By John Moreno Gonzales, New York Newsday
Calling their accord a historic step in the fight against gangs, police from Suffolk County and El Salvador signed a pact yesterday that would allow their departments to share intelligence and training to counter the international menace.
But even as the ink dried on an agreement that officials said would hang in “a place of honor” at the Suffolk County Police Museum, civil libertarians questioned the constitutionality of a local body making pacts with a foreign nation, and El Salvador’s human rights record in its crackdown against gangs. Meanwhile, Nassau police, who also met with Salvadoran lawmen this week, said they would not enter into the accord until completing a legal review of the same concerns.
“Crime and criminals have no boundaries,” Suffolk Police Commissioner Richard Dormer said shortly before signing the Spanish- and English-language documents during a news conference at the police academy in Brentwood. “I am very, very happy to join hands with my counterpart with the civil police of El Salvador.”
The Central American nation, one of the poorest and most wracked by violence in the world, is home to an estimated 10,500 suspected gang members who first arrived in the country about a decade ago through criminal deportations from the United States. The problem has now come full-circle, with gangs like MS-13 traveling between both nations and settling in communities like Brentwood.
A total of about 5,000 gang members are estimated to live in Nassau and Suffolk counties, up from about 500 10 years ago, causing Dormer to ally with El Salvador National Police Chief Ricardo Menesses in the cross-border struggle.
At the news conference yesterday, Menesses said his department was on its way to reforming the “mano duro,” or “hard-hand” policy that some judges in his country have refused to implement because of its sweeping provisions.
“For the youth that are out there and in need of help, we have to help them,” Menesses said, referring to what he called stepped-up social programs to keep Salvadoran youth out of gangs in the first place. But true to his nation’s zero-tolerance gang policy, he added: “We’re not going to give a truce to any criminal. He has to go where he deserves to be: jail.”
The Salvadoran laws granted police the right to detain anyone with what they believed to be a gang tattoo and allowed minors under 12 to be convicted. A United Nations human rights delegation announced in June that it considered the “hard-hand” policies to be against international human rights standards. Immigration attorneys add that street murders of suspected gang members in El Salvador are committed by death squads engaged in a social cleansing, though government officials say it is the gangs themselves killing each other.
Det. Lt. Kevin Smith, commanding officer of the Nassau County Police Public Information Office, said departmental brass met with Menesses earlier in the week, but concerns over El Salvador’s approach to gangs caused them to step back from an accord. “During that meeting, these issues came up,” Smith said yesterday. “A legal review will be done to determine if we can enter into this agreement.”
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said yesterday that the Constitution states that only federal authorities can sign pacts with foreign nations.
“You can’t have 50 states and thousands of municipalities entering into agreements with foreign countries,” she said, citing concerns that local officials are not sufficiently educated in international matters to act as diplomats.
“Gang violence is a problem,” Lieberman added. “But what we have to do is apply American standards of justice.”
Dormer said no documents were drawn up to list the projected costs and exact provisions of the agreement, but that they would be formulated in coming months.
Assemb. Philip Ramos, who brought the Salvadoran and local officials together after visiting El Salvador last year, said the accord could include Salvadoran officers training in the United States and Suffolk officers training in El Salvador. Ramos (D-Brentwood) said he believed the accord would promote human rights by allowing Salvadoran officers to learn new standards from the Suffolk police.