Alisyn Camerota v Newt Gingrich: Just the facts, Ma'm

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
--H.L Menchen




Just the facts, m'am.

--Detective Lt. Joe Friday

Listening to Alisyn Camerota trying to interview Newt Gingrich, I was amused to see her try to get across a point about facts, which Gingrich, who is much more sophisticated than she, deftly turned to his own advantage.

She was pressing him on Donald Trump's claims we are far less safe now than before President Obama came to office, that our cities are now horror shows rife with murder and mayhem.

"But the facts show that's not true," Camerota protested, "All the statistics show our cities are much safer."

"Well, but that's not how our citizens feel," Gingrich rejoined.

"But it's the fact."

"I'll take their feelings over your theorizing," Gingrich replied.

What got Camerota so worked up is she had done her homework, had read all the relevant studies from sources in the government and academia all of which support the idea that our cities are far safer than they were a decade ago, with respect to violent crime.

What Gingrich was saying is I does not believe these sources. He does not believe them because he doesn't want to believe that, because Donald Trump is running on fear, but there is also, truth be told, something to say for his skepticism.

"Statistics don't lie," we are told, but the interpretation of those statistics surely can.

Anyone who watched "The Wire" will know that crime statistics can be massaged--rapes can be downgraded to simple assaults, robberies to disorderly conduct. About the only thing that can't be faked is murder, because there's a body, but even then, a found body can be ruled "natural causes" when in fact it was a homicide.

There was one particularly hilarious story line in which the police hierarchy panicked when one of their detectives discovered where all the missing persons had gone--their bodies had been stacked up in abandoned row houses but the top brass did everything it could to prevent the uncovering of these bodies and the opening of these houses,  because the discovery of forty bodies would wreck the improved murder rate they had hoped to brag about. It ruined their statistics, gave lie to their myth that good police work had resulted in a drop in the crime and murder rates.

As Howard Colvin, the intrepid and upright police major remarked, "Statistics done ruined this job."  He knew statistics could be massaged, manipulated and "facts" rearranged.

This is all part of the argument that the elites control the government and academia and you can't trust anything that comes out of them. Or, as the Donald would say, "It's all lies."

Of course, the ultimate absurdity of the police statistics effort was the underlying belief was that police could prevent crime, could somehow prevent neighborhood drug gangs from murdering each other, could stop some fourteen year old with a gun from shooting another fourteen year old because he had insulted his sneakers.

When the mayor or the chief of police promises a reduction in the murder rate, he is saying with tough law enforcement we can bring the murder rate down, when in fact, the police are powerless to prevent murders; they can only investigate murders. The reasons for the basic truth of this require real understanding of real complexity, the sort Alisyn Camerota cannot get by spending two hours reading documents from the Department of Justice or papers from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. For that understanding, Alisyn would have to watch at least three seasons of "The Wire."


The problem with the Gingrich/Trump approach, of course, is when you totally abandon the effort to gather information, to understand how numbers are collected and then analyze the meaning of those numbers, you descend into the dark ages of belief and "what I feel."  From grade school onward, we try to teach our children, our future citizens how to construct an argument, and that begins with gathering evidence, then progresses to analyzing evidence. Donald Trump's admirers have always been frustrated by that, never been good at it because it requires a modicum of memory, some basic reading skills and the willingness to consider what you "feel" may actually not be real or true.