‘Tis The Season When Some Police Officers Brace to Battle So-Called ‘Gypsy Crime.’ The Label Has Its Critics.
By David Ovalle, Miami Herald (Florida)
The detective thumbs through a thick, jumbled binder packed with mug shots and profiles of local criminals. They hail from across Europe and the Americas, he says, marry young, have little schooling and refer to people outside their ethnic group as gadje.
He calls it his “Gypsy” file.
For more than a decade, North Miami Beach Detective Mark Nelson has tracked traveling criminals who run scams on the city’s elderly population. More often than not, he says, they belong to the ethnic group commonly known as Gypsies.
Nelson is one of few law enforcement officers in Florida who actively track Romani, the correct name for so-called Gypsies, who have historically been derided as wandering, petty criminals and scam artists, an image many consider an ugly stereotype.
Such practices draw the ire of Romani advocates, wary of the group’s centuries of persecution. They say cops have long stereotyped them and kept databases that amount to ethnic profiling.
“Certainly, we have crooks, too. We have criminals, but no more or no fewer than any other population. We get the attention because it’s part of our image,” said Ian Hancock, an ethnic Romani who teaches at the University of Texas and the U.S. representative to the International Romani Union.
Nelson considers himself somewhat of an expert on Gypsy culture.
“They prey on the elderly and that’s probably why I have such zeal in going after them,” he says. “They’re not preying on someone that can fight back.”
After several years on different assignments, Nelson is reviving his dossiers in an effort to be more proactive as the season amps up for traveling criminals, who often follow the snowbirds who flock to Florida for winter.
The Romani people -- sometimes called Roma, but not to be confused with Romanians -- are believed to have originated centuries ago in India before migrating throughout Europe, North Africa and then the Americas.
Throughout history they have been misunderstood, and are among the poorest and most persecuted of peoples, historians say. More than a million were killed by the Nazis during World War II. Their common name, Gypsy, is a misnomer -- it is a derivative of Egypt, where Europeans believed they had come from.
Using the word “Gypsy” to describe traveling criminals has long been the subject of debate. However, it rarely sparks the outrage that, for example, surfaced when The Herald wrote that Miami and Miami Beach police were monitoring hip-hop artists, which led many black leaders to accuse law enforcement of racial profiling.
FOCUSED TRAINING
Police from Chicago to Pennsylvania have held seminars on so-called Gypsy crime. Aventura also allocates an officer to monitoring such activity.
“There are good Gypsies. The element I deal with is the criminal element,” said Aventura Officer Marc Frider.
Former Milwaukee Detective Dennis Marlock, who investigated fraud cases for three decades, does not shy away from the label, comparing it to other organized crime rings organized by ethnicity. “I often liken it to the Sicilian Mafia,” he said this week. “All members are Sicilian, but not all Sicilians are Mafia members.”
Hancock said the Romani community needs to work harder at dispelling stereotypes.
“The Romani population hasn’t had the means to fight it in an organized way, the way other populations have been able to do,” Hancock said.
There has been a surge in cases of traveling con artists and scammers, although concrete numbers are hard to quantify because most go unreported, said Jon Grow, the director of the National Association of Bunco Investigators, which is dedicated to stopping con artists and transient criminals.
But Grow, like many law enforcement agencies, has grown wary of labeling such activity “Gypsy crimes.”
‘If you want to use `profiling’ [as a] word, we’re profiling criminals,” Grow said. “We’re not looking at Gypsies per se, we’re looking at thieves.”
Seminole County Lt. John Thorpe, who maintains a website dedicated to tracking transient criminals, said police should avoid labeling it Gypsy crime. “When we lecture, we don’t use the term Gypsy, we use traveling offenders,” Thorpe said. “It could be that there are a lot of them that are Romani, but not all Romanis. Not all English travelers or American-born Gypsies are criminals.”
Paul St. Clair, the director of the Roma Community Centre in Toronto, said that much of the criminal stigma comes from the ethnic group’s nomadic tradition, mostly in Eastern Europe. People think of them as “less attached to a particular community,” he said. “But this kind of nomadicism doesn’t really go on anymore.”
In Florida, they are often blamed for fortune-telling frauds, roofing and driveway sealing scams, and nickel-and-dime burglaries. In North Miami Beach, Nelson makes no apologies for his “Gypsy” file. As a patrol officer, he began investigating traveling crimes in the late 1980s. During his time tracking such crimes, Nelson says he has surveilled Gypsy funerals and functions and gotten to know people in the local Gypsy community.
“They’re usually described as Latins because they’re dark-skinned,” he said. “I can basically pick them out of the crowd.”
By the 1990s, he had joined a task force comprised of police agencies from Miami-Dade to Palm Beach counties aimed at curtailing so-called Gypsy crime. He began keeping his dossier in 1992.
Those efforts have fallen by the wayside and now a new generation of Gypsy criminals has emerged, Nelson said. Miami-Dade and Miami police do not have anyone dedicated specifically to traveling criminals.
In North Miami Beach, Nelson says there have been only about seven reported crimes this year that he suspects can be attributed to Gypsies -- which means probably three times that many go unreported.
SCAMS
Victims, usually elderly, do not report the crimes because they are often too embarrassed to admit they have been swindled. Nelson says he has seen an increase in “sweetheart” scams -- Gypsy women buttering up lonely elderly men to rob them.
Earlier this month, two women, “possibly of Latin descent,” approached an elderly couple as they walked into a doctor’s office in North Miami Beach, according to a police report. The women said they were social workers and persuaded them to return to their condominium to “discuss their medical options.”
After awhile, the women abruptly left -- and $1,000 in cash and an engagement ring were missing.
“They’ll pose as FPL and water department employees as a ruse to get into the house,” Nelson said. “It’s all preyed on the elderly. They come up with so many ploys.”