LOS ANGELES _ Los Angeles police Chief Charlie Beck said Tuesday that reports of sexual assault and domestic violence made by the city's Latino residents have plummeted this year amid concerns that immigrants in the country illegally could risk deportation by interacting with police or testifying in court.
Beck said reports of sexual assault dropped 25 percent among the city's Latino population in the beginning of 2017, adding that reports of domestic violence also have fallen by 10 percent.
Similar decreases were not seen in reports of those crimes by other ethnic groups, Beck said.
"Imagine your sister, your mother, not reporting a sexual assault for fear that their family will be torn apart," Beck said during an event at the Lincoln Heights Youth Center Complex in East L.A.
For months, law enforcement leaders across the U.S. have expressed fear that aggressive immigration enforcement promised by President Donald Trump's administration would weaken the already shaky bond between minority communities and police. In recent weeks, reports that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have identified themselves as police officers during raids and made arrests in courthouses have caused some to wonder whether immigrants in the country illegally will refuse to cooperate with police as a result.
In hopes of allaying those fears, Mayor Eric Garcetti signed an executive directive Tuesday expanding the LAPD's policy of not stopping people to question them about their immigration statuses to three other city agencies: the Fire Department, Airport Police and Port Police.
The LAPD stopped approaching people solely to ask about their immigration status in 1979, under Special Order 40, a policy signed by then-Chief Daryl Gates. In 2014, the city also stopped complying with ICE requests to detain immigrants in the U.S. illegally who have been arrested for minor crimes, though police still will hold those suspected of violent felonies.
"We want to focus on serious crime, but we also want to focus on making more citizens, not more criminals," Garcetti said Tuesday.
Beck stopped short of blaming the dip in crime reporting solely on Trump's immigration policies, but he said there was a "strong correlation" between the timing of the decrease and the panic among the city's immigrant population in the face of ramped-up ICE enforcement.
Garcetti and Beck said they both have had conversations with ICE officials about how immigration agents' tactics might affect law enforcement at a local level, including the possibility that an aggressive approach would weaken trust between police and immigrants.
"If you want a safe city, we need the trust and cooperation of all of our citizens," Garcetti said.
