The idea behind the article, the Shepherd suggests, is to bolster a theme that its faculty advisor, local wingnut Jessica McBride, has been touting that undocumented Mexicans are a real, real big problem. The article itself describes its motivation this way:
In light of the recent local immigration debate, the Frontpage Milwaukee team set out on a three-month investigation to see whether there are illegal immigrant inmates at the Milwaukee County jail or whether rhetoric about so-called “criminal aliens” is exaggerated.
So the entire premise of the piece, apparently, is a false dichotomy: either there are some illegals in jail, or the rhetoric is exaggerated. The implication is that these are mutually exclusive options: either one or the other but not both. If there are aliens in jail, the rhetoric is not exaggerated. This would be true, of course, only if the rhetoric were pretty tame, and relied solely on the implication that in the entire jail population, there is an undocumented immigrant or two.
The result (drumroll, please)... they found some. Shocker!
Michelle Malkin reproduces part of the story and endorses it as fair, all facts, no spin. So, it's been declared fair by someone whose idea of fair is... okay, so maybe that isn't the best evidence of objectivity.
The main point of the article was that there were at 181 persons booked at the jail in the last four years who were illegal aliens who had already been deported and come back. It had some scary-looking Hispanic people's mugshots, and went into great detail about all the crimes attributed to these individuals.
Oh, and it broke down that 181 in 4 years figure for us: that's three or four a week! Jeesh! Wait, which is it, three or four? Let's see. 365 days in a year, so 1461 days in four, counting the leapyear. Or just under 209 weeks, so its... well, about one every 1.3 weeks. Looks like their key finding is a mathematical error. I wonder if Malkin -- yeah, she reported it too. I suspect this will wind up being the old game of conservative telephone. Someone, maybe Limbaugh or whoever, will report it as four a week and not give the underlying numbers. Then the next person will find a way to suggest it's more, and by the time they get done it will be ten a day. It all starts with this one error.
The article is pretty long. I confess I only skimmed most of it. I was looking for a little bit of counterpoint. You know, some viewpoint that doesn't look like it's been included to bolster a conclusion but just because it's a fact, even though all the facts might not line up with the same conclusion. I didn't really see it. I didn't really see what the rhetoric was that the article sought to prove not "exaggerated." All I really saw, frankly, was the type of one-sided shrieking about scary criminals and how they're really really bad. I know this is a little unfair since I didn't have the patience for the whole thing, but at least enough of the article is one-note that it can be fairly critiqued on this point. If there is another side presented, it was certainly not given prominent attention.
My biggest so-what about the article was that 181 doesn't seem like a lot anyway, even if you multiply it a lot. Last time I was arrested and booked at the jail, it was a zoo. As anyone familiar with the situation knows, jail booking is the central destination for arrestees in an area covering a population of roughly a million people. I found page 7 of the Sheriff's 2006 budget and found that booking processes roughly 50,000 people each year, which is like 140 a day. Over 4 years, 181 people constitute less than a tenth of one percent of the total.This should not have eluded our intrepid student reporters. We might all remember the story from six weeks ago (during the monthslong Frontpage investigation) about how the county was forced to pay out millions of jailees because they violated a consent decree by overcrowding the booking area. More than 13,000 people over a few years were subjected to this overpacking. (The ACLU has some more information not in the other article I linked to.) They sometimes had 300 people in the booking area, which is limited to 110, which is in fact around the planned average population according to the budget above.
Milwaukee has a substantial population of undocumented workers. I don't have the figures, but it strikes me that if they were as criminally inclined as the rest of the population, it would be hard to get a figure as low as 181. This suggests support for the theory that illegal aliens are, apart from the issue of their presence, more law abiding than the rest of the population because they seek to avoid encounters that could lead to deportation, not just encounters with authorities, but encounters with people who might provoke them or lead them into trouble as well.
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