Lines and Shadows
Joseph Wambaugh
A MysteriousPress.com
Open Road Integrated Media ebook
For those who lived it, on both sides of the line
This is a true story.
THE BRIDAL SUITE
IN 1982, THREE SAN DIEGO AREA POLICE OFFICERS UNDERWENT psychological counseling in an effort to assess some traits that might cause either embarrassment to the police department or danger to the officers themselves.
The three officers in question were all convinced that disturbances in their lives were related to police service. At least two had experienced some episodes of weeping, which is predictable in police stress cases. At least two had some thoughts of self-destruction, which is extremely predictable in police stress cases. The only other thing the three officers had in common was that they were all part of a little experiment conducted by the San Diego Police Department. The experiment lasted eighteen months, ending in April 1978. It was a strange experiment, the results of which are still being debated on both sides of the Mexico-United States border.
Ten officers of the San Diego Police Department were asked to walk a foot beat. It may well have been the most bizarre and remarkable foot beat walked by American policemen in modern times.
In addition to being the story of that walking beat, this is also a tale of two cities. Each of the city’s metropolitan areas houses about one million people. One city is geographically small and the people live in close proximity. One city is large and sprawling.
In one city, inhabitants still suffer diseases considered exotic in the other: cholera, polio, typhus, tuberculosis, rickets. In the other city, separated from the former mostly by an imaginary line, lies some of the richest real estate in the richest half of the richest state in the richest country on the face of the earth.
Within a two-hour drive north from that invisible line there float unbelievable armadas: yachts and pleasure craft, half a million of them. And no less than 150 builders of yachts and pleasure craft striving to fill the insatiable need.
Although it’s difficult to say where unusual ideas originate, this one may have been born many years ago in a hag of a hotel near the Mexican border. The top floor of the hotel in San Ysidro housed “the bridal suite.” The sole occupant was an officer of the United States Border Patrol. He could cross the floor in two strides. He was a very big man living in a very small room, wryly named.
Dick Snider recalls his days in that hotel vividly. The floor outside his room ran downhill so that he had to skate to the slime-green bathroom down the hall. Slipping and sliding back up the floor to his coffin of a room was another matter, especially when he’d been putting down tequila and mescal and Mexican beer at The Playland Club, a theater-cum-saloon run by an ex-tightrope walker.
Maybe that’s how it all seemed to the twenty-five-year-old border patrolman on his first assignment, trying to live and support an estranged family on $75 a week, reduced to eating cheese sandwiches three times a day, listening to the ex-tightrope walker recall her good old days walking wire.
San Ysidro is not an incorporated town; it’s mostly a Spanish-speaking community within the city limits of San Diego. One can, they say, hit the United States port of entry with an empty tequila bottle thrown from any house in San Ysidro. An exaggeration, but one gets the idea. Back when former border patrolman Dick Snider was pinwheeling down the halls of the little hotel it was mostly cesspools, train trestles, stucco or cinder-block beer bars, and streets as greasy and blistered as fried tortillas.
Burl Richard Snider was born in southern Arkansas, in the tiny town of Silva, a crossroads that time and cartographers have obliterated. His family were farmers and mostly raised him in southeastern Missouri, the “lapland” where Missouri laps into Arkansas. It was a Mississippi River backwater which flooded yearly and caused his family to make several trips to California, their “Grapes of Wrath trips,” to find work in the San Joaquin Valley. One of those trips lasted two years, and during that time the youngster had occasion to play with Mexican children whose families had also made journeys from far places—cruel, hard journeys. The lapland farmboy found they were very much like himself, those Mexican children. He began picking up bits of their language and he studied Spanish in school, discovering that, because of Spanish, other studies clicked.
“For the first time in my life even English seemed to jell for me,” he recalled. “Spanish classes were a snap when I later entered the Border Patrol academy. While other guys were washing out because of it.”
But there was some living in store for young Dick Snider before joining the U.S. Border Patrol. He got married at seventeen and began working in the California oil fields, making quite a bit of money for a boy—a very large boy to be sure. He and his bride had two babies and everything was coasting along about as smooth as buttermilk. Then his oldest child, Ricky, got a strep infection of the larynx.
A generation later he looked, well, baffled when he tried to describe it. Ricky was just three years old. Ricky had trouble breathing one night. The next morning it was worse. Dick Snider rushed his son to the hospital. Ricky began choking. Ricky began strangling. Dick Snider watched his son’s face go blue-black before his eyes. His boy wanted his father to save him. The doctors cut open the boy’s throat and did a tracheotomy. The life support machine broke down. The boy died six hours later at two o’clock in the afternoon.
“It’s confusing,” he remembered. “I’d go out a my head for several minutes at a time. Then I’d come back. Out and back. I can’t remember the details. I can only remember that he recognized me at the end. The doctors tried to tell me that he couldn’t have. I believe he knew me at the end. His hair was wheat-blond and his eyes were brown. He always tried to do what I did. Once he scared me to death by running into a corral full a horses. He was going to wrangle them, he said. He said if his daddy could do it … well … he was some kid.”
Dick Snider and his wife also had a baby daughter, but nothing was the same after the boy’s death. There were some years of misery, then divorce.
He eventually found himself absolutely alone, in a mean little room in a hotel in San Ysidro, draping his large frame out the window on cool San Diego nights, watching the glow in the sky from Tijuana.
There had been no Hispanics in Dick Snider’s border patrol class. In fact he was the best Spanish-speaking recruit in the El Paso barracks during training. The United States government had not thought it necessary to recruit officers who fluently spoke the language of the border. Dick Snider, who always hankered to be in law enforcement, made investigator very quickly.
“I used to watch the San Diego cops chasing aliens down the streets a San Ysidro,” he recalled. “I’d sit in that sorry little room and look out at them. It made me think a lot about the alien plight.”
And it wasn’t easy supporting his estranged wife and daughter. Hence, cheese sandwiches and some milk when he was lucky. And booze because it was sometimes more necessary than food—that is, when you tended to think of a family destroyed and a dying son crying out for help. It’s not hard to imagine the fantasies in a cockroach hotel in the night, always an arm’s length from a service revolver, closer than that to the memories of a dead child. I couldn’t save him.
So, lonely and frightened men must think of other things. They get strange ideas. They drink, and they gaze out the window at wormy mongrel dogs dragging infected bleeding anuses across stippled pavement, dogs who cross the imaginary line at will to scavenge. And they gaze at cops chasing aliens in a crazy game more akin to present-day Pac-Man than anything else. At least when seen from the vantage point of a coffin of a room called the bridal suite.
The idea he got a generation ago was this: There
is not a significant line between two countries. It’s between two economies.
“I kept thinking, what if I’d been born a hundred yards south a that invisible line? As long as it’s the haves and have-nots side by side, they’re gonna come.”
There was a lot of anguish and misery out there in the night on the frontier. And it may be that this is where the idea for the later San Diego police experiment was born. While watching an early version of Pac-Man, where American lawmen ate up Mexican aliens only to spit them back south. And ate them up the next night only to spit them back south. And the next night.
It’s easy to see how a young border patrolman might start to identify with these pollos driven north by circumstance. And to wonder how many of them had seen a dying son cry out. Save me.
The border patrolman in the bridal suite began to concentrate on the anguish of illegal aliens. So as not to contemplate his own.
OBSESSION
BURL RICHARD SNIDER HAD JOURNEYED HALF A LIFETIME from the hotel in San Ysidro. He had gone from the U.S. Border Patrol to service as a park policeman on the other side of America, in Washington, D.C. He had remarried, returned west and had two more children. And he had joined the San Diego Police Department.
In the fall of 1976 Lieutenant Dick Snider, now a sixteen-year police department veteran, old enough to know better, was lying flat on his belly in a canyon watching a nightly ritual. The aliens gathered by an imaginary line between two cities, two countries, two economies, and when the sun was about to set they moved. In the old Border Patrol days a few dozen might try it on a given night. Now, in a zone of only a few square miles, in effect a no-man’s-land between the cities of Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, U.S.A., they came. Sometimes ten thousand per week. And in those canyons lurked Tijuana bandits and cutthroats who fed off the pollos as they crossed the frontier in the night. One of the slashes of earth in this no-man’s-land is called Deadman’s Canyon, for good reason. It is a mean, blood-drenched gash of mesquite and cactus and rocks within the city limits of San Diego, one of the richest cities in the richest state in the richest country.…
The illegal aliens saved and borrowed and sold and carried the net worth of their lives in their socks and underwear, and sometimes in bags and bundles. Bandit gangs formed near that imaginary line and enjoyed a nightly bonanza in the canyons. Aliens were ambushed, robbed, raped, murdered, occasionally within screaming distance of United States officers at the land port of entry.
The bandits were no fools. They lived in Tijuana but operated on the American side where it was safe. Tijuana lawmen can be very unpleasant, as the bandits well knew.
And the bandits were without mercy. During one robbery, a young pollo father was shot with his baby in his arms. He lay dying ten feet inside the promised land while the bandits stripped everything of value from the living members of his party. An orphaned blood-spattered baby with fat knees was carried screaming in agony back to Tijuana with shotgun pellets in his eye and brain.
All of this troubled Lieutenant Dick Snider, just as it had troubled him twenty years earlier. He lay in the scrub at night, alone in those canyons, the binoculars cupped in his big leathery paws, watching through slate-colored eyes forever squinting from the smoke of a dangling cigarette; His life had changed very much for the better in these intervening years. But the aliens? The Mexican economy was fearful. The rest of Latin America was desperate.
In 1976 there was already lots of rhetoric about the alien phenomenon. The American State Department had been forced to admit that the overall dilemma was insoluble, and was publicly promising to try to “manage” it a bit better. The five hundred Border Patrol officers in the Chula Vista sector were catching more than twenty thousand aliens a month, almost all of them having crossed in those few square miles of canyon inside the city limits of San Diego, near the busiest land port of entry in the world. The agents used helicopters, horses, four-wheel-drive vehicles, infrared scopes magnetic sensors, seismic sensors.
Sometimes a border patrolman had been known to stroll into an asparagus field on the west side of Interstate 5 and illuminate a pollo with his light, commanding him to stand and submit. After which he would suddenly find himself surrounded by fifty other aliens who thought he was talking to them.
The nearby city of Oceanside, for example, had a population of some seventy thousand and grew by fifty thousand during fruit-picking season, from undocumented stoop laborers. The law said that a farmer was not violating the law by hiring the illegals, but was by housing them. Therefore they slept in the brush, under trees, in cardboard boxes. The nights in San Diego County can get cold.
And it came to pass that labor organizers and farmers did much shouting into the wind. The farmers said that if they must pay and house American workers (assuming they would do stoop labor) a strawberry would cost what you now pay for an avocado. An avocado would cost what you now pay for a Mercedes. And so forth.
And Chicano activists entered the picture and argued that the American government could not separate a Chicano from a Mexican (with which most native Mexicans would disagree) and called the frontier “The Vietnam of the Southwest.”
The director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service had, by 1976, publicly commented that the alien situation appeared almost hopeless, far beyond the control of his uniformed force, the U.S. Border Patrol.
In the summer of 1976 Dick Snider was forty-five years old, too old to be lurking around the boonies, they said. Pretty dopey, they said, to be taking the department’s four-wheel-drive Ford Bronco to clatter up into those godforsaken canyons, one mile and one century away from the Southern Division substation of the San Diego Police Department. But he did it with ever more frequency, usually alone, and pondered the fate of those pollos being brutalized out there in the darkness as he lay concealed in foxtail grass and cactus and tumbleweeds.
Sometimes in the late afternoons, while he watched the multitude of aliens gathering on the mesas and plateaus waiting for sunset, he would see groups of Mexican schoolchildren being led across the invisible line by teachers conducting excursions into the canyons for flora and fauna. Oil-rich jojoba beans grew wild. Wild anise flourished, and scrub oak, stunted and tough, relentlessly surviving. And everywhere the threat of cholla cactus. Dick Snider watched through binoculars the throngs who played soccer and baseball and bought tamales and soda pop from the Tijuana “roach wagons” which also came to take a buck or two from the pollos before the canyon crossing.
He watched children with empty jars, and milk cartons full of water, flooding the burrows of tarantulas and scorpions, capturing the wretched creatures alive to peddle to Americans in the bars or to Mexican entrepreneurs who ensconced them in plastic molds to sell to tourists as paperweights. Everything was for sale to Americans in the border city.
It was not more than a short walk from a low-rent hotel where a young border patrolman once occupied the bridal suite. And in essence, he was still contemplating the same dilemma: the aliens.
It occurred to him that almost nothing had changed in all those years. It was as though, well, something as uncop-like as destiny had marked him, linking him to this place, near that imaginary line. But there had been one change in recent years: the bandit gangs. And it was insupportable to him that some pollos were actually attacked within screaming distance of his substation. Even Deadman’s Canyon was only one mile (and one century) away.
It didn’t seem to trouble very many other people. After all, they were illegal aliens, criminals by definition. But some of the criminals were only three years old, and some were younger. And the bandits were not sentimental about mothers and babes. Finally he became obsessed with the incongruity of it. This was the prosperous, beautiful, tourist-filled city of San Diego, U.S.A. His city. His outrage agitated the cerebral cortex where ideas live. And one came to him.
The best way to convince bureaucrats of anything is to quote statistics. Police administrators can toss around more numbers than baseball managers. And
like baseball managers, pollsters, politicians, or Pentagon generals, they can make statistics do just about whatever they wish. But there are certain statistics which even the most resourceful police pencil pusher would have trouble explaining away. One is homicide. There is a dead body on your beat or there isn’t. And too many of them were turning up around an imaginary line which Dick Snider had long believed was used to divide two economies. No one knew for sure how many murders actually occurred on American soil, because there were verified episodes of bereaved pollos carrying their slain husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, children, back over to the Mexican side for burial.
And every cop who has ever worked among illegal aliens knows that pollos assaulted in the night would not routinely report the crime to the U.S. authorities, since these people generally feared the authorities of both countries, not to mention deportation. Therefore, the San Diego police statisticians only got wind of the crimes where the Border Patrol or police stumbled upon some victim who had been gutted like a fish, or hamstrung by the bandit wolf packs, sometimes making bloody circles in the dust before bleeding to death. Sometimes raped so brutally that hospitalization was required prior to deportation. The real body count was anybody’s guess.
Dick Snider finally tired of crawling around those canyons at midnight, listening to gunshots and cries in the darkness. He remembered the old Border Patrol days when they used to track one alien ten miles because illegal entry was then considered a big deal. He wondered if nowadays any overworked, frustrated, dung-shoveling border patrolmen unconsciously approved of the Tijuana bandits for culling the migrants in no-man’s-land. In fact, he wondered how many ordinary compassionate citizens would tolerate the bandit gangs, who probably scared away a fair number that might otherwise have joined the ragtag migratory battalions of the night.
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