Now there are two more recent examples of law-enforcement agents on the border in hot water for violent encounters with illegal aliens — specifically Edwards County, Texas, Deputy Sheriff Guillermo “Gilmer” Hernandez and an unidentified Border Patrol agent in Arizona. When you add these to the recent cases of Border Patrol agent David Sipe, whose federal “civil rights” conviction was recently thrown out, and imprisoned agents Jose Compean and Ignacio “Nacho” Ramos (profiled here by America’s Most Wanted), you can see why one of the Border Patrol union locals says on its website “Do your job, go to jail!”

It may be true that some of the more enthusiastic immigration hawks are are taking Compean and Ramos’s side uncritically. Any large law-enforcement effort is going to result in lots of charges of excessive force, almost all of them lies by criminals, but a few of them clearly true, and some of them gray areas. The question — and I really don’t know what I think — is are there more incidents of excessive force along the border than elsewhere, say in the inner city? Are the border cases more likely to result in findings against the officers than in big cities? This certainly seems to be the case (and this administration has no credibility whatsoever in arguing otherwise), but there must be quanitative measures of such things — incidents per man-hour, etc. Does anyone know of a rigorous examination of this kind of thing?