By Abby Goodnough, The New York Times
SAN JUAN, P.R. - It was a long autumn for Nestor Muniz, and the winter, he guesses, will be longer still. A stray bullet killed his daughter Nicole as she drove past a housing project here one August night, a month before her 17th birthday.
She was among more than 750 people killed this year in Puerto Rico, a small island (only twice the size of Rhode Island) with a homicide rate more than three times the United States average. More murders per capita take place here than in any American state, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Since Nicole’s death, which was widely covered by the news media here, Mr. Muniz has made lowering crime on the island his mission. He has organized a march with other relatives of murder victims, lobbied politicians and worked to inspire a collective sense of responsibility among Puerto Ricans - the most crucial step, he says, toward abating the problem.
“It’s going to take a big, big change,” Mr. Muniz said, taking a break at the furniture shop he manages in San Juan, where 1.5 million of the island’s nearly 4 million residents live and where most of the island’s violent deaths take place. “People here have been like, `If it didn’t happen to me, I don’t care.’ ”
Nicole’s killing commanded more attention than most because of its randomness, but the outpouring of concern did not slow the homicide rate, which the police attribute largely to the drug trade. Three superintendents of the Puerto Rico Police Department have quit in two years; the latest, Victor Rivera Gonzalez, is leaving Jan. 6. In an interview, he said that even a last-minute offer to raise his $107,000 salary by $20,000 did not sway him.
Superintendent Rivera said the root problem was insufficient staffing: Puerto Rico has 21,000 police officers, and by his reckoning, the force should grow by at least 4,000. He said he envied New York City’s police force, but in fact the ratio there is about the same: 40,000 officers for a population of 8 million.
As of Dec. 14, New York had 569 murders this year, according to the New York police. Puerto Rico had 752 by Dec. 17. Last year there were 774 murders on the island, up from 744 in 2001, the F.B.I. said.
The island’s major newspapers keep a running tab of the deaths, with graphic articles about shootings, stabbings and carjackings almost daily. This month alone, there have been articles about a quadruple homicide outside a San Juan disco and the shooting death of a nursery school teacher in Juncos who was hunted down in her home by a gang seeking revenge on her brother.
After Nicole’s death, Superintendent Rivera announced a new war on street crime that doubled police patrols from 4 p.m. Friday to 4 a.m. Monday, sent frequent helicopter patrols over known drug-dealing areas and dispatched K-9 units to sniff out guns at nightclubs, where many shootings have taken place.
The police have also tried to reduce an estimated 1,500 drug puntos, or distribution spots, with frequent raids, Superintendent Rivera said. And the department has shortened the initial training time for recruits, to get them on the streets faster.
Because of its 270 miles of coastline, much of it isolated, and its location between South America and the United States, Puerto Rico has long been a way station for shipments of cocaine and marijuana. About 75 percent of the drugs move on to Miami, New York and other points north, Superintendent Rivera said.
Young men peddle the drugs that remain here, often in the housing projects of San Juan, he said. The competition among dealers is fierce and often fatal.
Murders of drug dealers and their associates are by far the most common kind, which leads some Puerto Ricans to play down the problem.
“It’s not a good idea to be on the street or in the discotheque at 3 or 4 in the morning,” said Freddy Van, a cabdriver in San Juan. “But if you go early or don’t go at all, you don’t have a problem.”
Superintendent Rivera says he wants a law requiring bars and nightclubs to close at 2 a.m. A Puerto Rican legislator proposed such a bill after the quadruple murder outside the disco, but the island’s powerful tourism industry is fighting it.
Another proposed law would increase penalties for killings by stray gunfire, which are on the rise. But some legislators said creating laws would not help, pointing to a strict gun-control law passed in 2000 that they said had done nothing to diminish a huge illegal gun trade.
“We have enough laws on the books,” said Iris Miriam Ruiz, a minority leader in the Puerto Rico House of Representatives. “We need to enforce the existing laws better and deal with the economic problems of Puerto Rico.”
Ms. Ruiz said it would also help to find a police superintendent who would stay on the job, because the department was “a difficult bureaucracy” and new superintendents needed time to win the loyalty of the force. Ms. Ruiz, like other members of the minority political party, the New Progressive Party, said Gov. Sila Calderon was too soft on crime and Puerto Rico needed a return to mano dura, or strong hand tactics.
Ms. Calderon’s predecessor, Pedro Rosello, used that approach in his two terms in the 1990’s, when the murder rate dropped after the number reached a high of 995 in 1994. Now Mr. Rosello is running for governor again and promising to bring back mano dura, an approach that involved, among other things, having the National Guard swoop down on housing projects.
Like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s anticrime tactics in New York, Mr. Rosello’s drew complaints of civil rights violations.
Superintendent Rivera said that the news media had exaggerated the crime problem and that most categories of crime, including robbery, rape, aggravated assault and car theft, were down this year. He said it would be hard to adopt New York’s intensive crime-fighting tactics without sharply raising police salaries, which he said start at about $21,300. In New York, the entry-level police salary is $34,500.
One point on which Superintendent Rivera and his critics agree is that Puerto Rico’s bail laws need overhauling. The island’s Constitution does not allow judges to deny bail and gives them wide discretion in setting it, so many accused killers go free while awaiting trial.
In one high-profile case, a man accused of killing a teenage trumpet player turned out to have been out on bail after being charged in another killing months earlier.
Mr. Muniz said that bail reform would help but that the biggest change had to be in the apathetic attitude he says has engulfed the island.
When a convoy of police vehicles descended on a drug punto in the Vista Hermosa housing project one recent Friday night, a crowd that had gathered for an outdoor party watched impassively as the police arrested a teenage boy and an older man, seizing bags of crack cocaine and marijuana from their pockets.
A woman in a Santa Claus hat had been selling rolling papers at a table on the sidewalk and seemed to barely notice the disruption.
Mr. Muniz, who said he was never involved in politics or crime fighting before Nicole’s death, said that his best consciousness-raising effort to date had been a march on Oct. 5, Nicole’s 17th birthday. As many as 1,000 relatives of murder victims participated, he said, many carrying photos of their dead.
Next year, billboards will go up around San Juan with a picture of Nicole, who had hoped to study fashion design at Boston University, and a line from an essay she wrote shortly before her death: “I only wish that violence comes to an end.” Mr. Muniz hopes people will notice.