Remember the old days when fighting crime was about cops using their experience and training to grab up bad guys? That’s generally still how it works. The difference today is the increasing use of and reliance on machines and computers to catch criminals. Criminal databases and other innovations have proven valuable in terms of giving police a leg up, but some of the technological advances in law enforcement and other industries have a few kinks that need to be worked out.

You hear a lot of people talking about the fox guarding the hen-house. Putting the Fed in charge of the Wall St. bailout certainly comes to mind. But for an even more striking example, ask yourself this question: how do we know that the private guards supervising illegal aliens at private immigration lockups aren’t illegal immigrants themselves? According to Gene Johnson’s article for the Associated Press, the answer is simple: we just don’t know.

In Texas, McAllen police officers are not owed thousands of dollars in back pay for hours they spent on-call, a Hidalgo County jury ruled recently. Forty-four members of the city’s largest police union sued the city back in 2001, claiming officials should have paid them at the same rate as other municipal employees assigned to jobs that required them to come into work at a moment’s notice.

Law enforcement is facing the prospect of devastating cutbacks, and for some agencies, the axe has already begun to fall. Police patrolling the numerous parks on Long Island in New York have had their budget slashed 25 percent over the past five years, at the same time that crime is going up. The situation has gotten so bad that the cops themselves are speaking out about their concerns.