Crime Levels in El Paso May Not Be What Obama Has Painted, & PolitiFact Was Silent
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on May 19, 2011
In January, four Hudspeth County workers in Texas were shot at from the Mexico side of the US-Mexico border - Texas Rangers scoured an area 25 miles east of Fort Hancock for bullets (Vanessa Monsisvais / El Paso Times)
PolitiFact analyzed a few of Pres. Obama’s statements during his El Paso speech last week for their veracity on illegal immigration.
Of those talking points analyzed, the president did so-so. His claim that the southern border fence was “nearing completion” was unquestionably false, as I had covered here last week.
PolitiFact appears to have only analyzed those statements made by POTUS that would garner the president a higher ranking in truth-telling.
PolitiFact chose to not analyze this statement made by the president, taken from the White House transcript:
“And also, despite a lot of breathless reports that have tagged places like El Paso as dangerous, violent crime in southwest border counties has dropped by a third. El Paso and other cities and towns along this border are consistently among the safest in the nation.”
Why did PolitiFact not mention this nor evaluate the statement, as it had others from the El Paso speech?
This may be why:
In March 2010, PolitiFact called Gov. Rick Perry a liar for saying that his border security efforts had brought border crime at the Texas-Mexico border down 60%. PolitiFact saw fit to excoriate the governor, but to give the president a pass. The time period of the governor’s claim and the president’s claim appear to overlap, so PolitiFact appears to have dodged this one deliberately. The fact-checking organization couldn’t very well praise the president when, just a year earlier, it had attacked the governor on using the same or similar border crime statistics.
Terrence P. Jeffery at CNS News exposes this further, using information gleaned from Obama’s own Executive Office for the United States Attorneys’ statistical report that was published last year, which used compiled statistics from Obama’s Department of Justice:
The latest annual statistical report of the Executive Office for the United States Attorneys — which was published in 2010 and covers fiscal 2009 — made a special point of highlighting violence on the border.
“Violence along the border of the United States and Mexico has increased dramatically during recent years,” the report said. “The violence associated with Mexican drug trafficking organizations pose(s) a serious problem for law enforcement.”
“Illegal immigration provides the initial foothold with which criminal elements, including organized crime syndicates, use to engage in a myriad of illicit activities ranging from immigration document fraud and migrant smuggling to human trafficking,” said the report. “Federal prosecution of border crime is a critical part of our Nation’s defense and federal jurisdiction over these offenses is exclusive.”
As noted in this column last year, the report pointed out that when measured by the number of criminal defendants charged during fiscal 2009, the five most-crime-ridden U.S. judicial districts were all on the Mexican border. These included: Southern Texas, Western Texas, Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico.
According to Obama’s Justice Department, there were more then two-and-a-half-times as many criminals (8,435) charged in federal court in Western Texas, where El Paso is, than in the combined districts of Southern New York (1,959), which includes Manhattan and the Bronx, and the Eastern New York (1,377), which includes Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island.
None of this was brought to light by PolitiFact’s appraisal of the president’s speech.
AWR Hawkins at Big Government nails it here:
Yet the bigger problem we face as a result of Obama’s willingness to leave the border porous isn’t political so much as practical. In other words, a border that isn’t secure translates into a country that isn’t secure either.
If you think I exaggerate the dangers of an open border then here’s a little experiment for you: Tonight, when you’re headed to bed, lock your front door but leave your back door wide open (and if you really want to emulate what Obama has done by advertising our open border, put a sign up in your backyard that says “back door open for your convenience.”)
I dare say not many among us could sleep well under such conditions, yet those are the exact same conditions Obama places our nation under when he turns a blind eye toward our faltering southern border in order to secure a few hundred thousand votes for the coming presidential election.
Additionally, 663 illegal aliens from countries with reported ties to terrorism were arrested along the Southwest border in 2010.
Many factors go into determining crime rates and crime trends — the cities and counties assessed, the span of dates used, whether the crimes committed are violent or non-violent crimes, whether they were committed by citizens, illegal aliens, or both, and other factors are used (or not used) when crunching the numbers. Foiled attempts may or may not be used, such as the finding of an improvised explosive device Easter afternoon on an expressway overpass near Brownsville, Texas, near the Mexican border. The bomb was not detonated and no one apprehended, so that incident may not be included in border crime/safety statistics.
Pres. Obama’s methodology for his “El Paso and other cities and towns along this border are consistently among the safest in the nation” claims were not made public. However, it appears that once upon a time, El Paso did have lower crime numbers — several years ago. That doesn’t seem to be the case presently (read this and this on current crime levels). As was pointed out above in the Executive Office for the United States Attorneys’ statistical report, El Paso’s crime rate is not the glowing example of a peaceful, safe city as Pres. Obama had declared during his speech.
Statistics can be easily manipulated, accidentally or deliberately, depending on any given methodology. Gov. Perry may or may not have deliberately cherry-picked his data to derive his “60 percent” claim. Likewise with the president.
Nationally, the concerns about our unsecured borders extend beyond safety issues. A recent Gallup poll shows that 9 out of 10 Americans want the border secured this year and that 61 percent of Americans are very concerned that illegal immigrants are putting an unfair burden on U.S. schools, hospitals, and government services. Another recent survey from Rasmussen Reports reveals that a staggering 64 percent of those surveyed do not think the United States border with Mexico is secure.
So, while the president made lame, insensitive jokes about building moats with alligators to curtail illegal immigrant entry into the country to mollify Republicans, PolitiFact appears to have given him a pass on his gray-area statement about crime and safety.
Gov. Rick Perry was not amused nor impressed with the president’s immigration speech:
“This is a president who is more interested in trying out for Saturday Night Live it seems like,” he said. “The guy’s a stand-up comic, and that was what he was playing to. The fact of the matter is, Americans don’t want a stand-up comic for the President of the United States. Anyone who knows what’s happening on the border of Texas and Mexico or, for that matter, the southern border of the United States with Mexico realizes this is not comedy; there are people’s lives in jeopardy every day.”
He said ranchers in Texas are shot at. He cited incidents on Falcon Lake, which is half in Mexico. An American tourist was killed on the lake last year.
“You’re going to see U.S. citizens killed,” Perry foretold if the federal government doesn’t do more.
A portion of the letter Texas Gov. Rick Perry gave to Pres. Obama during his 2010 visit to the state on what Texas needs in National Guard troops from the federal government to slow down illegal immigration and begin to secure the state's southern border
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