USA Today (Virginia)
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. territory of Puerto Rico may be an island paradise for tourists, but it’s also one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a cop.
Forty police officers have been murdered during the past decade on the island of 3.8 million people - more than were slain in the states of Florida and New York combined with a total population of 54.5 million, according to statistics compiled by the FBI.
Only California and Texas have recorded more police slayings since 1994 in states and U.S. territories.
The grim numbers, U.S. and Puerto Rican authorities say, are a reflection of uncommon brutality in a place where the drug trade continues to thrive. Puerto Rican police also cite a lack of training in survival skills, making officers vulnerable on the streets.
“This is a very violent place,” says Luis Fraticelli, the FBI’s special agent in charge in San Juan.
Fraticelli says Puerto Rico has been recording 600-700 murders a year, more than the 492 killings in New York and 506 in Los Angeles last year.
“When police officers and agents respond to calls here, they know the chances are higher that they will be involved in a confrontation involving a weapon,” says Fraticelli, who is on his third bureau assignment in San Juan.
Most of the violence, Fraticelli says, is related to the island’s position as a staging area for illicit shipments of cocaine and heroin heading to the U.S. mainland from Colombia.
The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy reported that 63% of the 774 murders in Puerto Rico in 2002 were related to the drug trade. At the same time, overall violent crime increased nearly 30%.
As a U.S. territory, Puerto Rico has become popular for traffickers looking for easier access to major U.S. cities. The FBI and White House drug policy office say drug shipments are moving through Puerto Rico because traditional routes out of Mexico and Central America have been subject to closer scrutiny since the Sept. 11 attacks.
“It’s a whole different world,” says Suzanne Brown, an FBI special agent formerly assigned to the island.
Brown, who worked with survivors of slain officers and left her Puerto Rico assignment two years ago, says local police also had been dogged by thousands of carjackings, many of them violent.
“With that many incidents, people were going to be killed,” says Brown, now assigned in Las Vegas.
Details about the individual officer deaths in Puerto Rico were not immediately available. But police Lt. Ruben Moyeno, an instructor with the San Juan suburb of Carolina, says most officers were killed in shootouts with drug suspects or in incidents related to answering calls about domestic violence.
Last week, Moyeno led a training session for police on how to reload their weapons and return fire if they are wounded — a recognition of the danger confronting officers on the island.
“It happens,” Moyeno says. “Police have to know how to survive on the street here. Most of the time, officers don’t get any additional training after they graduate from the (police) academy. They are thrown right into it. We have to update our training. There are too many killings.”
Suzie Sawyer, executive director of Concerns of Police Survivors, says the number of police deaths in Puerto Rico may exceed the totals reported by the FBI.
Sawyer, whose group works closely with the National Law Enforcement Memorial in Washington, says Puerto Rican police have been slow to register officers as murder victims if they were working off-duty assignments.
In 2003, for example, the FBI reported that no officers were murdered in Puerto Rico.
But Sawyer’s group, which has helped provide aid to hundreds of police families since 1984, found that at least two had been murdered last year.
According to the FBI, the number of officers killed in Puerto Rico has fluctuated in previous years, from nine in 1994 to zero in 1999. The number of murders picked up again from 2000 to 2002.
“This is a place we pay attention to,” Sawyer says. “There has been a lot of trouble with corruption. We have had police officers killing other officers. Drugs are a big problem there, but the death rate (for police) is unusually high.”