crime Archives - Page 9 of 10

Biden’s Flint Fiasco, Continued

October 23, 2011

Murder, rape and robbery are declining in spite of police layoffs in Flint, Mich. — according to the most recent official report released by the State Police. Those and other reported “index” crimes were down 11.5 percent overall during the first six months of this year, compared with the same six-month period last year.
We’ve continued to dig into the statistics for crime-ridden Flint because we caught Vice President Joe Biden misrepresenting them repeatedly as he argued for passage of the administration’s jobs legislation.

Biden’s Whopper in Flint, Mich.

October 20, 2011

Joe Biden falsely claimed on multiple occasions that the number of reported rapes in Flint, Mich., has skyrocketed since 2008 — providing different accounts at different events that do not square with FBI data.

GAO Report: U.S. Source For “Large Portion” of Mexican Crime Guns

June 19, 2009

According to a new report issued by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, the United States is the source for a “large proportion of the firearms fueling Mexican drug violence”:
GAO, June 2009: Available evidence indicates a large proportion of the firearms fueling Mexican drug violence originated in the United States, including a growing number of increasingly lethal weapons. While it is impossible to know how many firearms are illegally trafficked into Mexico in a given year,

WSJ: “GAO Ties U.S. Guns to Mexico Violence”

June 18, 2009

The Wall Street Journal reports that a new study by the Government Accountability Office says "most firearms recovered in drug violence in Mexico come from the U.S." The WSJ, which obtained and reviewed a draft of the study, says the full report is to be released later today.
This news might seem to confirm the claims made by President Barack Obama and others that "more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States."

Cheney’s Gitmo Recidivism Claims

May 14, 2009

Former Vice President Dick Cheney used his May 10 appearance on CBS’ "Face the Nation" to, once again, strongly defend the Bush administration’s handling of alleged terrorists taken into U.S. custody. At one point, to back up his characterization of Guantanamo Bay detainees as ultra-bad guys, Cheney claimed that detainees sent home from Gitmo had already demonstrated significant recidivism: "We released hundreds already of the less threatening types. About 12 percent of them, nonetheless, went back into the fight as terrorists."

More on Mexican Guns

May 13, 2009

After we posted our April 17 story ("Counting Mexico’s Guns") pointing out the absence of data to back up statements from Obama administration officials (including the president), journalists and others that 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the U.S, we still had a few questions about the tracing process. At the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), we sat down with Charles Houser, chief of the agency’s National Tracing Center,

Obama Soft on Crime?

October 31, 2008

With a handful of days to go before Election Day, the Republican Federal Committee of Pennsylvania is going after Sen. Barack Obama with a mailer that claims the presidential nominee has “a record of being soft on crime.” Luckily, our fellow fact-checkers at PolitiFact.com are all over this one. According to PolitiFact, the mailer (also being distributed in Florida) “cherry-picks a few choice examples and conveniently ignores evidence that contradicts its conclusions.”
For example, the mailer says that Obama is “against tougher penalties for street gangs,”

McCain, Palin and Rape Kits

October 10, 2008

A few weeks ago, we wrote about the pervasive rumor that Sarah Palin, when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, made women pay for their own forensic testing when reporting a rape. The verdict: This policy was enforced for at least some reported rapes in Wasilla, and in 2000, complaints about rape kit charges in Wasilla and other rural areas drove then-Gov. Tony Knowles to pass legislation requiring police departments to pay for the testing. The Wasilla police chief opposed the new state law and defended the practice,

The Momentary “No”

October 10, 2008

The third-party group Committee for Truth in Politics has released an ad accusing Sen. Barack Obama of favoring early release for sexual offenders. We like the group’s name — hey, that’s what we’re all about! But we find it pretty misleading in the case of this ad, which includes a gross oversight on a 1999 vote. The end result is absurdly wrong.
Here’s the script of the ad (we couldn’t find a version of the video that would run properly on our site,