The truth about misassigned paternity

Marlene Zuk

June 20, 2010

Father's Day inspires sentimental cards, tacky neckties, cheap aftershave and, at least in some circles, suspicion and doubt. What if the child you think is the fruit of your loins actually sprang from someone else's seed?

With DNA tests now widely available, so-called paternity fraud has become a staple of talk shows and TV crime series. Aggrieved men accuse tearful wives who profess their fidelity, only to have their extramarital affairs brought to light. Billboards in Chicago and other cities provocatively ask, "Paternity questions?" and advise that the answers are for sale at your local pharmacy in the form of at-home DNA paternity tests. Some fathers'-rights groups in Australia have called for mandatory paternity testing of all children at birth, with or without the mother's consent or even her knowledge.

And people are pretty well convinced there is a need for all this vigilance. When asked to estimate the frequency of misassigned paternity in the general population, most people hazard a guess of 10%, 20% or even 30%, with the last number coming from a class of biology undergraduates in a South Carolina university that I polled last year. I pointed out that this would mean that nearly 20 people in the class of 60-some students had lived their lives calling the wrong man Dad, at least biologically. They just nodded cynically, undaunted. Even scientists will quickly respond with the 10% figure, as a geneticist colleague of mine who studies the male sex chromosome found when he queried fellow biologists at conferences.

But the truth, insofar as we can tell, is much less sensational. According to the most unbiased research, the real incidence of misassigned paternity in Western countries hovers around 1%, with a few studies pushing that number to 3% or nearly 4%. That's one-tenth as common as the conventional wisdom has it. It appears that we humans are more honest, monogamous and faithful than we think. So what's behind all that lack of faith in the family?

Not surprisingly, when you press people for the source of their conviction, they rarely have anything much except a notion to offer. They "heard it somewhere," or (in the case of the scientists) are "sure it was in a paper published awhile back."

Unbiased studies are hard to find, because most people undergo paternity testing only if they have a reason to suspect a discrepancy between the purported father and the genetic one. Using data from the companies that sell the at-home tests, for example, is certain to yield an overestimate of misassigned paternity.

A handful of medical studies that get around this problem do exist. Most of them gathered information on the parents of children with genetic disorders like Tay-Sachs disease or cystic fibrosis, in which the child has to inherit a copy of the defective gene from both parents to show the disease. When large numbers of families are surveyed for such research, a certain proportion of fathers turn out not to have the gene that their purported child inherited, thus yielding the figures of 1% to 3.7%. Higher numbers, particularly the often-cited 10%, seem to come from more biased samples, or, more likely, simply turn out to be an urban legend, akin to cellphones being able to pop popcorn. (Ironically, one of the paternity testing services advertises on snopes.com, an Internet myth-busting site that will cheerfully disabuse you of the notion that the "Taps" melody came from a scrap of paper in the pocket of a dying Civil War soldier.)

Australian sociologist Michael Gilding thinks we believe in all that duplicity because we've been influenced by pop evolutionary psychology, which emphasizes the gains our (male) ancestors would have made by sowing their seed far and wide. I'm not so convinced, simply because that class in South Carolina, for instance, was pretty shaky on the basics of evolution, let alone its application to modern psychology. Maybe we're all too aware of infidelity and assume that accidents must often happen. And yet, even if people are fooling around in large numbers, the data show they are also taking the paternity of their children seriously — men are still getting matched with their own offspring, even if women change partners.

So take heart, fathers. When 96.3% of you open that tie with the soccer ball print, or sniff that acrid cologne, you can rest assured that at least it came from your very own flesh, blood and DNA.

Marlene Zuk is professor of biology at UC Riverside and author of the forthcoming "Sex on Six Legs."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-zuk-paternity-20100620,0,5791482,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Human Rights Defenders Seek Protection in Mexico

MEXICO CITY — With a drug war raging around them and an unreliable judicial system in place, Mexico 's human rights activists have their hands full as they grapple with a growing new class of victims: themselves.

“I'm not going to be silenced,” insisted Silvia Vázquez Camacho, an activist from Tijuana, who is now in hiding after receiving a series of threats on her life in recent months. Despite her bold declaration, the fear in her voice was palpable, and she acknowledged that she had been forced to take a respite from her activism.

Mexico has a long history of cases in which the authorities, whether they wear badges or business suits, trample on the rights of the powerless. Acknowledging that, the government 20 years ago created a formal commission to officially identify violations and recommend — but not order — remedies. Citizens groups also rose up, however, to level the playing field and represent victims of wrongful arrests , torture, illegal land grabs and numerous other transgressions.

But the system is being severely tested by what human rights activists say is a concerted attack on their rights. The new reality is that activists now devote a considerable portion of their time helping other activists, who have been threatened or far worse.

“No one is protecting us,” said Juan Carlos Gutiérrez Contreras, director of the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights. “Human rights activists should be able to do their jobs. And we don't just want protection. We want the government to investigate the threats.”

Amnesty International , in a recent report, outlined 15 cases of threats against Mexican human rights activists in recent years scattered across the country. Although there are no precise tallies, human rights groups say that the number of activists who have been improperly singled out by the police, soldiers and government officials is in the dozens.

In one of numerous new cases on file with Mexican human rights organizations, Ms. Vázquez and another woman, Blanca Mesina Nevarez, recently fled Tijuana because they feared that their lives were in danger as a result of their work. The two activists had been representing 25 police officers who had accused Mexican security forces of torturing them in early 2009 to force them to sign confessions saying that they were taking bribes. The activists suspect that a group of rival Tijuana police officers are the ones threatening them.

The more vocal the activists were in raising the torture allegations, the more intense the response. First there were threatening phone calls. Then police cars began turning up outside their homes and trailing them around the city. After Ms. Mesina testified at a hearing in Washington last fall of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a man in a mask approached her and threatened to kill her.

Alarmed by the intimidation, the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights recently took on the case of the Tijuana activists, calling on the Mexican government to beef up its protection measures for the two women, before it is too late.

For some, like Raúl Lucas Lucía, it already is. Mr. Lucas defended the rights of indigenous people in the state of Guerrero until he was abducted by three men who claimed to be police officers in February 2009. “Keep quiet or we'll kill your husband,” Mr. Lucas's wife, Guadalupe Castro Morales, was told in a phone call from someone who reached her on her husband's cellphone. “This is happening to you because you're defending Indians.”

Mr. Lucas's body and that of a colleague, Manuel Ponce Rosas, were found seven days later. The case remains unsolved.

“Do you think you're so brave?” a man in a car yelled at Obtilia Eugenio Manuel, the founder of an indigenous rights organization, also in Guerrero, in another case compiled by Amnesty International. The man added, “If you don't go to prison, we'll kill you.”

She also received three death threats by text message on her cellphone, one of which warned her that no human rights group could save her. Responding to her case and those of other activists in Guerrero, the international human rights commission, which is part of the Organization of American States , called on the Mexican authorities to provide her and dozens of other activists with protection.

In another case, Cristina Auerbach Benavides, who campaigned on behalf of the families of 65 miners who died in a coal mine explosion in 2006, was confronted more than once at her home in Mexico City by men who claimed to be police officers. The incidents occurred when the bodyguard assigned to her by the Mexico City government was off duty.

“Mexico is a dangerous country in which to defend human rights,” said the Amnesty International report, which noted that there were many more cases in the files of the country's numerous human rights groups.

Activists working on cases connected to the drug war are particularly vulnerable because drug trafficking organizations, and their many accomplices in police forces and governments, show little tolerance for criticism.

To be sure, human rights workers are by no means the sole targets. Crusading journalists have been silenced by shadowy gunmen. Politicians and police officers who dared confront organized crime have lost their lives over it.

President Felipe Calderón has defended his government's human rights record and described his antidrug offensive as an effort to protect the human rights of all Mexicans against powerful criminals.

“Obviously we have a strong commitment to protect the human rights of everybody, the victims and even of the criminals themselves,” he said last August in Guadalajara, with President Obama at his side, when questioned about human rights. “And anyone who says the contrary certainly would have to prove this — any case, just one case, where the proper authority has not acted in the correct way.”

Human rights activists say they have stacks of cases. And they say that there is ample reason in Mexico to take death threats seriously.

In Ms. Mesina's case, after she returned from Washington, she was followed by a mysterious black pickup truck with tinted windows and no license plates. She drove her car into a parking lot to get away, and that is when a man dressed in black got out, with his face covered, and approached her.

“ ‘This is the last time I'm going to warn you to stop filing complaints in Tijuana,' ” she recalled him saying in a stern warning that was laced with expletives. “If I don't kill you now it's to avoid a scandal around the elections and because your case is already known internationally.”

Ms. Mesina, who became an activist to help free her father, who is one of the jailed Tijuana officers, and his colleagues, took the last part of that threat as form of encouragement. More attention on the case, she said, might make it harder to kill her.

But Nik Steinberg, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who does work in Mexico, expresses some doubt. “One wonders, if the government will not even protect defenders whose cases have attracted international intention, who will it protect?” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/world/americas/20mexico.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Anti-Hate-Crime Video Offers Unsettling Lesson

James Warren is a columnist for the Chicago News Cooperative.

The audience attending an international music festival in Millennium Park offered mostly pro forma applause Thursday evening for a brief announcement of winners in an online video contest. It's too bad there wasn't time for the assembled to watch the winning entries, including the $20,000 grand-prize recipient, “1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim.”

It's the five-minute effort of both Anida Yoeu Ali, a Cambodian Muslim performance artist who came to Chicago when she was 5, and Masahiro Sugana, her video producer-husband, who as a teenager came here from Japan. The video features a fictional poet, dancer, angel and prisoner speaking out against anti-Muslim hate crimes by repeating the jarring essence of incidents around the country.

Freeway signs declaring, “Kill All Muslims.” Assaults on South Asian Sikhs, Egyptians, Spaniards and bagel store owners mistaken for Muslims. Citations of nasty incidents in suburban Bridgeview and Collingswood, N.J. A man pushing a stroller past a mosque and yelling, “You Islam mosquitoes should be killed.” There are more.

The “1700%” alludes to a national increase in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate crimes after the Sept. 11 attacks. The video is unsparing and short of uplifting, but effectively unsettling, concluding with spare words across the screen: “Look at what you've done ... because we refuse to end the violence.”

The videos are the next stage in a Chicago experiment — One Chicago, One Nation — to create greater understanding of a Muslim population estimated as high as 6 million in the United States, with the largest number, perhaps 400,000, in the metro area. The endeavor is backed financially by George F. Russell Jr. of Tacoma, Wash., founder of a billion-dollar investment-services firm best known for the Russell 2000 stock index.

Mr. Russell was moved by the events of Sept. 11 and joined in a worthy effort by the Chicago Community Trust , San Francisco-based Link TV and two other Chicago groups, the Interfaith Youth Core and the Inner-City Muslim Action Network . Mayor Richard M. Daley was at Saturday's announcement by the groups of 100 “community ambassadors” to lead gatherings in various forums and help oversee $200,000 from Mr. Russell to spur interfaith cooperation.

The other video contest winners are atmospherically very different and more hopeful than “1700% Project.” In particular, there's the $5,000 documentary category winner, “ Eyes Manouche ,” by Ratko Momcilovic of Chicago.

It opens with a reminder of the awful 1990s wars in the former Yugoslovia. It succinctly details the respective ethnic hatreds via comments from three Chicago immigrants: Serbian Nikola Dokic, Croatian Robert Palos and Bosnian Adis Sirbubalo. Mr. Momcilovic is a Croatian-born Serb.

Recalling those bloody times before he immigrated, one of them said, “All of a sudden, they put some kind of label on you.” Another said, “You can't hate one nation, only one individual.”

The viewer doesn't know until late in the five minutes that these three men are now bound together. They're members of Eyes Manouche, a band playing Balkan gypsy music.

The video then cuts to them performing, with Mr. Palos and Mr. Dokic on guitars and Mr. Sirbubalo on accordion, interspersing the thoughts of the other two band members, Andrew Vogt, the bass player, and Daniel Crane, the drummer, both native Americans.

“The music transcends boundaries,” one said in the rousing finale.

The project's leaders briefly surfaced at the festival — “Dandana: A Celebration of Muslim Voices” — at the Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park.

“We're now moving onto the main stage, getting to a larger cross section of Chicago,” said Terry Mazany, president of the Chicago Community Trust. (The Community Trust has contributed to the Chicago News Cooperative .)

“We're elevating the narrative of pluralism, with the storytellers of pluralism,” said Eboo Patel, an India-born Muslim and former Rhodes scholar who heads the Interfaith Youth Core and is chairman of President Obama 's interfaith task force. “The ambassadors will be the conversation leaders, changing the conversation from conflict to possible cooperation.”

I met the big winners, Ms. Ali, 36, and Mr. Sugano, 38, who won a second category for a total haul of $25,000. She just graduated from the School of the Art Institute , but that was after a 13-foot-by-9-foot mural on the same topic of hatred was defaced while hanging in an exhibition at the school. Somebody circled the words, “Kill All Arabs.”

“The police didn't seem to believe it was a hate crime,” Ms. Ali told me. But Thursday brought some consolation. “This has all been a redemptive experience,” she said.

It won't take you long to check out the winners at linktv.org/onechicago . That might be redemptive, too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/us/20cncwarren.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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‘Smart on Crime' Mantra of Philadelphia Prosecutor

PHILADELPHIA — The new district attorney in violence-weary Philadelphia had vowed not to get tough on crime but to get “smart on crime.” This month, R. Seth Williams began to make good on his word, downgrading penalties for possessing small amounts of marijuana from jail time to community service and fines.

It was an easy decision, said Mr. Williams, who took office in January promising changes that would reduce prosecutions but increase the conviction rate. Now he also spends hours each week visiting schools, exhorting students to graduate.

Philadelphia, after being battered for years by the worst sort of superlatives — the highest murder rate, the lowest conviction rate — seems ready to give Mr. Williams and his ideas a chance.

“This is like a breath of fresh air,” said Ellen Greenlee, chief of the city's public defenders, who described the previous district attorney's approach to charging suspects as “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.”

Mr. Williams, the first black district attorney in the history of Pennsylvania, is a 10-year veteran of the office he is now shaking up. He looks younger than his 43 years and is happy for junior staff members to call him Seth.

In private and public appearances, Mr. Williams repeats practiced lines from a justice-reform movement that has taken hold in places like New York, San Diego and San Francisco and promotes, for lesser offenders, community courts and drug treatment rather than trial and prison.

“Crime prevention is more important than crime prosecution,” he said repeatedly last week as he rode from one event to another. “We need to be smarter on crime instead of just talking tough.”

“I've put my money where my mouth is,” he added in an interview, by redirecting his overstretched resources toward a more careful selection of cases and starting a computerized study of prosecutions to see why they so often fail.

But the real test of public support for Mr. Williams's new directions, Ms. Greenlee and other legal experts said, may come if there is a surge in high-profile killings or the killing of a police officer by a repeat offender. Violent crime has fallen here in recent years, but of the 10 largest cities in 2009, Philadelphia still had the highest murder rate.

“We need to focus on the people who are shooting people,” Mr. Williams said of the newly lenient penalties for marijuana. Senior court officials said the shift would avoid 4,000 costly trials a year.

The only public condemnation came from Mr. Williams's predecessor, Lynne M. Abraham, who during 18 years as district attorney sounded an increasingly hard line on crime. Ms. Abraham criticized the new marijuana policy, saying that “the drug cartels who import pot from Mexico are thrilled.”

While the drug shift caught the public eye, legal experts said the changes Mr. Williams was making, especially in the unit that decides what charges to file against those who are arrested, are far more important.

Previously, the charging unit included five lawyers, usually junior lawyers who were encouraged to file the widest and harshest charges they could, Mr. Williams said. Now the unit has 18 more experienced lawyers, who spend time considering what charges can realistically succeed. The office is also offering plea bargains earlier in the process, again to clear the courts for more serious cases.

“The new D.A. is one part of a sea change that is occurring in criminal justice in Philadelphia,” said Seamus P. McCaffery, a State Supreme Court justice.

The drive to streamline the justice system became easier, Mr. Williams and Justice McCaffery said, after an investigative series by The Philadelphia Inquirer last December found that the city had failed to obtain convictions in two-thirds of cases involving violent crimes, and that thousands of cases were dismissed because prosecutors were not prepared or witnesses did not appear.

Ms. Abraham, the former district attorney, who is now in private practice, called the articles misleading and said it was wrong to “do justice by the numbers.”

On one recent morning, Mr. Williams spoke to loud applause at the high school graduation at Freire Charter School.

“Why am I spending time here?” he asked. “Of the 75,000 people arrested each year for crimes in Philadelphia, what is the one thing they have in common? They didn't graduate from high school.”

He described his own origins, saying they could easily have left him a street thug. When he was born in 1967, he went from the hospital to an orphanage; he does not know anything about his biological mother and said he was not interested in learning.

He spent time in two foster homes before being adopted, at 18 months old, by a middle-class black couple whom he credits with instilling a sense of civic duty. His father was a schoolteacher who also worked evenings at a recreation center, and his mother was a secretary.

As he congratulated the graduating seniors, he told them about a personal failure: He got into West Point , but had to leave in his first year when he failed math and chemistry.

He switched to Pennsylvania State University , where he was elected head of the Black Caucus and then the student government. He attended Georgetown Law School and started as an assistant district attorney under Ms. Abraham. Chafing at what he saw as a dysfunctional system, he resigned to run against her, unsuccessfully, in 2005.

The Philadelphia district attorney's office was a stepping stone for the likes of Senator Arlen Specter and Gov. Edward G. Rendell , but Mr. Williams declined to speculate about his future.

Eugene J. Richardson Jr., one of the legendary Tuskegee airmen of World War II and a retired school principal, said he hoped the changes sought by Mr. Williams would pan out, adding, “So often the new broom comes in and then gets stuck in a corner.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/us/20philly.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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On Border Violence, Truth Pales Compared to Ideas

When Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, announced that the Obama administration would send as many as 1,200 additional National Guard troops to bolster security at the Mexican border, she held up a photograph of Robert Krentz, a mild-mannered rancher who was shot to death this year on his vast property. The authorities suspected that the culprit was linked to smuggling.

“Robert Krentz really is the face behind the violence at the U.S.-Mexico border,” Ms. Giffords said.

It is a connection that those who support stronger enforcement of immigration laws and tighter borders often make: rising crime at the border necessitates tougher enforcement.

But the rate of violent crime at the border, and indeed across Arizona, has been declining, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation , as has illegal immigration, according to the Border Patrol . While thousands have been killed in Mexico's drug wars, raising anxiety that the violence will spread to the United States, F.B.I. statistics show that Arizona is relatively safe.

That Mr. Krentz's death nevertheless churned the emotionally charged immigration debate points to a fundamental truth: perception often trumps reality, sometimes affecting laws and society in the process.

Judith Gans, who studies immigration at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona , said that what social psychologists call self-serving perception bias seemed to be at play. Both sides in the immigration debate accept information that confirms their biases, she said, and discard, ignore or rationalize information that does not. There is no better example than the role of crime in Arizona's tumultuous immigration debate.

“If an illegal immigrant commits a crime, this confirms our view that illegal immigrants are criminals,” Ms. Gans said. “If an illegal immigrant doesn't commit a crime, either they just didn't get caught or it's a fluke of the situation.”

Ms. Gans noted that sponsors of Arizona's controversial immigration enforcement law have made careers of promising to rid the state of illegal immigrants through tough legislation.

“Their repeated characterization of illegal immigrants as criminals — easy to do since they broke immigration laws — makes it easy for people to ignore statistics,” she said.

Moreover, crime statistics, however rosy, are abstract. It takes only one well-publicized crime, like Mr. Krentz's shooting, to drive up fear.

It is also an election year, and crime and illegal immigration — and especially forging a link between the two — remain a potent boost for any campaign. Gov. Jan Brewer 's popularity, once in question over promoting a sales tax increase, surged after signing the immigration bill, which is known as SB 1070 but officially called the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.

No matter that manpower and technology are at unprecedented levels at the border, it may never be secure enough in Arizona's hothouse political climate when Congressional seats, the governor's office and other positions are at stake in the Aug. 24 primaries.

It took the Obama administration a few weeks to bow to that political reality and go from trumpeting the border as more secure than it had ever been to ordering National Guard troops to take up position there — most of them in Arizona, Mr. Obama assured Ms. Brewer in a private meeting — because it was not secure enough.

Crime figures, in fact, present a more mixed picture, with the likes of Russell Pearce , the Republican state senator behind the immigration enforcement law, playing up the darkest side while immigrant advocacy groups like Coalición de Derechos Humanos (Human Rights Coalition), based in Tucson, circulate news reports and studies showing that crime is not as bad as it may seem.

For instance, statistics show that even as Arizona's population swelled, buoyed in part by illegal immigrants funneling across the border, violent crime rates declined, to 447 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2008, the most recent year for which comprehensive data is available from the F.B.I. In 2000, the rate was 532 incidents per 100,000.

Nationally, the crime rate declined to 455 incidents per 100,000 people, from 507 in 2000.

But the rate for property crime, the kind that people may experience most often, increased in the state, to 4,082 per 100,000 residents in 2008 from 3,682 in 2000. Preliminary data for 2009 suggests that this rate may also be falling in the state's biggest cities.

What is harder to pin down is how much of the crime was committed by illegal immigrants.

Phoenix's police chief, Jack Harris, who opposes the new law, said that about 13 percent of his department's arrests are illegal immigrants, a number close to the estimated percentage of illegal immigrants in the local population. But the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, which runs the jail for Phoenix and surrounding cities and is headed by Joe Arpaio , a fervent supporter of the law, has said that 19 percent of its inmates are illegal immigrants.

Scott Decker, a criminologist at Arizona State University , said a battery of studies have suggested that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes, in part because they tend to come from interior cities and villages in their home country with low crime rates and generally try to keep out of trouble to not risk being sent home.

But he understood why people's perceptions of crime might lag behind what the statistics show. “Hard as it is to change the crime rate, it may be more difficult to change public perceptions about the crime rate, particularly when those perceptions are linked to public events,” Mr. Decker said.

He added, “There is nothing more powerful than a story about a gruesome murder or assault that leads in the local news and drives public opinion that it is not safe anywhere.”

Kris Kobach , a University of Missouri law professor who helped write the Arizona immigration law, pointed to crimes like a wave of kidnappings related to the drug and human smuggling business in Phoenix, something Ms. Brewer herself noted when she signed the law.

Although the reports have dipped in the past couple of years, the police responded to 315 such cases last year.

“That's scary to people, and people react to that all over the state,” Mr. Kobach said. “They are concerned. ‘That might happen in my part of the city eventually.' ”

Terry Goddard, the state attorney general, who does not support the immigration law, said the drop in violent crime rates might not reflect the continued violence, often unreported, that is associated with smuggling organizations.

Mr. Goddard said he doubted that the immigration law would put a dent in the smuggling-related crime that grabs attention in the state. For that reason, Mr. Goddard, who is running to be the Democratic nominee for governor in the primary, said he backed the deployment of National Guard troops and supports increasing manpower and spending on police and prosecutor anti-smuggling units.

Brian L. Livingston, executive director of the Arizona Police Association, said he would prefer more attention on the border, too. But until then, he said, laws like Arizona's are necessary.

“We know the majority of people crossing across are not criminal, but unfortunately some criminal elements are embedded with them,” he said, adding, “Governor Brewer gets that.”

As Ms. Brewer put it just after signing the bill: “We cannot sacrifice our safety to the murderous greed of drug cartels. We cannot stand idly by as drop houses, kidnappings and violence compromise our quality of life.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/us/20crime.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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Amid a growing national angst about illegal immigration, Americans keep hearing a chorus: Secure the border first. Then talk about immigration reform.

The idea appeals to public sentiment, and it seems like a simple demand.

But what do pundits and politicians mean?

Is a border secure only when no one crosses illegally and when no contraband slips through?

If some permeability is acceptable, what is the tolerable amount?

Political leaders mostly dodge those questions, and for good reason: Anyone with a minimal knowledge or understanding about the nearly 2,000-mile swath of land between Mexico and the United States realizes that requiring a secure border establishes an impossible standard.

One reason: There is no way to conclude success because authorities have no idea how many undocumented immigrants are getting through. Authorities can count only the number of unauthorized intruders captured. Such unavoidable uncertainty prevents any absolute assurances that no one is sneaking over, making declarations of victory impossible.

Another reason: The motivation and creativity of those trying to get across.

Impoverished Mexicans, willing to gamble their lives and savings to reach America, subject themselves to desert heat and extortion or torture by coyotes. Drug runners risk being caught and imprisoned or getting killed by competitors.

So the smugglers dig tunnels, create false compartments, bribe border guards, fly ultralight planes and use every means imaginable to get over, under or across the line. The more security there is, the higher the smuggling price and the greater the profit incentive.

Here is another way to consider the problem: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a leader in the anti-immigration movement and acclaimed as America's toughest sheriff, cannot secure his own jails. Every year, despite armed guards, electronic locks and video monitors, inmates smuggle drugs in from the outside and sometimes even escape.

No one would blame Arpaio. All penal institutions, regardless of security measures, have breaches. Yet imagine if America adopted a position that no new laws could be passed regarding prison reform "until the nation's jails are secure."

Tom Barry, director of the Transborder Project at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., said the demand for a completely secure border is a ploy by those opposed to immigration reform to prevent new policies.

"No matter how much enforcement you have, there will always be people coming through," he said. "Since that is true, opponents to immigration reform will always be able to say the border is still not secure . . . and therefore we cannot pass immigration reform."

At some point, the question becomes: How much border enforcement is necessary? Or enough?

David Shirk, director of the Transborder Institute at the University of San Diego, said the United States has more federal agents deployed along the Mexican line than at any time in the past century.

"It seems to me the argument can be made that we've gone as far as is reasonable," he said. "The border will never be secure enough for some people. . . . Politicians are using the idea of the border as a phantom menace and establishing an unreachable goal."

For the past decade, critics have complained that the U.S. government does little or nothing to stem the flow of undocumented intruders.

"Our nation's border security efforts are a litany of failure," Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., wrote in a recent commentary for the congressional newspaper The Hill . "Ultimately, Congress must fix our broken immigration laws. . . . But we cannot address that difficult task until we, as a nation, control our own borders."

While the success of America's border enforcement may be questioned, historical data reflect an escalation of effort:

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in April, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the Southwest border is "as secure now as it has ever been." Challenging the sincerity of lawmakers who demand security, she asked, "Will it ever be reached as far as Congress is concerned, or will that goal post continue to be moved?"

Still, amid a decade of record spending on enforcement - increases that began under Republican President George W. Bush, who twice tried and failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform - America's estimated illegal-immigrant population increased from 8.5 million to 11. 9 million. The vast majority of the immigrants came from Mexico.

Apprehensions of illegal crossers in the desert began to decline only in the past few years, as the nation's economy and job market collapsed. In 2009, Border Patrol agents arrested 550,000 undocumented immigrants on the Southwestern border, though that is considered a fraction of the total slipping through. Drug seizures continue to increase, though it is unclear how much of that reflects increased trafficking and how much is a result of improved enforcement.

Amid the ebb and flow of statistics, the calls for tighter border security continue.

But public understanding is stymied by simplistic notions of border dynamics and geography.

Those unfamiliar with the vast border zone have little sense of its challenges or the creativity of trespassers. Many ignore the value of the millions of legal crossings each year, the vital importance of legitimate trade and the fact that border crime is a two-way street.

According to Alonzo Peña, deputy assistant secretary of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, each year $19 billion to $29 billion from illegal-drug and human trafficking is smuggled from the United States into Mexico, where it is used by drug cartels to finance their violent operations. Only $200 million gets seized. As part of controlling the border, the southward flow of cash and arms also must be stopped.

Gustavo Mohar, Mexico's intelligence chief, shakes his head at the idea of securing such a huge swath, an area exceeding 100,000 square miles.

"The correct word is 'managing' a border," he said. "You cannot close it."

Even the U.S. Border Patrol does not set its sights on complete security. Instead, its mission is to establish "operational control," a term defined by Congress as the prevention of all unlawful U.S. entries.

This year, Border Patrol claimed success along 894 miles of boundary, less than half of the Mexican line, or about one-tenth of the nation's land and sea perimeter. Even in sectors that are supposedly under control, Border Patrol records show, smugglers and illegal immigrants get through by the thousands.

Some anti-illegal-immigration groups acknowledge that fully securing the border is a pipe dream.

"I couldn't, if you held a gun to my head, tell you it could ever be done 100 percent," said Bill Davis, director of Cochise County Militia, a group of armed civilians who patrol Arizona's southern flank. "If you can cut it down from 100,000 (illegal entries) to two people, great."

Davis, who advocates a doubling of manpower and technology, said a border is controlled when agents monitoring surveillance cameras and sensors receive no more than one alert per night.

No matter how many federal troops and agents are on patrol, no matter how many sensors, cameras and fences are employed, many will try to sneak across the border, and some will succeed.

Each time that happens, opponents of immigration reform will be able to declare that the line is not defended, that America is not safe.

They appeal to patriotism, asking why the world's most powerful nation cannot protect its sovereign boundaries.

They appeal to fear, suggesting that terrorists potentially could mix in with the daily swarm of Hispanics heading north for opportunity.

Public passion is so high, said the Transborder Project's Barry, that no one does a cost-benefit analysis of border enforce- ment.

"Everybody is jumping on the border-security bandwagon, including moderate Democrats," Barry said. "It's not driven by anything real on the grid, not by violence or invasions of illegal immigrants . . . not based on any real assessment of threats to the nation."

The rhetoric is magnified by fears that Mexico's explosive cartel violence may bleed over the international line. In fact, FBI and Arizona records show crime is dramatically down statewide and along the border. Murders in Arizona decreased by one-fifth last year; aggravated assaults dropped nearly 9 percent.

Those numbers provide little consolation to southern Arizona residents weary of undocumented immigrants and armed drug couriers traipsing across their properties. Still, the statistics contradict claims of a cri- sis.

"I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse," said Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik. "Well, the fact of the matter is, the border has never been more secure."

At the Washington, D.C.-based Federation for Ameri- can Immigration Reform, press secretary Bob Dane described border enforcement without reform as "a fool's para- dise."

FAIR presses Congress to impose rigid immigration limits, opposing an amnesty program or an increase in the number of work visas.

Dane said most of the nearly 12 million illegal immigrants came to America for work, so there is a simple policy change that would force them out: Require employee verification and crack down on businesses that hire undocumented workers.

"Simply declaring the border is secure without workplace enforcement is like putting locks on the door with a sign that says, 'The jewels are all yours if you can find a way in,' " Dane said. "The jobs magnet is the reason folks come and the reason they stay."

Susan Ginsburg, senior policy adviser for an international nonprofit known as Borderpol, which works to make international borders safer, said it is a mistake to require border control as a prerequisite for changing U.S. policies because the existing system created a broken border in the first place.

"Comprehensive immigration reform will help because it will make the border more manageable," she said.

Michele Wucker, executive director of the World Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said border incursions happen wherever two countries have unequal economies or black-market trade.

Wucker, author of "Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong," said those who demand a sort of iron curtain prior to policy change are obstructionists: "It means don't ever come up with a workable system."

Arizona has the most to gain from a new policy paradigm, Wucker argued, because the status quo made the state a thoroughfare for smuggling. Yet the state's political leaders, caught up in a wave of public opinion, no longer press for reform.

"When I see John McCain saying, 'Build the dang fence,' I'm very sad," Wucker said. "Arizona would benefit more than any other state from immigration reform at a national level. They're really cutting off their nose to spite their face."

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/06/20/20100620border-security-arizona.html

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From the Associated Press

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NJ city leading way in crime-fighting technology

By DAVID PORTER

Associated Press Writer

EAST ORANGE, N.J. (AP) -- This city of 65,000 has fought one of the nation's highest crime rates in recent years with an arsenal of high-tech gadgets, from gunshot detection systems to software that can sift and analyze crime data almost instantaneously.

The results have been startling: Violent crime in East Orange has fallen by more than two-thirds since 2003, according to state police statistics.

Yet even with its crime rate plummeting, the city is going a step further by becoming the first in the country to combine those systems with sensors, sometimes called "smart cameras," that can be programmed to identify crimes as they unfold. East Orange police say the overall system can trim response time to mere seconds.

Doubters, meanwhile, question whether the effect on crime justifies the price tag.

Jose Cordero was hired as East Orange's police director in 2004 after overseeing the New York Police Department's anti-gang efforts. Crime in East Orange had dropped off after the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 90s but then rose dramatically in the early 2000s as gangs began to put down roots.

A firm believer in the power of technology, Cordero said he developed a database in his spare time so the department could track and analyze crime data instead of waiting for paper reports to be collated.

Other upgrades followed, among them a wireless computer system for all patrol cars; video surveillance cameras in high-crime areas; a virtual community patrol system for residents to report crimes via text message; a grid showing patrol cars' locations, and a gunshot detection system that tracks the source of shootings.

The entire network has cost $1.4 million, of which $1.1 million came from grants and forfeiture funds, according to Cordero. Some companies donated time and equipment in the early phases, East Orange Mayor Robert Bowser said.

"We knew what the city had been doing for 20 years and we knew what had worked and what hadn't worked," Cordero said. "There was a community resolve that things could change, and should change."

The sensors, which work in concert with surveillance cameras, are designed to spot potential crimes by recognizing specific behavior: Someone raising fist at another person, for example, or a car slowing down as it nears a man walking on a deserted street late at night. Each new crime recorded is programmed into the database.

"They know what is normal behavior," said Tarik Hammadou, whose Australian company, Digisensory Technologies, makes the sensors. "And when there is abnormal behavior like an assault, we annotate it and say to the sensor, 'This is an assault,' so the sensor will always remember the pattern."

When the sensor raises an alert, an officer sitting in the department's nerve center can zoom in on images to see if a crime is in progress. A computer program sends the information to a laptop in the patrol car nearest to the scene. The whole process takes seconds.

"We can almost be in two places at the same time," said detective Reginald Hudson, a 17-year veteran. "I can sit here and watch the cameras in another location and maintain a presence right here."

Hammadou said the sensors aren't in regular use by law enforcement agencies beyond East Orange. Consequently, there is little research available on their efficiency.

That hasn't deterred skeptics from weighing in. Dennis Kenney, a professor of criminal justice at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the sensors can pick up so many innocuous actions - someone lining up behind an ATM user, for instance - that the system could be overloaded.

"You'd be constantly watching every ATM because you'll have so many false positives," he said. "Then to make up for it you would have to screen out so many things, and that defeats the purpose. It's a novel idea, but the technology just doesn't support it."

While sensors like the ones used in East Orange will speed response time, "there's little evidence that increasing the rate of information going to the cars will make a big difference unless the cars are driving faster," said Peter Scharf, a public health professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, who co-authored a study of gunshot detection systems used in the Virginia cities of Hampton and Newport News.

Nevertheless, Scharf cites the case of D.C. snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo as an example of how sensors could have taken existing pieces of information - the description of a car, a pattern of behavior, a type of weapon - and alerted law enforcement to a shooting about to happen.

"You would have had them dead to rights," he said.

The camera system helped East Orange police catch a suspected car thief recently, spokesman Darryl Jeffries said. A pursuing officer's report of a stolen Jeep automatically activated a "virtual perimeter" of cameras trained on the area, providing other patrol cars information they used to apprehend the suspect soon after.

Privacy rights advocates have criticized the increasing use of surveillance cameras in urban areas. In New Jersey, the American Civil Liberties Union consulted with Newark when the city began installing traditional surveillance cameras two years ago, and is keeping an eye on developments in East Orange, ACLU New Jersey director Deborah Jacobs said.

Cordero said publicity about his department's technological advances has had the dual effect of making residents feel safer while letting criminals know they're being watched.

"The value of technology is not the might it brings to law enforcement, though that's important," he said. "If we continue to influence the criminal mindset, I think it will balance out."

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HIGH_TECH_POLICING?SITE=TXBEA&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

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