Hey, folks. Two stories popped up on the news junkie radar yesterday, and got us thinking about Sheriff Jenkins “expertise” in a couple of key areas. When Jessica Fitzwater promoted the Human Trafficking Task Force, and the Frederick City Police Department took an active and engaged interest, but the Sheriff’s Department found it unnecessary (and Billy Shreve #neverforget said that some people are in favor of human trafficking) we developed a new awareness of this horrifying issue that our Fredneck Trump Train Faction seems so untroubled by. Oh, and Cindy Rose had some thoughts about that too, now that we recall. It was allegedly some sort of scam for teachers to get more training or something that makes covfefe amount of sense. How could you possibly look more foolish than dismissing the efforts to keep kids from being sex trafficked as an evil liberal teacher plot? But, you do you, crazies. Please proceed.

Well, yesterday The Washington Post had a story about a training program the Texas Department of Public Safety has launched to help officers recognize when they find a child who is being trafficked and what they can do to help. The officers down there have found it to be so helpful, they want to see it go nationwide! This is a fantastic story about good policing–please do follow the link. Isn’t it a wacky coincidence that this type of training was the exact reason cited for forming a task force locally? Is there some reason we wouldn’t be promoting good policing?

It’s incredibly disheartening to review the local discussions surrounding this issue. The more we learn about it, the more monstrous the ambivalence toward–or, more accurately, the hostility toward–acting to stop this seems.

But there’s more Texsplaining to do because another thing that we read yesterday in The Houston Chronicle deals with immigrants and crime. We’ve bristled before at our local “expert” on the border and what exactly would qualify someone on the Mason-Dixon border to act as a special adviser on these matters. Well, it seems that the quite well-known and esteemed conservative think tank, The Cato Institute, has research indicating that undocumented immigrants in Texas are less likely to commit crimes than native born Texans are. In the immortal words of Rick Perry, “Ewps.”

“Using data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, researchers from the conservative think tank Cato Institute found the arrest rate for undocumented immigrants was 40 percent below that of native-born Texans.” — Fernando Ramirez, The Houston Chronicle, March 6, 2018

Law enforcement officers in real border states uphold sanctuary policies as a tool to help them to solve crimes because it increases the reporting of those crimes and the cooperation of witnesses. It seems like The Cato Institute’s research suggests something in support of that thinking. Maybe we could learn a thing or two from people who have first-hand experience and research in support of their positions? Just a thought.