Police in New York City conducted 575,000 “stops” in 2009. The actual number could be higher–depending on the number of stops the police decided not to record on paper. The ‘stop and search’ is a legally dubious tactic that persists largely because white, middle-class people are mostly unaffected by it. It is bad enough when the officers are in uniform, but gets worse when the police are in plain clothes and approach people rapidly. The police “target” may have only seconds to determine whether he/​she is facing a mugging or a police stop. More here.

Today Politico Arena asks:

Does the level of support for Arizona’s immigration law demonstrate that immigration can be a potent campaign issue in the 2010 midterms?

My response:

Few national issues produce more heat and less light than immigration, as the reaction to Arizona’s recent legislation on the subject demonstrates. And with nearly three-quarters of Americans now saying they approve of allowing police to ask for documents, according to the latest Pew Research Center poll, and the Arizona law’s approval-disapproval rating at nearly 2 to 1, it’s hard to imagine that immigration will not be a factor in the coming elections.

The issues surrounding the immigration debate — criminal, economic, social — are often complex, and not always clear. But the underlying issue is clear: We no longer control our southern border, and Congress seems unable or unwilling to do anything about it. It hardly needs saying that a welfare state, in the age of terrorism, cannot have open borders. If the failure to control is partly a function of our substantive law — the absence of a serious guest-worker program, for example — then that needs to be corrected. But it needs to be done in concert with serious enforcement.

Yet what was President Obama’s response to the Arizona law, which at bottom was a call to Washington to do something? It was to ask the Justice Department to look for any legal problems in the law and to respond accordingly. It was to play the presumed political card, that is, rather than to address the underlying issue, which he’d promised to do during his campaign for the presidency. Well if the Pew numbers are any indication, this “master politician” may have once again, as with ObamaCare, misread his mandate and the public mood. For a growing number of Americans, as recent elections have shown, November can’t come soon enough.

Bruce Schneier has a typically good essay on the use of “worst-cases” as a substitute for real analysis. I noticed conspicuous use of “worst-case” in early reporting on the oil spill in the Gulf. It conveniently gins up attention for media outlets keen on getting audience.

There’s a certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary principle, it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis and fear for reason. It fosters powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable to the effects of terrorism.

Worst-case thinking—the failure to manage risk through analysis of costs and benefits—is what makes airline security such an expensive nightmare, for example. Schneier concludes:

When someone is proposing a change, the onus should be on them to justify it over the status quo. But worst case thinking is a way of looking at the world that exaggerates the rare and unusual and gives the rare much more credence than it deserves. It isn’t really a principle; it’s a cheap trick to justify what you already believe. It lets lazy or biased people make what seem to be cogent arguments without understanding the whole issue.

It’s not too long for you to read the whole thing.

Last week in this space I criticized my friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute for siccing the Federal Trade Commission on General Motors over its misleading “we repaid our bailout money” ads. Now CEI founder/​president (and old friend) Fred Smith gives his side of the story in a lengthy response. And a new report from Fox News covers the whole controversy.

A Georgia jury has acquitted Tonya Craft of 22 criminal charges relating to child abuse and child molestation. A remarkable outcome given the awful rulings of the judge during the trial. Previous coverage here and here. 

When so many charges are leveled, the pressure to enter into a plea bargain intensifies–even if the accused is innocent. The defense attorney will say something like, “Look, some kids are going to say you did something awful. That’s going to happen. We might persuade the jury to acquit on most of the charges, but there’s still a chance they will convict you on a few counts. That could mean several years in jail. Might be better to plead guilty to one charge, serve six months, and then get on with your life.” Some people breezily proclaim that they would never plead guilty to a crime they did not commit, but when your own freedom is really on the line, the decision is not so easy.

More on plea bargaining here (pdf).

Are Mexican authorities fighting an all out war against drug cartels or simply helping one drug organization win the battle against other criminal gangs for the most lucrative trafficking route to the United States? Street banners alongside Mexico’s highways—put up by rival drug gangs—have long suggested that the administration of Felipe Calderon is in bed with the Sinaloa cartel, that country’s most powerful drug organization. As The Economist reported earlier this year, the Mexican government’s efforts against drug trafficking have been fairly one-sided:

“The Sinaloa organisation (named after a north-western state) is responsible for around 45% of the drug trade in Mexico, reckons Edgardo Buscaglia, a lawyer and economist at ITAM, a Mexico City university. But using statistics from the security forces, he calculates that only 941 of the 53,174 people arrested for organised crime in the past six years were associated with Sinaloa.”

Leaked documents obtained and reported on Monday by Reforma newspaper suggest that drug corruption reaches the top levels of law-enforcement in that country, adding to the suspicion that the Mexican authorities have indeed sided with (some) drug lords. The documents apparently also show the police sharing DEA intelligence with its drug clients, a troubling development when Mexico is asking for more U.S. cooperation in its fight against some drug cartels.

Surveys indicate that the Mexican people still support the Calderon administration in its drug war. However, patience is running out, especially as the number of innocents killed in the violence soars. The tourism industry is also taking its toll, as shootings become commonplace in resorts such as Acapulco and Cancun, driving away visitors. If Mexicans perceive that all this blood and treasure have been paid just to help one criminal gang over the other ones, support for Calderon’s war will rapidly wane.

Also, these allegations present a conundrum for president Obama, who happens to host Felipe Calderon on Monday for a state dinner at the White House. The administration has been pressed by the Mexican government to substantially increase the level of assistance in the fight against cartels. However, if it becomes clear that high-ranking Mexican law enforcement officials are in bed with one or more criminal organizations (not the first time that something like this has happened) and that U.S. intelligence has ended up in the hands of drug lords, there will be growing resistance within the U.S. government to further aid Mexico. This in turn, will only exacerbate the tension between both governments.

“Plata o plomo” (which literally means “silver or lead” and refers to how officials are either corrupted or killed by drug lords) has long been a common feature of the drug war in Latin America. It is not surprising that multi-billion dollar cartels corrupt the officials who are supposed to fight them. What is surprising is some people in Washington still believe that this is a winnable war.

A bill introduced in the Senate yesterday would require Congress to bring earmarks out of the shadows, producing earmark data in a format that the public can easily use.

S. 3335 calls for a “unified and searchable database on a public website for congressional earmarks.” This is something President Obama called for in his 2010 State of the Union speech, though we haven’t heard much more from him about it since then.

Importantly the bill is not just about a web site. The bill would enable the public to “programmatically search and access all data in a serialized machine readable format via a web-services application programming interface.” That gobbledegook means that people could access the data for themselves, slicing and dicing it to learn whatever they want or to display it however they want.

I’ve noted here before the efforts of my government transparency web site Wash​ing​ton​Watch​.com to capture earmark data and the related effort to get earmark data directly from Congress at Ear​mark​da​ta​.org.

The bill was introduced by Senator Tom Coburn (R‑OK), and is currently cosponsored by Sen. Michael Bennet (D‑CO), Sen. Barbara Boxer (D‑CA), Sen. Bob Corker (R‑TN), Sen. John Ensign (R‑NV), Sen. Russ Feingold (D‑WI), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D‑NY), Sen. Johnny Isakson (R‑GA), Sen. John McCain (R‑AZ), and Sen. Mark Udall (D‑CO). Its House counterpart is H.R. 5258 (Cassidy R‑LA), which also has bipartisan support.

Support for these bills across parties and ideologies suggests good things may be in store for earmark transparency.