There’s a great old saying from Mark Twain that should serve as an important reminder that numbers can be manipulated to support pretty much any conclusions we want them to.
“Figures don’t lie,” the author is credited with writing, “but liars figure.”
Were Twain alive today, he might apply that chestnut to the debate over Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
The arguments for and against the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act of 2010 devolved into a statistical tête-à-tête over crime, specifically the number of offenses committed by illegal immigrations in the state.
Border-Related Violence Takes Center Stage
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed the bill into law in April of 2010, suggested that “border-related violence and crime due to illegal immigration” were out of control.
“There is no higher priority than protecting the citizens of Arizona,” Brewer said at the signing ceremony. “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.”
Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona also weighed in.
"The violence is incredibly high. The human smuggling and drug cartels are at a level of violence where 25,000 -- 23,000 Mexican citizens have been murdered in the last few years, 5,000 already this year,” he said. “There’s a level of violence which has increased to a significant degree …”
And Arizona State Sen. Sylvia Allen, in an e-mail supporting the law, wrote of the illegal immigrants crossing the border: “These people are violent and they will kill anyone who gets in the way.”
“Federal prisons,” she continued, “have over 35% illegal's and 20% of Arizona prisons are filled with illegal's. In the last few years 80% of our law enforcement that have been killed or wounded have been by an illegal.”
Crime Claims Not Supported
Phoenix Police Department spokesman Sgt. Tommy Thompson told an Arizona Republic columnist that the percentage of Arizona police officers killed by illegal immigrants is actually 20 to 24 percent.
“As for injuries,” Thompson told the newspaper, “where does that number come from? You'd have to look at every single report.” He said he didn’t believe anyone had actually done that.
Furthermore, the number of violent offenses -- murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults -- fell in Arizona across the board from 2008 to 2009, according to preliminary data contained in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.
Statistics from Arizona’s Department of Public Safety support the decrease in violent crime. Other data from the Border Patrol suggest that illegal immigration, too, has fallen.
The Unknown
The FBI and Arizona reports do not provide details about how many crimes were committed by illegal immigrants. But authorities cited by The New York Times suggested the levels are nearly equal to their proportion of the Arizona population.
The Phoenix police chief told the newspaper that about 13 percent of his department’s arrests are illegal immigrants, roughly equal to the percentage of illegal immigrants in the local population. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, on the other hand, reported that 19 percent of its inmates are illegal immigrants.
What conclusions can you draw from such data?
None, really. Doing so would just prove Mark Twain right.