December is for Cynics

It is hard for me to decide what was the most cyn­i­cal abuse of a news story for polit­i­cal oppor­tunism this week:  do I choose the national story of Repub­li­cans wail­ing that the failed Christ­mas Under­pants Bomber was the President’s fault because he refuses to use the phrase “war on ter­ror” every day, or should I choose my local tiny-town story of pot­heads link­ing a vio­lent rape to police pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with chas­ing around pot­heads?  Oh let’s go for the local angle – you haven’t heard it before, it’s filled with lies and fool­ish­ness, and worst of all, they’ve abused the good name of polling!

Takoma Park, Mary­land is the self-styled “Berke­ley of the East,” a long­time bas­tion of lib­eral crank­i­ness and nuclear free-zones, pop­u­la­tion ~20,000, that hugs DC’s north­ern bor­der.  I spent 5 eye-opening months serv­ing on the City Coun­cil this year, but we’ll blog about that later.  It is absolutely the type of place where one would expect local scrun­gies to form TIME, Tako­mans for Intel­li­gent Mar­i­juana Enforce­ment, to keep the police depart­ment from harshin’ their buzz.  Fine.  Polit­i­cal advo­cacy and involve­ment is the heart of the Amer­i­can Dream for me, no mat­ter what the views.  I’ve started this blog pri­mar­ily to enlighten read­ers on the nuances of polling that are dif­fi­cult for a layper­son to inter­pret, and to call out abuse and mis­use of num­bers (I’ll never be able to keep up with it all, but there will always be some­thing to talk about) by the media, advo­cates, cam­paigns, and pretty much every­one else.  Start­ing in my own lit­tle micro­cosm is as good a place as any.

This arti­cle in the local paper gives me a lot to work with.

Ah, an exit poll on elec­tion day!  How sur­pris­ing that 70% of those asked sup­ported this state­ment:  “In order to focus police resources on vio­lent and prop­erty crimes, would you sup­port a local ordi­nance direct­ing police to stop arrest­ing peo­ple for pos­ses­sion of mar­i­juana for per­sonal use?”  I don’t need to spend a lot of effort point­ing out why this ques­tion is lead­ing, but I do want to stress that lead­ing ques­tions DO have their place – I use ‘em all the time.  The prob­lem comes when you do not rec­og­nize the bias(es) you are intro­duc­ing, and when you do not have the counter-measure of a “straight” up or down ques­tion asked before­hand.  What I really want to point out here is how many other things are wrong with this “infor­mal” poll.  Exit polls actu­ally have a method­ol­ogy to them –

–were respon­dents picked in a planned fash­ion, either every nth per­son com­ing out of the polls, or cer­tain quo­tas for age/gender of every nth person?

–were all exits and entrances ade­quately cov­ered, and records kept of how many peo­ple used each door and were inter­viewed at each door?

Resound­ing No’s to both – one table was set up at the main entrance, but there are as many as a dozen doors into the com­mu­nity cen­ter (only 1 polling place; if there were mul­ti­ples, this post would never end).  My favorite part is that they were clearly cherry-picking their respon­dents for peo­ple they thought would agree with them – I was eye­balled and passed by.  Cripes, am I really so old that I’m seen as a cer­tain ‘no” vote on mar­i­juana reform?  Tiny group, tiny minds – I would not be pick­ing on this lit­tle abuse of polling were in not for the jaw-dropping audac­ity of the sug­ges­tion that a vio­lent, rare-for-our-area sex­ual assault on a jog­ging path could have some­how been pre­vented if these folks got their way on mar­i­juana reform  – this piece of crass oppor­tunism wins my year-end Bah Hum­bug Award.  For the record, the Takoma Park Chief of Police has said over and over again that they do not pick folks up for sim­ple pos­ses­sion unless other crimes are sus­pected – after all, he under­stands that he’s got big­ger prob­lems to deal with every day.