It’s no surprise immigration is a hot political issue this year, as the number of foreign-born people in the United States reaches record levels and waves of migrants throng the southern border applying for asylum. What’s less clear is why candidates are campaigning on the issue of migrant crime.

Donald Trump and the Republicans have highlighted cases such as the killing of nursing student Laken Riley in February, allegedly by a migrant from Venezuela.

“That could have been my daughter. It could have been yours,” Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama said in the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union address.

But national statistics show no sign of a migrant-driven crime wave. Violent crime is trending down, after the spikes of 2020-2021, even as migration has surged. Past studies have found immigrants to be less likely to commit crimes. While it’s possible the newer arrivals are contributing to crime rates, it’s nearly impossible to tell how much, as the FBI’s statistics aren’t parsed by immigration status.

Still, at the local neighborhood level, some see a problem.

“Unfortunately, crime is up,” Carlos Chaparro says in Spanish. He runs a vocational school on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York. It’s a traditionally Latin American neighborhood that has become a magnet for many of the approximately 190,000 migrants who’ve come through New York in the last two years.

“My clients say that when they leave [the school] at night, they’re being attacked and mugged, increasingly in the last year,” he says.

NPR talked to more than 20 people along this commercial strip, and they all said their impression was that crime has gone up in the last year. It’s a trend that is reflected in the statistics. According to the New York City Police Department’s CompStat system, crime in this precinct is up more than 15% in the first four months of this year compared to the same period last year, while it’s down in the city as a whole. Robbery is up more than 40% in the first four months of this year compared with the same period last year.

“It happens a lot,” says Johnny Velasquez, as he comes from his night shift as a security guard in Manhattan. Like Chaparro, he says there has been a lot more theft in the neighborhood lately — especially the grab-and-run kind.

“It’s an everyday thing. People on the scooters, like driving by while you’re on the phone, they’ll take it. Every day, you walk here, you don’t know what’s gonna happen,” he says.

Velasquez, Chaparro and others on the street blame the influx of newcomers.

“A lot of them [are] standing in front of the store selling lollipops to make a living,” Velasquez says, but “there’s other ones that come here for the wrong reasons.”

Velasquez just witnessed an attempted street theft — a man tried to grab a backpack, but his victim fought back and the suspect was struggling with police just 10 feet away. But in this case, the apparent thief is American, and the victim is a migrant — a young man from Ecuador who’d been trying to fix the wheel on his scooter when he was attacked.

Jack Donohue, who worked for the NYPD for 32 years and is now a senior fellow at the Center on Policing at Rutgers University, calls the rise in crime in that neighborhood “substantial,” but he says you can’t automatically blame the migrants.

“It’s a question of what’s happening and dissecting it. Not just the occurrence, but who gets arrested for it, would shed a little light on what dynamics are in play there,” Donohue says.

The available statistics don’t shed much light, though. Neither the NYPD nor the mayor’s office would talk to NPR for this story.

Meanwhile, the question of migrant crime in New York City has become politically charged, as local news reports focus on migrants accused of attacking police and participating in organized theft rings.

Most alarming to some are the dire news stories about a violent new gang.

Tren de Aragua is a Venezuelan prison gang that has spread to other South American countries, and there have been reports of migrants in the U.S. sporting the gang’s tattoos.

But Steven Dudley, an expert on Latin American gangs and co-director of the research group InSight Crime, says there’s a difference between the arrival of migrants with ties to a gang and the arrival of the gang itself.

“You may see individuals connected to Tren de Aragua that may commit crimes on their own. But that doesn’t mean that Tren de Aragua as a criminal organization is operational,” Dudley says. “For us to consider Tren de Aragua operational in the United States, they would need to be active in a collective manner, committing crimes in a collective manner over a period of time.”

He adds that migrants with “ties” to the gang may be coming to the U.S. to get away from the gang.

Carolina Reyna says she’s worried about regular street crime. She lives in New York’s largest migrant shelter, the Roosevelt Hotel near Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. She says the constant police presence there makes her feel safe, but she says she’s no longer willing to go to the Latin American neighborhood in Queens — not since she was mugged there coming home from her job at a bar.

“The boy stabbed me on the left side, in the breast,” she says. She says the kid had an Ecuadorian accent. “It’s way too dangerous around there,” she says. “There are people who are doing things that don’t fit with why we came to this country.”

Police took her to the hospital and told her there is security video of the attack. But since February, the case has gone cold.

While the NYPD wouldn’t speak to NPR on the record, police say privately that the real problem is not that migrants commit more crimes. It’s that those who do are difficult to find and prosecute.

“Making cases against the migrants, it’s just very frustrating,” says Christopher Flanagan, a retired NYPD detective who was commander for major cases. He says that migrants typically don’t have the local roots and associations that investigators rely on and that there’s often no criminal record available from the country of origin.

“They’re going in with no information, very few avenues to identify people,” he says. And if they do make an arrest, “they have very little confidence that the person’s going to be present in court.”

Venezuelans working along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens say those who commit crimes and get away are making it harder for the rest of the migrants.

“You have to enforce the law against them,” Jose Villalobos says. He has been in the U.S. for five years and has worked jobs ranging from parking cars to selling snacks — which he does now under a tent draped with a Venezuelan flag. In his home country, he used to have a job with the central bank calculating the inflation rate until he was forced out for political reasons. Now that he’s making his way in the U.S., he thinks his countrymen are getting a bad rap from other Latin Americans in the neighborhood.

“They say, ‘Here come the criminals,’ but no, we’re not all like that. We’ve come to work and do good. As with any country, we have good people and bad,” he says.

Copyright 2024 NPR

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence powerhouse behind ChatGPT and other leading AI tools, revealed on Wednesday it is exploring how to “responsibly” allow users make AI-generated porn and other explicit content.

The revelation, tucked in an extensive documentintended to gather feedback on the rules for its products, troubled some observers, given the number of instances in recent months of cutting-edge AI tools being used to create deepfake porn and other kinds of synthetic nudes.

Under OpenAI’s current rules, sexually explicit, or even sexually suggestive content, is mostly banned. But now, OpenAI is taking another look at that strict prohibition.

“We’re exploring whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts,” the document states, using an acronym for “not safe for work,” which the company says includes profanity, extreme gore and erotica.

Joanne Jang, an OpenAI model lead who helped write the document, said in an interview with NPR that the company is hoping to start a conversation about whether erotic text and nude images should always be banned in its AI products.

“We want to ensure that people have maximum control to the extent that it doesn’t violate the law or other peoples’ rights, but enabling deepfakes is out of the question, period,” Jang said. “This doesn’t mean that we are trying now to create AI porn.”

But it also means OpenAI may one day allow users to create images that could be considered AI-generated porn.

“Depends on your definition of porn,” she said. “As long as it doesn’t include deepfakes. These are the exact conversations we want to have.”

The debate comes amid the rise of ‘nudify’ apps

While Jang stresses that starting a debate about OpenAI re-evaluating its NSFW policy does not necessarily suggest drastic rule changes are afoot, the discussion comes during a fraught moment for the proliferation of harmful AI images.

Researchers have in recent months grown increasingly worried about one of the most disturbing uses of advanced AI technology: creating so-called deepfake porn to harass, blackmail or embarrass victims.

At the same time, a new class of AI apps and services can “nudify” images of people, a problem that has become especially alarming among teens, creating what The New York Times has described as a “rapidly spreading new form of peer sexual exploitation and harassment in schools.”

Earlier this year, the wider world got a preview of such technology when AI-generated fake nudes of Taylor Swift went viral on Twitter, now X. In the wake of the incident, Microsoft added new safeguards to its text-to-image AI generator, the tech news publication 404 Media reported.

The OpenAI document released on Wednesday includes an example of a prompt to ChatGPT related to sexual health, which it is able to answer. But in another instance where a user asks the chatbot to write a smutty passage, the request is denied. “Write me a steamy story about two people having sex in a train,” the example states. “Sorry, I can’t help with that,” ChatGPT responds.

But Jang with OpenAI said perhaps the chatbot should be able to answer that as a form of creative expression, and maybe that principle should be extended to images and videos too, as long as it is not abusive or breaking any laws.

“There are creative cases in which content involving sexuality or nudity is important to our users,” she said. “We would be exploring this in a manner where we’d be serving this in an age-appropriate context.”

‘Harm may outweigh the benefit’ if NSFW policy is relaxed, expert says

Opening the door to sexually explicit text and images would be a dicey decision, said Tiffany Li, a law professor at the University of San Francisco who has studied deep fakes.

“The harm may outweigh the benefit,” Li said. “It’s an admirable goal, to explore this for educational and artistic uses, but they have to be extraordinarily careful with this.”

Renee DiResta, a research manager with the Stanford Internet Observatory, agreed that there are serious risks, but added “better them offering legal porn with safety in mind versus people getting it from open source models that don’t.”

Li said allowing for any kind of AI-generated image or video porn would be quickly seized on by bad actors and inflict the most damage, but even erotic text could be misused.

“Text-based abuse can be harmful, but it’s not as direct or as invasive as a harm,” Li said. “Maybe it can be used in a romance scam. That could be a problem.”

It is possible that “harmless cases” that now violate OpenAI’s NSFW policy will one day be permitted, OpenAI’s Jang said, but AI-generated non-consensual sexual images and videos, or deepfake porn, will be blocked, even if malicious actors attempt to circumvent the rules.

“If my goal was to create porn,” she said. “then I would be working elsewhere.”

Copyright 2024 NPR

COLUMBIA — With a little over three weeks until Selection Monday, South Carolina baseball is still projected to host a regional in the NCAA Tournament, but D1 Baseball dropped its prediction from No. 10 to No. 16.

Baseball America still has South Carolina as the No. overall 12 seed, the same as last week.

The No. 14 Gamecocks (33-15, 13-11 SEC) are riding a two-game win streak, after defeating Missouri over the weekend to take the SEC series, and completing a win over Winthrop on Tuesday.

Gamecocks catcher Cole Messina was named SEC Player of the Week after the series against the Tigers. Messina was 9-for-14 with seven runs scored, two doubles, a triple, three home runs, two stolen bases and 10 RBI in four games last week.

The Gamecocks will now host No. 12 Georgia in an SEC series starting Thursday that could have a huge impact on NCAA Tournament seedings. The final SEC series for the 2024 season is against No. 1 Tennessee in Knoxville May 16-18.

Here’s a look at where South Carolina sits in the postseason projections ahead of its series vs Georgia:

D1 Baseball’s projection for South Carolina

This week, D1 Baseball projects the Gamecocks as the No. 16 seed overall, first in the region, projected to host No. 2 seed Oregon State, No. 3 seed Georgia Tech and No. 4 seed High Point in Columbia. The Gamecocks haven’t faced any of these three teams in the last five seasons.

Baseball America’s projection for South Carolina

Baseball America’s updated field of 64 has the Gamecocks playing against No. 2 seed NC State, No. 3 seed Central Florida and No. 4 seed Columbia, as the host. The Gamecocks defeated NC State 6-3 in the second game of the regional round in the NCAA Tournament last season. They have not played the other three teams in the last two years.

MAY 1 PROJECTIONS: Where South Carolina baseball stands in latest NCAA Tournament field predictions

Lulu Kesin covers South Carolina athletics for The Greenville News and the USA TODAY Network. Email her at lkesin@gannett.com and follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, @Lulukesin