Or down, we were winning. We had no other way to explain it. This isnt to suggest we werent seceding intermission. Border patrol had to have consistent and reliable data. Not simply data on what we were catching, we also had to report data on what we were not catching and the unknown. Today the Border Patrol does not describe the borders as controlled or uncontrolled. Instead it uses a variety of indicators, capability assessments, commander judgment to assign areas of risk category of high, medium and low. The Border Patrol also evaluates these risks to ensure they are based on current risk. In closing, i will leave you with a few thoughts here that became evident as we wrote these articles and i spoke with dozens of agents representing thousands of years of Border Patrol experience. Border security is not an end state to be achieved and revisited every five or ten years. Rather, its a constant battle we fight every day and one which we must be vigorously engaged. There is also no pan
We developed a preliminary set of risk indicators to analyze elements of risk along our border and evaluate the progress we were making amin relation to our goals. Before 2012 if you asked a Border Patrol agent if we were winning, he would say absolutely, and he would point to the number of arrests and seizures to show you that. Regardless of whether they went up or down, we were winning. We had no other way to explain it. This isnt to suggest we werent seceding in our mission, we just had no way to tell if we were succeeding along our border. So the Border Patrol had to build a foundation of consistent and reliable data on crossborder occurrences. Not only on data of what we were catching, we also had to record data on what we were not catching and the unknown. Today the Border Patrol does not describe the border as controlled or uncontrolled. Instead it uses a variety of indicators, intelligence estimates, capability assessments, commander judgment to assign areas with risk category