Hazleton crime up, mayor tells court (Allentown Morning Call)

By Matt Birkbeck
Of The Morning Call

Newly compiled police statistics reveal that violent crime in Hazleton rose by 60 percent from 2003 to 2006, when the city experienced an influx of new Hispanic residents, Mayor Lou Barletta testified Thursday.

Barletta also said 19 illegal immigrants were charged with violent crimes including homicide, rape and aggravated assault last year, more than all the illegal immigrants charged during the preceding five years combined.

''How many people need to be shot before we stand up and fight back?'' Barletta said during his second day of testimony in a federal trial over Hazleton's Illegal Immigration Relief Act. The ordinance, passed last summer, imposes fines on landlords who rent to illegal immigrants and companies that employ them.

Barletta read statistics compiled Tuesday by the city's police department. On Wednesday, he testified he proposed the ordinance without any data supporting his contention that illegal immigrants were ''destroying'' Hazleton. There were 52 violent crimes in 2003; 83 were reported in 2006, he testified Thursday.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which joined the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund and several Hazleton businesses and Hispanic residents in suing to overturn the ordinance, sought the statistics but was rebuffed by the city. On Monday, the ACLU obtained a court order forcing the city to calculate recent crime statistics dating to 2000.

Barletta, questioned on direct examination by city attorney Harry Mahoney, used the data to overlay the increase in crime atop the arrival of some 10,000 new Hispanic residents to the Luzerne County city.

The mayor said the city where he grew up began to change in 2003. Despite an economic renaissance fueled in part by the new Hispanic residents, Barletta said a troublesome element ? illegal immigrants ? also entered Hazleton, living in overcrowded apartments and committing violent crimes.

''I was called to one apartment, and there were nine mattresses on the floor and cockroaches in the refrigerator. It wasn't fit for animals, much less humans, and they were all illegal immigrants. God forbid there wasn't a fire,'' Barletta said.

He also told of how he was shocked to learn that a 14-year-old boy, an illegal immigrant, was selling crack at a city playground, and that an illegal immigrant charged in the shooting death of Derek Kichline in May 2006 had been arrested eight times before in other cities.

''How much can you take?'' Barletta said. ''This wasn't the Hazleton we all knew. I had enough.''

Barletta added that he believed, based on federal statistical guidelines, that a third of Hazleton's Hispanic residents are illegal immigrants. But he was quick to add he was supportive of all legal residents, including Hispanics, and had welcomed many of the 60 new Hispanic businesses that opened in Hazleton over the past five years.

Barletta also said he believed most members of the Hispanic community support his position, but he expressed disappointment that Hazleton's Hispanic leaders refused to support the ordinance. ''That would be like me being an Italian-American condoning organized crime,'' he said.

Before Barletta testified, immigration expert Marc Rosenblum said landlords and employers, afraid of losing their ability to conduct business in the city, will be more likely to pass over Hispanics for jobs and apartments, regardless of their immigration status.

''They'll have very real incentives to screen people out on the eyeball test,'' basing their assumptions on the way prospective tenants and workers look, not on data, said Rosenblum, a professor at the University of New Orleans.

Under questioning by Kris Kobach, another of the city's lawyers, Rosenblum conceded many of his predictions are speculative.

Kobach, a University of Missouri law professor and immigration adviser to former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, said Hazleton will use an Internet-based program, Basic Pilot, that's operated by the federal government to determine a person's immigration status.

Citing a nationwide survey of employers already enrolled in Basic Pilot, Kobach said the program makes businesses more likely to hire immigrants, not less, because it gives them a degree of certainty that the job candidate is authorized to be in the country.

Rosenblum agreed, but said other provisions of Hazleton's law outweigh the benefits of participation in Basic Pilot. For example, the penalties for violating the local law are ''much more severe'' than penalties under federal immigration law, he said.

The trial resumes today with more testimony from Barletta.

The plaintiffs argue that the federal government has jurisdiction in immigration matters. The ordinance has been shelved pending the outcome of the trial, the first in the nation to examine the legality of local efforts to curb illegal immigration.