Talk:United States arrests 10,340 fugitives in first-of-kind nationwide sweep

No one seems to have any data on this story that wasn't provided as part of a press release from US law enforcement agencies. Is there a complete list of detainees anywhere? In a sweep this large, I have to imagine that mistakes were made, and some of these people are innocent, and yet everyone seems to be reporting the same "10,340 fugitives" jargon with the same examples of kiddie abusers and other easy PR wins. I'm not a tin-foil hat type normally, but this one kind of gives me the creeps. Ajs 22:00, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You are correct about the source being ultimately the law enforcement agencies themselves. It seems to me that with a large diverse group of law enforcement agencies, there is not really room for exaggeration or distortion of the number of usual arrests. Notably, one of the articles said that this is 10 times the number of arrests. So even without the "nationwide sweep", they normally scoop up, say, 1,000 fugitives a week. That is 0.1% of the total number of outstanding warrants, about 1 million. So it does not seem unrealistic. They were in this case particularly going after the "kiddie abusers" and whatnot, and "PR wins" does seem to have played a role. But it's still news, I think. DouglasGreen 21:29, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)