So Much for Duck Hunt
Jul 13th, 2009 | By Michel Marizco | Category: General News, Immigration, Politics
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THE BORDER REPORT
As far as border enforcement ideas, it was amongst the most hare-brained; set up web-cams along the Texas border and let citizens log in and report any illegal activity they saw. 
It reduced what should have been a serious issue, monitoring a border gone awry, into a perversion of Neighborhood Watch; a fine mess we'd all be in if they'd pointed those damned things north.
And now, like so many other intervention programs by governments that should have had little say anyway, I want to know where the money went.
According to an internal report obtained by the El Paso Times, Gov. Rick Perry's border watch cameras have eaten up a few million dollars and showed few results.
The newspaper reports the camera system's operators, the Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition, received a $2 million federal grant last year but only erected 17 of the promised 200 cameras. Meanwhile, 125,000 looky-loos, or "virtual Texas deputies" as they were called (and you can bet someone somewhere wears that title with pride), called in eight drug busts and eleven arrests. Frankly, I'm a little surprised they were able to call in even that many. And I'm really surprised they called in 300 illegal migrants.
The dirty little secret behind the governor's campaign is the stats. Taking their lessons from the Homeland Security Department, the coalition revised its goals so that the low numbers actually looked like they'd topped their less than lofty ambitions. Love it, yes I do. Instead of 200 cameras, they claimed they only wanted 15; and instead of the projected 1,200 arrests, they rewrote their goals list to say they wanted only 25.
Not that raw ineptitude is stopping anyone. It'd be no fun if it did. Instead, the governor's office plans to ask for another $2 million to give it another go next year. Governor spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger offers up this beaut: "The bad guys know there are an extra pair eyes on the border." The virtual cameras were a terrible idea right from the start. They make the very idea of border enforcement seem clownish; a buffoonery. But there's serious questions that need to be asked. If the coalition only purchased 17 cameras and were budgeted for 200, where'd the rest of the money go? It wasn't that long ago that the Government Accountability Office paid a visit to Texas for another group of cameras, the $239 million Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System's pole cameras that were found lying on the ground outside a storage shed in Naco, Ariz. That investigation led nowhere; turned out later that Democratic Congressman Silvestre Reyes' daughter was the vice-president of the company who won the contract to set those up. By that standard, a $2 million contract is chump change. But my guess is that a little bit of snooping around would turn up someone's pockets stuffed with a nice bit of change.
