I had wondered, when I attended the Stephenville (Erath County) debate the other night where Miller came up with the 60 percent drop in crime at the border. AUDIO of his immigration comment- I see the answer via Burnt Orange from the El Paso Times; Perry made it up, through fuzzy math, for political reasons.

Stunning borderwide drops in crime that Republican Gov. Rick Perry last week attributed to state border security efforts are more likely campaign calculations than accurate statistics, according to experts and some law enforcement officials.

In news conferences and campaign television commercials last week, Perry lauded state-led border security operations he said reduced crime 60 percent borderwide and kept Texans safe from terrorism.

But Perry's top homeland security official acknowledged that the numbers used to calculate the average crime decrease do not prove a sustained drop in crime from El Paso to Brownsville, do not include crime rates in major border cities, and do not account for other possible reasons for the decrease

Uh. HOW is that a 60 percent drop when you don't even evaluate whether it continued after an operation and when it seems that when the drop in crime happened (as it would DURING an operation)it surged somewhere else?

To come up with the 60 percent drop in crime Perry touts, state homeland security officials averaged together declines in several counties from operations that happened at different times over a four-month period.

To gauge the results of their efforts, McCraw said, sheriffs compared crime data from the time of the surge operation to crime reports from the same time last year.

The sheriffs calculated drops ranging from 25 percent to more than 70 percent in all crime, including vandalism, rape and murder.

"The measurement was only at the time we were conducting the operations," McCraw said.

He said there was no statistical evaluation of whether crime remained low after the operations. But, McCraw acknowledged, there was evidence that when law enforcement surged in one area, criminals surged in other areas

In the article, it mentions two other important factors-one is that crime in some of those parts was already going down anyway BEFORE Operation Rio Grande, and secondly, the major border cities, like El Paso, Laredo, Brownsville, Harlingen, and McAllen weren't part of any state border security operations, even though those cities represent half the population from a 32 county area. (And the cities have received ZERO dollars for border security)

And what about Perry's claims about protecting the US from terrorist from secured borders?

West Point national security and terrorism professor Margaret Stock said she was skeptical of any claims about programs reducing terrorist threats on the U.S.-Mexico border.

"A terrorist does not have to be a foreigner coming in across the border. A terrorist could be a U.S. citizen," she said, referring to the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

She referred to a recent study by the nonpartisan Washington-based Nixon Center that indicates terrorists are more likely to enter the United States through legal channels or through Canada than to sneak over the Mexican border.

Surge operations like the ones in Texas, she said, also tend to have the consequences of simply delaying planned crimes or pushing criminals or would-be terrorists to other areas.

"Then what have you accomplished?" she said.