Reliable measurement, program evaluation, and institutional memory: The Border Patrol’s new national strategy

ways in which categories of data were defined and reported.  In short, apprehension rates, agency “outputs,” were a totally inadequate measure of the status of security along our national borders.

In 2004 the Border Patrol declared in its “new” national plan which would henceforth measure its progress in border security not just in terms of apprehension rates, but by the vaguely defined “operational control” of our borders.

Unfortunately, by 2010 the Border Patrol could only claim 13 percent “operational control” of all our borders.  So what did the Border Patrol do when faced with such a low performance score?  It simply declared that “operational control” was not an adequate measurement and returned to apprehension rates as its “interim” method of measuring both its institutional efficacy and the status of our nation’s borders.

Then, on Tuesday, 8 May 2012, the Border Patrol officially revealed to Congress that it was working on a “new” measurement of border security.  This measurement would be the product of a brand new methodology, still in the development stages, which was “quantified.”

Apparently arriving at such a number describing performance is very difficult to do, so the Border Patrol is going to have to spend several additional years developing this measurement.  In the meantime, the “interim” measurement employed to measure the success of the Border Patrol’s newest national strategy, along with the measurement of the our border security, will remain the same old annual apprehension rates of illegal aliens and illegal drugs.

No one in Congress on Tuesday, 8 May, questioned the Border Patrol’s dedication, hard work, good intentions, and challenging tasks.  But following the Border Patrol’s projected time line, it is a reasonable question to ask why, after more than a decade since 9/11, the Border Patrol has not been able to develop an accurate measurement of its efficiency and progress in border security given its huge increase in budget.

So it is not surprising, given these circumstances, that institutional memory completely failed Border Patrol Chief Agent Michael Fisher at the Tuesday Congressional hearing:  Fisher forgot to mention his agencies ICAD, ICAD II, ICAD III, ISIS, the American Shield Initiative, the Secure Border Initiative, SBI TI, the SBI Systems Integrator, and Boeing’s contract for a virtual wall, all failed projects in establishing border security. And let’s not forget, as Fisher did, the most recent boondoggle extravagancy: Raytheon’s Advanced Spectroscopic Portal Program.

It is reasonable for the public to demand an accurate measurement of the progress the Border Patrol is making in national security along our borders. Changing measurements from apprehension rates to operational control, then back again to “interim” apprehension rates in lieu of the arrival of a promised new metric, smacks of the same historical promises of a Systems Integrator, a virtual border fence, or a phantasmagoric machine which, for more than $500 million, can discover a dirty bomb in an 18-wheeler.

Yet history reminds us, even if the Border Patrol won’t, that this agency is not in dire need of another new technological fix that has not yet been developed, whether it’s the latest surveillance gadget or now a trendy management strategy accompanied by a theoretical enumeration.  What the Border Patrol vitally needs, along with all our members of Congress, is an adequate measurement of Border Patrol performance which, placed within an historical context, allows anyone to fairly and consistently judge the progress of this vital law enforcement agency regardless of which party holds power.

Instead, what we may likely see from the Border Patrol is a multi-million dollar quagmire metric generated by a one-of-a-kind software package premised upon the Border Patrol’s same old unreliable data, apprehension rates.  Or, worse still, an opaque metric which is classified so the public has no idea what it really measures or leaves out.  But as we all know by now, garbage in, garbage out.

Lee Maril is a professor of Sociology at East Carolina University and the director of its Center on Diversity and Inequality Research. Maril has authored six books on the border including The Fence, his most recent work which focuses on the government’s continuing efforts to build a virtual and physical fence along the southwestern border. He blogs at LeeMaril.com.