S.D. Police Halt Border Patrols by Special Squad

A special police squad that has patroled the U.S.-Mexico border strip since May has been pulled out of the area, and San Diego police officials say they are once again studying alternative methods for combating crimes committed against illegal immigrants.

Deputy Police Chief Manuel Guaderrama described the department’s action as an opportunity to reevaluate and probably revise the unit’s operations and tactics following the Dec. 7 shooting of a 17-year-old Mexican youth who is now paralyzed from the waist down.

Such reassignments have often followed shootings by previous similar border squads, but Guaderrama said that, this time, the unit may be changed drastically--from its recent status as a foot patrol to a high-profile motorized unit operating out of four-wheel-drive vehicles posted along the international boundary. It is unlikely that the officers will be redeployed regularly on foot, Guaderrama said.

“We thought it was better to put them on hold till we have a plan for better coverage along the border,” Guaderrama said. “They probably won’t be deployed the same way.”

The idea, Guaderrama said, is to both increase safety for the officers and broaden the area covered by the small anti-crime unit, which consists of a sergeant and five officers, all uniformed.

Meanwhile, two U.S. Border Patrol agents who witnessed part of the Dec. 7 shooting by the San Diego police squad have provided investigators with accounts of the incident that, according to Marco E. Lopez, a San Diego attorney representing the victim, raise “serious doubts” about the veracity of the official police version.

However, police Sgt. Frank Martinez, who headed the investigating of the shooting, said the apparently contradictory accounts of the incident have been resolved through supplemental questioning of the federal agents.

The Border Patrol agents have also told investigators that they were unaware that the police unit was operating in the area on the evening of the shooting, a dangerous oversight that raises the risk of an accidental armed confrontation between different law enforcement forces. Under its operational guidelines, the San Diego police squad was required to keep the Border Patrol closely informed about its presence and whereabouts.

The pullout of the squad, known as the Border Crime Intervention Unit, marks the latest shift in one of the thorniest issues with which senior San Diego police officers have had to deal in recent years. Since the late 1970s, authorities have deployed a number of similar details along the border zone, but all have eventually been disbanded or reassigned, usually after controversial shootings.

Robbers have long victimized the hundreds of illegal aliens who seek to jump the border each day; migrants often carry large amounts of cash and other valuables designed to help them start their new lives.

The unit was successful in deterring crime against migrants, authorities say.

The decision to pull out the latest special unit was related to the Dec. 7 shooting, an incident that Guaderrama says underlined the perils faced by officers serving on the squad. The decision was made a few days after the shooting, he noted.

Guaderrama’s logic was characterized as “ludicrous” by Roberto Martinez, a Latino rights activist who has long been critical of what he characterizes as brutal tactics employed by local police and federal immigration authorities along the border. He alleged that Manuel Martin Flores Campo, the victim of the Dec. 7 shooting, was hit in the back as he was fleeing the squad. Flores was the first person shot by the latest incarnation of the border police squad, which was launched in May.

“The danger is not to officers, but to the undocumented immigrants,” Martinez said.

Flores, now hospitalized at UC San Diego Medical Center, has said he was unarmed and hadn’t threatened or harmed anyone, his lawyers maintained. He has denied charges of resisting arrest, robbery and attempted robbery that are pending in Juvenile Court.

San Diego police say Flores was shot shortly before midnight when he appeared poised to attack police patrol members Sgt. Joseph Wood and Officer Cesar Castro with what seemed to be a knife but turned out to be a screwdriver. San Diego police have indicated that the officers fired while pursuing the suspect in the dry area of the river channel, while they were within 15 feet of the suspect.

However, Border Patrol Agents G.W. Knight and Clark J. Messer said in interviews with police that they believed members of the border squad may have fired from atop or on the Tijuana River’s concrete southern levee, which rises from the south edge of the broad flood-control channel that encases the river. That position would put them much farther away from Flores than 15 feet.

Marco E. Lopez, a San Diego attorney representing the victim in a planned civil claim against the city, said the “contradictory” statements raise “serious doubts” about the police version of events.

But the San Diego Police Department’s Martinez said the two Border Patrol agents had revised previous assertions that the gunshots had come from the levy structure itself, adding, “We’ve already written some other reports on that.”

The police investigation of the incident, which has been completed, will be forwarded to the district attorney’s office this week for review, Martinez said. The district attorney routinely reviews shootings by police officers.

The two Border Patrol officers also told investigators that they were unaware that the police squad was operating in the area that evening. That would seem to violate a basic tenet of the squad’s operating procedures: to always maintain close contact with the armed federal agents who patrol the border daily. The idea was to avoid cases of mistaken identity among the two law enforcement agencies operating in the tense darkness of the border zone.

“We had a very strict policy about notifying them (the Border Patrol) every time we were out in the area,” Guaderrama said. Guaderrama said he assumed that the Border Patrol had been informed that the San Diego police squad was operating the night of Dec. 7.

Members of the squad contend that they had notified the Border Patrol of their presence, Sgt. Martinez said, adding that the officers had been operating in the same area the preceding two days.

The Border Crime Intervention Unit replaced a similar anti-crime squad composed of about a dozen members, made up equally of San Diego officers and Border Patrol agents. During its five-year life, the former outfit shot 44 suspects, 18 of whom died. That unit was disbanded a year ago after four fatal shootings during a two-week period that began in late December, 1988.

Senior Border Patrol agents expressed private dissatisfaction when the Police Department decided last May to create a new border anti-crime squad composed solely of city officers. Federal officials declined a police offer to join in later. Border Patrol officials said they would henceforth rely on their regular agents and patrol tactics to deter crime.

Since the anti-crime unit was reassigned, said Lt. Bill Brown of the Police Department’s Southern Division, where the squad is based, the officers have been entering the canyons, Tijuana River area and other areas along the rugged international boundary in response to reports of crimes against migrants provided by Border Patrol agents.