justice Department too often interprets the concept of “equal protection of the law” incorrectly.
“The DOJ, in its utter lunacy, thinks that any policing activity that results in disparate enforcement against a particular minority is unconstitutional,” the former officer said. “That’s not what the Constitution says. Equal protection is meant to avoid unlawful discrimination. It is not meant to cap the number of arrests of criminals from a certain race who are terrorizing a community. That would amount to unequal protection for crime victims, most of whom are Hispanic in this case.”
Indeed, the population of Brentwood is 68 percent Latino or Hispanic, according to 2014 Census figures compiled by Queens College. More than 17,000 of the town’s 60,000 residents claim to be from El Salvador, the home of the MS-13 gang. As the New York Times reported recently, some Brentwood residents blame an increase in Central American migrants for the increase in gang violence in the town.
Roorda said the solution to the Latino gang problem is a border wall – but not the border wall most people have in mind.
“I’ve said for some time now that we ought to abandon the implausible idea of a wall along our broad southern border and pay Mexico to build one along its own relatively narrow border with the rest of Central America,” Roorda proposed. “We could more easily manage the flow of drugs, guns and illegal immigrants across the Mexican border if it didn’t include so many Central and South Americans accessing our border through Mexico, too many of whom have connections to criminal gangs and cartels.”
Two anonymous law enforcement authorities told the New York Times that over the past several years MS-13 has sought to recruit recent immigrants from Central America because they are usually more vulnerable. However, some recent Latino immigrants abhor the gangs, fearing for their and their children’s safety.
Unfortunately, Latinos have long distrusted the Suffolk County police. Illegal immigrants in particular worry that if they go to the police with information on criminal activity, the cops will turn them over to immigration officials. This makes it difficult for the SCPD to eradicate the gangs.
Roorda said getting illegal aliens to report crimes is a terribly difficult challenge for law enforcement.
“Frankly, the best way is through using paid informants or by leveraging a potential informant’s unlawful immigration status by looking the other way on their illegal presence in exchange for information on more dangerous criminals,” Roorda said. “The feds, who normally don’t want to deport anyone, would have a problem with local law enforcement developing snitches that way, but who cares if it puts MS-13 members and other violent criminals behind bars?”
The people of Brentwood have grown increasingly horrified as MS-13 has shifted from primarily targeting rival gang members to targeting all residents, but mostly teenagers. Several parents and students told the New York Times teenagers must constantly be on their guard while in school and while traveling to and from school.
At a community forum last month, Brentwood School District officials reportedly revealed some students had been “red-flagged” for possibly having gang affiliations. The principal of Brentwood Ross High School, Richard Loeschner, admitted to the New York Times his administration knew of 20 to 25 students in the district with possible gang affiliations. But he said school officials can’t exclude a child just because they suspect he or she is a gang member, because state and federal laws entitle all children to an education.
Alex Newman, an international educator and journalist, believes schools should be able to expel students who are most likely part of a gang.
“The safety of students should be one of schools’ most important priorities,” Newman told WND. “Nobody has a ‘right’ to a tax-funded education, and individuals who get involved with criminal gangs should automatically forfeit the privilege if local authorities determine that’s what is necessary to protect students.”
Loeschner told the New York Times gang members rarely present themselves in his school, but when they do, “we take care of that pretty quickly.”
The school has been subjecting students to random screenings with metal detectors, and such screenings have increased since last month’s rash of four murders. However, there are no metal detectors at the entrance of either of Brentwood’s high schools.
Newman, the coauthor of “Crimes of the Educators,” said it’s up to the local authorities to decide whether or not students should pass through a metal detector every day, but he asserted metal detectors will not solve the real problem in the schools of Suffolk County and the rest of America.
“If one understands what is really going on in the government’s schools under the guise of education, the fact that predatory gangs are emerging at these institutions is no surprise at all,” Newman asserted. “It is the fruit of the poison tree we misleadingly call public education today.”
Newman said the modern-day combination of indoctrination and dumbed-down education in American schools often leads children to respond in highly destructive ways. It’s a theory he and coauthor Samuel Blumenfeld explored in “Crimes of the Educators.”
“When children are indoctrinated with a humanistic, evolutionist worldview, they end up damaged mentally and spiritually,” Newman declared. “When they are purposely turned into illiterates ignorant of even the absolute basics, they end up damaged mentally and spiritually.
“This damage manifests itself in many ways – school shootings, drug abuse, suicide, gangsterism, and other harmful behaviors. So again, we need to deal with the root of the problem, and metal detectors do not do that. We need God back in schools. We need real education and real literacy. Only then will these problems start to go away.”
