Yet violent crimes like kidnapping have gone up almost exponentially. Maybe not all violent crime in general, but kidnappings are continuing to increase.
"PHOENIX — A 13-year-old girl was grabbed off the street and thrown into an SUV by Mexican kidnappers who mistakenly believed she was the niece of a drug dealer who helped steal 55 pounds of marijuana.
The girl pleaded with her kidnappers that they had abducted the wrong person, but they hit her over the head, bound her with duct tape and drove away as relatives watch helplessly.
In the wave of abductions that have gripped the Phoenix area, this case illustrates one of the greatest fears of police: the possibility that kidnappings might expand beyond the underworld of drug and human trafficking to target law-abiding people.
"We get enough problems with just bad-guy-on-bad-guy" abductions, Police Chief Jack Harris said. "If you expand it to where they are going after these regular citizens, we just don't have that kind of personnel to be able to invest in those kinds of cases at that level."
With 368 reported kidnappings in 2008, Phoenix has swiftly become the nation's kidnapping capital. Abductions have become such a persistent problem that police created a special squad of anti-kidnapping officers.
Authorities hope to avoid the mistakes of Mexican police, who ignored kidnappings involving smugglers _ a decision that may have encouraged gangs to start snatching ordinary people displaying signs of even modest wealth.
The Mexican government usually disregards the problem "unless it is a high-profile case _ a very rich person or a famous person who was kidnapped," said Jose Luis Velasco Cruz, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and an expert in drug crimes.
Over the last several years, many kidnappings in Phoenix have involved drug traffickers abducting rivals, associates or their relatives. The abductions offer a way to collect unpaid debts, steal money from fellow traffickers or retaliate for earlier abductions.
Immigrant smugglers have also been known to do kidnappings, sometimes holding customers hostage to extort money from their families."
368 kidnappings in Phoenix (one city) in 2008 alone. Must be a lot of American criminals.
