State of Wednesday: THE FALSE POSITIVE FALLACY

Sorry, folks, the data is clear on ICE and policing

Jul 08, 2026

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Greetings, Dear Reader,

There’s a lot going on. The cars have passed by, the goals have been drug back out, and Trump has declared the war with Iran back on. Platner is who we thought he was. The shock!

But when everyone zigs, I’m going to zag.

I’m sure you’ve encountered the false positive fallacy recently.

Before we get to that, however: Are you … sick … of paying high health insurance rates because unhealthy people abuse the system.

You should check out America’s HealthShare!

Use code STATEOFTHEDAY and get your first month free.

Take Back Your Healthcare

THE FALSE POSITIVE FALLACY

It’s a common refrain: “One is too many.”

In its most basic application, it’s a call for reinvigorated policy or increased support. One hungry child is too many. One homeless veteran is too many. In this form, it’s assumed figurative. Nobody really expects to house every mentally ill veteran by year’s end. They just want a bigger effort.

In its most mentally ill form, “one is too many” operates as a rhetorical set of brakes. Its use is tantamount to ending a policy altogether, so we can “reform” or, in extreme cases, “abolish.”

One unarmed black man shot by police is too many.

That was the most recent and most pernicious deployment of OITM political cudgel. It had disastrous results, starting with a national political platform that posited, with all seriousness, abolishing the police.

Citing peer-reviewed studies on the resulting Ferguson Effect – in which police pulled back from problem neighborhoods, either due to lack of will or resources – I asked Claude to estimate the excess murders and violent felonies that occurred in the following years.

“If you want a defensible range to cite: something like 150–900 excess homicides and tens of thousands of excess felonies/assaults, concentrated in specific cities following high-profile incidents,” it concluded.

A helluva range, but confounding factors abound. One of the studies hedged the numbers by saying maybe 25% of that excess could be confidently attributed to the Ferguson Effect.

So the one-is-too-many crowd that howled over George Floyd and Jacob Blake ended up contributing to the homicide deaths of somewhere between 40 and 275 people, and whatever 25% of “tens of thousands” of other victims is.

Not a good outcome. And you know what they say about history repeating, right?

A nearly identical trend is happening today with immigration, and the numbers are similar.

Renée Good. Alex Pretti. Like Floyd and Blake, the degree of their culpability in their particular outcome is highly debatable. It’s also irrelevant for my purposes.

Following their deaths, the one-is-too-many crowd pounced. We need to suspend ICE operations. We need to suspend deportations.

Years after the “Ferguson Effect,” when the damage was already done, Harvard professor Roland Fryer did a study that almost got him fired. “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” concluded that there were no racial differences in lethal police shootings.

He knew the conclusion would cause a stir. So he did the whole study over again. Same outcome.

If you were to take Fryer’s empirical approach further by analyzing total police interactions versus lethal shootings, you’d find that fewer than 1 in 45,000 police interactions result in a fatal shooting, based on the 2022 Bureau of Justice Statistics numbers. That’s .00022%.

But how many of those shootings were justified and how many were “false positives” that could feasibly get the “not even one” crowd roiled?

City Journal did an analysis of the 118 “unarmed” slayings of black men The Washington Post tracked between 2016-2024. Of those, they concluded that 51 were attacking police officers or other civilians at the time they were shot; 11 made a threatening movement while holding a visible weapon; and 18 made a movement that officers or others perceived as threatening.

The other 38 might have been unjustified. Given the amount of police interactions along the same timespan – an estimated 385 million – that means one in ten million might result in an unjustified slaying.

But why is all that relevant! Renée and Alex are dead, and that’s not to mention the Americans who are enduring Fourth Amendment violations!

The numbers on both accounts are almost identical.

Based on a GAO review covering ICE deportation operations from FY2015-FY2020, the agency arrested roughly 674 potential U.S. citizens, detained 121, and removed 70. With an annual “administrative arrest” rate of ~150,000 during that timespan, that means that for every 1,000 interactions, less than one false positive (arrest/detain/deportation) occurred if we conceded “potential” for actual.

If we went further, and constricted actual false positives to ultimate deportations, that number shrinks to ~0.000466%.

It reads to me like in both cases, domestic policing and ICE detentions, American law enforcement is operating at a highly efficacious level, does it not?

The degree to which mass media acts as a reality distortion machine cannot be overstated.

Recall the graph published in a Skeptic Research Study in 2021 in which roughly half of liberal or very liberal people overestimated the amount of unarmed black men killed by police in 2019 by several orders of magnitude.

By the way, the real number was 13.

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Say, for sake of argument, the liberals in your local cohort stick to their “one is too many” argument guns. Let’s apply that to the entire government.

Do we abolish, defund or halt operations for any other agency for a single false positive?

Do we do that for welfare or daycare or healthcare fraud? Imagine we applied that to literally any other liberal sacred cow.

About 7-8% of yearly medicare expenditures is false positives, i.e. fraud. The entire nanny state would need to be halted, reformed, abolished.

I can hear libertarians the world over jumping for joy at such a notion.

But, Geoff, that’s not punitive like an arrest or detention? Who is the aggrieved party?

The US taxpayer.

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The sad thing about the “false positive” fallacy is it works, especially in tandem with reality distortion from mass media.

So and so’s mom who is on a green card got deported to Mexico. Renée Good floored the gas and got shot in the head. My beloved local baker is on her way back to El Salvador.

The only thing I can say in response is to stick to your own guns.

In 99.99% of cases, these agencies are upholding the laws as written. For the good of America, they should ignore the hysterics and keep going.