Back to Special Order 40

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At the urging of libertarian political opportunist Walter Moore, the city of Los Angeles is going back to the well of Special Order 40.

Much has elapsed since the death of an L.A. high school student named Jamiel Shaw, and as I predicted weeks ago, the conversation about his death has become an ugly one about immigration.

Moore has ridden the zeitgeist and pressed a repeal of an LAPD regulation called Special Order 40, which bars police from investigation someone solely to determine his or her citizenship. 40 is intended to encourage illegal immigrants' cooperation in police investigations. (Reasoning: An illegal immigrant will tell police about a crime he has witnessed if he knows he won't get deported for it, proponents say.)

His proposed repeal, called "Jamiel's Law," has no political traction, but a related motion in the city council by a San Fernando Valley council member by the name of Dennis Zine does. Zine wants to amend 40 by requiring officers to check the immigration status of gang members they run into, even if those gang members aren't under arrest.

(The plan has obvious surface flaws. For instance, how do you know who's a gang member and who's just a troublemaker? Sure, there are government lists of gang members, but gang membership changes everyday, and the LAPD's Excel spreadsheets of gang membership cannot possibly keep up. Still, one can understand the appeal of Zine's proposal.)

Whether Zine, Moore, or 40's proponents are right I cannot say. The debate over 40 is typical of a policy debate, in which there are pros and cons, and the "right" policy is the one where the pros outweigh the cons.

I can't say whether the pros outweigh the cons because the debate lacks the statistics that comprise pros and cons here. To determine whether 40 is good policy, you'd have to know things like how many illegal immigrants feel protected by the existence of 40? How many crimes have been solved with an illegal immigrant's help? Et cetera.

Right now, the debate is solely an ideological one: should the LAPD be in the deportation business or not? As we know from watching (for instance) the Bush administration, ideology is not necessarily a springboard to good policy.

As such (and as usual), city council president Eric Garcetti is on the right side here:

We need to look at the big picture and focus on creating a system that effectively deports criminals, encourages cooperation from victims and witnesses, and ensures the federal government accepts its responsibility as the enforcer of our nation's immigration laws.

Sure, he sounds non-committal, but starting from a premise of "these are worthwhile policy goals" is so much more effective than starting from a premise of "I believe illegal immigrants should be ______."

Two Abortion Stories

Image by Labour Youth

A few weeks ago, I came across this paragraph at the bottom of the second page of an article on a search and consent case the Supreme Court was about to hear at the time.

In other action on Monday, the court rejected an appeal concerning an
Arizona county jail's policy on abortions for pregnant prisoners. The
unwritten policy requiring an inmate to obtain a court order before
jail officials would transport her for an abortion was found by an
Arizona appeals court to place an undue burden on the right to
abortion. The justices, without comment, turned down the Maricopa
County sheriff's appeal, Arpaio v. Doe, No. 07-839.

Now, maybe it's a sign that my head's been buried in the sand the past few months (election, election, election, aaaahhhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH), but this one took me by surprise. And then there was this article last week: Health Database Was Set Up to Ignore 'Abortion'.

The Arpaio v. Doe decision came as a pleasant shock to me. Of course there are government officials trying to limit abortions - I'm not that out of the loop. That this would be an even bigger problem for prisoners, whose rights and movement are greatly restricted is also no big shock. Never mind that most prisoners are in a uniquely, shall we say inconvenient, situation to bring a child into this world - 'they shoulda thought of that before they went and had sex.' What did surprise me is that the Supreme Court - the Roberts Supreme Court - might possibly side with those women who, realizing that they cannot care for their children and uncertain that anyone else will do so for them, choose not to bring a pregnancy to term behind bars. And don't give me that old sob story about all the childless couples out there ready to adopt these unborn children. The number of children in semi-permanent foster care speaks differently.

Now, I know that Arpaio can't really be taken as a test case for how this court will treat future abortion cases. The sheriff's appeal was rejected without comment, masking any opinions held by members of the court. But it still made me happy, unlike the second story, about search limits on Popline, only the world's largest reproductive health database.

It all started in February, when the Agency for International Development, the government body that funds Popline (which is run by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University), noticed that it included two articles on abortion advocacy. They 'expressed concerns,' it was determined that the articles didn't meet the database's criteria, and the articles were removed. Then the database's search engine was reprogrammed to ignore the query word 'abortion.'

Right...That's not an overreaction at all. As Debra Dickson, one of the Popline managers pointed out, database users still could still find information on abortion by using such search terms as, "fertility control, postconception," and "pregnancy, unwanted." Silly me! It's 'Guess the Query Word!' Here I've been missing out on a great game.

It's still not clear exactly what happened. In a statement on the School of Public Health's website, Dean Michael Klag, promised to look into the issue, assuring people that "I could not disagree more strongly with this decision," which he hadn't been aware of it until that morning.

In the end, this'll probably all be chalked up to an explosive misunderstanding on the Popline managers' part, but it's easy to see how they got there. The database does depend on federal funds, and the paws currently clutching at the purse strings don't exactly smile upon family planning going further than what you learn in an abstinence only sex ed class. Maybe there was some personal ideological motivation there too, but most likely they just got scared. Massive databases don't fund themselves, and with the Bush administration out to get anything that smacks of 'immorality,' what would you do?

Gah! I may not agree with fiscal conservatism, but at least I can comprehend it. Moral conservatism... Just because you have a close personal relationship with Jesus, doesn't mean I have to. Believe me, I've tried. We just couldn't seem to make it work. Please, stop trying to save me from myself.

The Latest Poll Shows: It's a Recession!

photo by marshlight

President George W. Bush is famous for saying he doesn't pay attention to public opinion polls.

Many reasonable people think that this is arrogant – democratically elected leaders should not flout the will of the people who elect them, critics say.

But perhaps there is some wisdom in Bush's policy against reading polls.

What I'm getting at is: Most people just don't know that much stuff, and polls must reflect that. That is, in many cases, polls are asking people about things they simply don't know very well.

Imagine if a pollster called you and asked, "Is the economy headed for a recession?"

You're smart, sure, but do you know what a recession is? Troll your memory for a second. Formulate a guess.

Going by that most reputable of all sources, Wikipedia, a recession is defined in two ways.

Economists say: "A recession is a decline in a country's real gross domestic product, or negative real economic growth, for two or more successive quarters of a year."

The National Bureau of Economic Research says: "A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. A recession begins just after the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends as the economy reaches its trough."

Did you guess right?

Knowing whether the American economy is in recession requires knowledge of the definition of "recession," as well as the directions of GDP, and perhaps income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.

Knowing whether the economy is headed for recession requires all that, plus advance knowledge of what will happen in the future.

So you'll excuse my skepticism when I see a poll that announces, "Majority of Americans expect a recession." I don't think the majority of Americans even know what a recession is, let alone whether one is on the horizon.

There are many things that the majority of Americans are expert on: how to speak English, whether they are happy, and whether they like their cars and houses, for instance.

But when a pollster calls and asks the majority of Americans a bunch of questions that baffle economists, we ought not to grant the results much credence.