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jpak

(41,757 posts)
Fri Jul 14, 2017, 11:29 AM Jul 2017

Jeff Sessions used our research to claim that sanctuary cities have more crime. Hes wrong.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/07/14/jeff-sessions-used-our-research-to-claim-that-sanctuary-cities-have-more-crime-hes-wrong/?utm_term=.1da00ceb5601

On Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech in Las Vegas on sanctuary cities and local law enforcement. He announced, “According to a recent study from the University of California, Riverside, cities with these policies have more violent crime on average than those that don’t.” Almost certainly, the reference is to our study, which we first published here at the Monkey Cage in The Washington Post last October and later in the academic outlet Urban Affairs Review.

The attorney general’s summation of our study, however, is not true. In fact, our study suggests a different conclusion: Municipalities that chose to designate themselves as sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants experience crime rates no higher than they otherwise would. We state this clearly throughout our study.

How could our findings have been so misrepresented? Although we do not know for sure, it is possible that Sessions’s speechwriters at the Department of Justice based this inaccurate characterization on an article published on Fox News or an article published on World Net Daily.

In the WND article, the author mischaracterized and repackaged our findings. She simply ignored the statistical uncertainty underlying our analyses — something loosely akin to ignoring the margin of error in polling. She then claimed that sanctuary cities had higher crime rates than non-sanctuary cities, ignoring the fact that these differences were not large enough to be statistically significant. This erroneous conclusion contributed to an increasingly popular but inaccurate narrative that sanctuary cities — and their immigrant populations — are dangerous.

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Jeff Sessions used our research to claim that sanctuary cities have more crime. Hes wrong. (Original Post) jpak Jul 2017 OP
WND, Faux awesomerwb1 Jul 2017 #1
Let's face it SHRED Jul 2017 #2
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