Roundup: Homeland security, privacy, trooper vacancies and Mexican cartels

Here are few, disparate items that merit Grits readers' attention:

Mexican cartels in Texas
241 cartel operatives have been arrested in Texas since 2009, DPS Col. Steve McCraw told the Transportation and Homeland Security Committee this morning. He said cartels inside Mexico are using "terrorist tactics" for criminal operations, but not yet on the US side. He mentioned a point Grits has emphasized before, that cartels have "leveraged" Texas prison gangs for use as assassins and smugglers inside Mexico, reinforcing the fact that most of the real "spillover" so far has gone southward.

Chronic trooper vacancies at DPS
McCraw also told the committee the Department of Public Safety will be down to 280 vacancies after its next recruiting class, down from 340 right now. He said the biggest problem was recruitment, with low wages compared to other law enforcement agencies like Austin or Plano.

Lege raid on victim compensation funds leaves it drying up
The Crime Victim Compensation Fund is headed for insolvency, the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee was told yesterday, after the Legislature raided the fund in 2011 to balance the budget. Said Daniel Hodge of the AG's office, "Short-term stability and long-term viability are at risk now."

On sentencing and job prospects
A former Texas FBI agent received a downward sentencing departure in his federal criminal case because the judge felt he was additionally punished by the effects of a criminal conviction on his future job prospects, declaring, “Your life is pretty much ruined in terms of any law enforcement job.” Isn't that true of pretty much everybody with a felony conviction?

Sunset: Voters wanted ethics, not just disclosure
Editorialized the Austin Statesman, "Since its creation, ... the Ethics Commission has not referred a single ethics investigation to prosecutors and has mostly levied relatively small fines for failure to properly file financial disclosure statements and other similar paperwork." Sunset staff put it bluntly: "The people of Texas had every reason to believe they were getting an ethics agency when they voted for the constitutional amendment creating the Texas Ethics Commission in 1991. They did not vote for a Disclosure Filing Commission and likely would not have done so."

When the rent comes due: Homeland security edition
The feds have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on homeland security equipment of all stripes for local government over the last decade. Now, notes the Tennessean, the burden shifts to cities and counties to pay for the equipment's upkeep.

What proportion of the public commits crimes?
In New York City's massive stop and frisk program, about 12% of police encounters resulted in arrests or summons, reported New York magazine, which implies that about 12% of the public at any given time may be breaking the law. I mention it because Grits was interested a couple of years ago to see data from a drivers license and insurance checkpoint in San Angelo that one in 6 drivers stopped were ticketed or arrested. What does it say about Americans that 12-16% of the public are breaking the law if you stop them more or less randomly on the street? Does it say more about the "criminals," or the government? As a corollary, it reminds me of a question I heard posed some years ago by a now-forgotten source: If it were possible to construct a machine capable of enforcing every law on the books at all times and punishing everyone who broke them, would you build it? Could we even afford to?

Protecting privacy: Beyond the Constitution
Most legal privacy protections in federal law arise from statutes, not Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, and scholar Erin Murphy has helpfully compiled and analyzed those statutory provisions, noting that "at least four Supreme Court justices recently suggested in United States v. Jones that the proper scope of privacy protection might be a topic better left to legislatures than courts." Her article seeks to answer the question, "what does the federal statutory approach to regulating privacy from the police look like, and in what ways does that mimic, overlap with, or differ from the Fourth Amendment constitutional approach?"

Being Human, 2012
Slightly off topic, but I watched the opening segment on "Perception and Sensations" from the Being Human 2012 conference online yesterday and it was fascinating. See the full array of presentations here. See a summary of the talk from The Thoughtful Animal.