Poe pushes panic button

By RICK CASEY
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

It is safe to say there's a place in hell for unrepentant murderers, and I hope there is a lower rung for cop killers.

When a murderer kills a convenience-store clerk, he inflicts deep wounds on the clerk's family, friends and co-workers.

Any murder is a horrible crime.

But when a murderer kills a police officer, he inflicts that loss and more. He victimizes every good citizen.

We need the police to protect us, not to suspect us, not to feel an urge to pull their guns every time they stop us for absent-mindedly making an illegal turn.

So if Juan Quintero killed officer Rodney Johnson, he had better get right with his Maker because the citizens of Texas will want to hasten their meeting.

But in today's atmosphere, Quintero is more than an accused murderer. He is being made into a symbol of the Evils of Immigration.

U.S. Rep. Ted Poe jumped to the head of the mob that would use Quintero's alleged crime to brand many illegal immigrants as homicidal.


What 'we' really 'know'

"We know that 25 homicides a day are committed by people who are illegally in the country, and this is one more," he told the Chronicle.
But who is this "we" and how do "we" know that?

Tuesday morning I called Poe's communications director, DeeAnn Thigpen, to ask her the source of that statistic.

By end of day all she could come up with was that it came "from the House Judiciary Committee, based on FBI statistics." It was too late to reach either the committee or the FBI to confirm, and she was unable to provide any documentation.

Frank P. Williams III was not surprised. He and his wife, Marilyn D. McShane, are Ph.D. professors of criminal justice at the University of Houston-Downtown and authors of many books and articles on crime and the justice system.

They saw Poe's quote and became immediately skeptical. For one thing, they say, the FBI doesn't keep crime statistics based on immigrant status.


'An outlandish figure'

Second, the numbers don't add up. If Poe is correct, they say, illegal immigrants commit 9,125 homicides a year.
That would be more than half the nation's annual homicides, reported at 16,692 last year.

"This is clearly an outlandish figure and patently untrue," said Williams.

Poe's Thigpen did mention a study done by the General Accounting Office of illegal immigrants in prison. But the GAO study hardly supports Poe's number.

It found that 55,322 illegal immigrants were incarcerated in federal, state and local prisons and jails in 2003.

But only 12 percent of them were in for violent crimes � murder, robbery, assault and sex crimes.

Let's say a quarter of those were for homicide, a very high estimate based on the percentage in the general prison population for homicide. That would put the number of illegal immigrants imprisoned for such crimes at about 1,700.

According to Williams, the national average sentence for homicide (including vehicular homicide and manslaughter) is 5.9 years. So those 1,700 would represent about 288 homicide convicts per year, about 3 percent of the number Poe cites.

If Poe is right, U.S. judges and juries are mighty lenient toward homicidal illegal immigrants.

Professor Williams says Poe's statement fits into a well-established phenomenon known among sociologists as "moral panic."

"Some sensational thing happens," said Williams. "Some authority makes a claim. The claim is always exaggerated, usually tremendously exaggerated. Almost no one questions the claim."

Sure enough. I heard a radio talker citing Poe's numbers Monday.

"People then start using the claim to bolster their vested interest on the issue," continued Williams. "Then usually action is taken. People ultimately start questioning the claim, and the claim starts shrinking substantially."

Poe is a former criminal judge. He should know better.

But illegal immigration is a great election-eve issue.

It is also a huge, complex problem that demands a solution based on reality, not on an artificially induced "moral panic."

i think that if poe hadn't made the statements, the author would not have been so quick to advocate the death penalty for this defendant. he set that up so he can essentially say, okay he may deserve the death penalty, but this immigration thing is getting blown way out of proportion. later, he'll probably be one of the people advocating leniency, most likely because it's hard for illegal immigrants or because he suffers from post-partum psychosis.

as far as the attack on poe's hyperbole, that's politics. both sides of the fence use that same technique (check out debates on global warming or the patriot act, or even plamegate). a broad, attention getting statement is thrown out and starts to get repeated as fact even as the evidence rolls in showing that the statement was more of an overstatement. but, apparently poe is new and republican, so it's an evil wedge issue instead of politics as usual.

During the legislative process, lawmakers love to use an individual story to justify their bill. Somehow, the human psyche reacts to a personal experience much quicker than a statistic. But, the statistic, if accurate and properly explained, is likely a more rational reflection of what is happening.

Law by anecdote is a serious disease in Austin. Prosecutors often find themselves in the difficult position of trying to rebut a story.

Probation reform was pushed by one senator by his constant repetition of his claim that a defendant in Houston was revoked and sent to prison for being 15 minutes late to his monthly probation officer meeting. An eye-roller of a story but repeated nonetheless.

at some point in any argument i get into, someone relies on an anecdote (me or the person who eventually wins the argument). why is it that people seem to gravitate towards the single, dramatic example of something right or wrong? it's always amazing to me how people in the middle of an argument can caveat the hell out of an anecdotal argument and still rely upon it as support for that argument.

Stories are stronger than statistics. Us prosecutors make use of anecdotes during the legislative sessions, too, both to kill bad bills and pass good ones.

If Judge Poe misused a stat, shame on him. If you read the Chronc, you know one thing for sure: their reporters never, ever misuse statitics. So let's give Rick Casey a Brownie Point. He is a very eagle-eyed journalist.

Unfortuneately, Rick, like many in the MSM, seems to miss the big story, while reporting a relatively minor problem. The big story is that, according to Casey's story, in 2003, there were 55,322 illegals doing time in the US, of which "only" 12 percent were in for a violent crime. If my math is right--& it may not be--12% of 55,322 means "only" 6,638.64 illegals were doing time for a violent crime.

I think that is more of an outrage than Poe's misused statistic. That is about 1/3 of the pop. of the TDC, and aprox. the population of Victoria, Texas. I bet, out of those thousands of criminals and the cases that landed them in jail or prison, are more than a few extremely sad stories--anadotes--for someone to read about.

And who is paying for the federal government's laxness in protecting us from these people? Admittedly their victims pay the heaviest price, but who is paying for their incarceration? Is it the feds, or the states? Maybe Rick might want to look into that, if he has run out of real scandles to write about.