{"id":286,"date":"2016-07-26T20:33:35","date_gmt":"2016-07-27T00:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/?p=286"},"modified":"2016-07-27T09:37:46","modified_gmt":"2016-07-27T13:37:46","slug":"crime-and-immigration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/?p=286","title":{"rendered":"Crime and Immigration"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night while watching the Democratic National Convention<\/a> I had my Twitter<\/a> feed up (@foggybottomline<\/a>) so I could send out a few and follow what the Twitterverse had to say.\u00a0 I don\u2019t follow @JohnLibertyUSA<\/a> so I\u2019m not sure why this popped up in my feed<\/a>.\u00a0 As you can see I pushed back a bit, asking for a link, and we went back and forth. \u00a0Since a discussion like this calls for more than 140 characters at a time, I thought I\u2019d move it to the blog.\u00a0 Hopefully, Mr. Liberty and his fellow traveler @DeanPerkins<\/a> will come over for a look.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mr. Liberty makes two claims: that \u201cillegal aliens\u201d commit 75% of street crime in Southern California (later shifted to a claim that 75% of outstanding LA warrants are for \u201cillegal aliens\u201d), and that 95% of LA homicide warrants are for \u201cillegal aliens.\u201d Mr. Perkins later says something about \u201c1000s [sic] shot in Chicago are fake,\u201d which is not necessarily a claim that immigrants shoot thousands of people in that city, but comes across that way in this context.<\/p>\n

Liberty supports his claim with two sources: \u201cThe Illegal Alien Crime Wave<\/a>\u201d (Heather Mac Donald<\/a>, writing in the Winter 2004 issue of City Journal<\/a><\/em> (published by the Manhattan Institute<\/a>), and a 2011 GAO report on Criminal Alien Statistics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The City Journal<\/em> article focused on criticizing sanctuary city policies and lamented the lack of resources committed to limiting illegal immigration and deportation, among other complaints.\u00a0 Mac Donald doesn\u2019t really present evidence that a wave of crimes committed by immigrants existed in 2004, and she comes nowhere near supporting Liberty\u2019s specific assertions.\u00a0 It\u2019s mostly a rant that government isn\u2019t paying much attention to the immigrant crime problem.\u00a0 Of course, even if she\u2019d made a 2004 case it might not say much about what life is like 12 years later.<\/p>\n

Mac Donald does make the \u201c95% of homicide warrants\u201d claim, but provides no source.\u00a0 Indeed, she notes that readers won\u2019t find \u201cany reference to such facts in official crime analysis.\u201d Think about what this means: Mac Donald does not rely on official crime analysis statistics to support her claim \u2013 she simply says something and then implies that government covered it up.\u00a0 So even though Mac Donald quotes LAPD and other officials from Los Angeles who complain about immigrant and gang crime, she does not quote them citing LAPD or LACS statistics, as Liberty seems to claim in a later tweet.<\/p>\n

So he simply cites as supporting evidence someone else who makes the same unsupported claim he makes.\u00a0 Perhaps in his mind it must be true \u2013 he read it on the internet after all, and it makes sense to him because he hates and fears immigrants.\u00a0 Of course, that\u2019s not how evidence works.\u00a0 In the end Liberty demonstrates a typical conservative tactic: make a specific claim (illegal immigrants commit 75% of street crime in Southern California) that has no supporting evidence of any kind, and later switch their claim to a more general one (lots of immigrants commit crimes and go to jail) that is of course true but banal.\u00a0 Lots of people \u2013 immigrants and native-born Americans – break the law and go to jail for it.<\/p>\n

It would appear that Liberty got this stuff from an email straight out of MyRightWingDad<\/a>.\u00a0 The Snopes<\/a> article I tweeted in response fact checks an email that includes some of this<\/a>, plus a claim that \u201c75% of people on the most wanted list are illegal aliens.\u201d\u00a0 I suspect this is where Liberty got his \u201c75% of outstanding LA warrants\u201d claim.\u00a0 Mac Donald does not mention this and therefore does not support Liberty.\u00a0 The LA Most Wanted List is searchable<\/a> but includes no data on immigration or citizenship status.\u00a0 This strikes me as one of those times when the contents of a \u201cyou won\u2019t believe this\u201d email matches preconceived notions and so must be true \u2013 even if Liberty garbled the exact claim as if on the wrong end of a game of \u201ctelephone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nor does the GAO report support either claim.\u00a0 It focused on three research questions: \u201c(1) the number and nationalities of incarcerated criminal aliens; (2) the types of offenses for which criminal aliens were arrested and convicted; and (3) the costs associated with incarcerating criminal aliens and the extent to which DOJ\u2019s methodology for reimbursing states and localities for incarcerating criminal aliens is current and relevant.\u201d\u00a0 This says a lot about immigrant crime and incarceration in the US, but nothing at all about Los Angeles (or Southern California) specifically.\u00a0 So I would ask Mr. Liberty to try again.<\/p>\n

Mr. Perkins comes a bit closer.\u00a0 As of yesterday, more than two thousand shootings have already occurred in Chicago this year according to the Chicago Tribune<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 But immigrants, illegal or not, are not responsible for all of them, if that\u2019s what he meant.<\/p>\n

What does the evidence really say?\u00a0 Peer-reviewed studies<\/a> suggest<\/a> that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans per capita, and more immigration seems to keep crime rates down.\u00a0 \u00a0This article shows<\/a> that immigrants (including illegal immigrants) in Southern California are less likely to be arrested and incarcerated than native-born citizens.\u00a0 The Wall Street Journal<\/em> also pointed this out<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One more note: Before I took my quick look at this I would have expected sources like the FBI\u2019s Uniform Crime Report to include information on offender citizenship status, but if this or another source captures this I couldn\u2019t find it in an afternoon of searching.\u00a0 Perhaps my Google-fu needs work. If someone else out there can point me to a good database on this please do.\u00a0 I\u2019d love to know if I missed something. \u00a0For now it looks like right-wingers like Liberty and Perkins want to make people fear immigrants for no good reason.\u00a0 If they or anyone else can help me see that I\u2019m wrong, please do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night while watching the Democratic National Convention I had my Twitter feed up (@foggybottomline) so I could send out a few and follow what the Twitterverse had to say.\u00a0 I don\u2019t follow @JohnLibertyUSA so I\u2019m not sure why this popped up in my feed.\u00a0 As you can see I pushed back a bit, asking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[93,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-immigration"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=286"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":287,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions\/287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}