Seems pretty straightforward, but somebody ought to explain the difference to Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. On June 11, Dewhurst publicly claimed that Phoenix, Arizona was the number two kidnapping capital in the world, after Mexico City.
But, after researching the soundbite, journalists with PolitiFact Texas and the Austin American-Statesman declared Dewhurst's statement to be "False".
The earliest such statement was made by an ABC News investigative piece from early 2009. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and both Arizona senators have made the same claim. But no politician or media outlet cited hard facts proving it. The Phoenix police department told O'Rourke it doesn't know.
"I called the FBI, Department of State, Interpol, United Nations, Homeland Security — any agency that we thought could shed some insight into the statement," O'Rourke said at her desk in Austin. "And nothing turned up. Nobody was tracking the statistic in a comparable way."
What's more, officials from firms that insure executives abroad told O'Rourke they don't think Phoenix comes close to Baghdad or Latin American cities.
Dewhurst considers this reporting "a new low", telling NPR that the act of calling his claim false belongs on the opinion page, not in the newspaper. I disagree. (That's an opinion.) There's a difference between disagreeing with a politician's philosophy and citing evidence that said politician has made statements that are demonstrably inaccurate. (That's a fact.) Dewhurst is absolutely right that opinion belongs on the opinion page. But facts are not opinion.
UPDATE: Reader Timothy Williams found more explanation of the facts behind Phoenix's kidnapping problems in a George Will column on RealClear Politics. There were 368 reported kidnappings in Phoenix last year. Almost all of the victims were "drug smugglers and human traffickers preying on one another" or undocumented immigrants who paid for passage into the U.S., only to be be held hostage by their "guides" until families can pay even more money. Williams' opinion (and mine) is that politicians like Dewhurst are using those numbers in a completely misleading way, implying that evil undocumented immigrants are randomly kidnapping law-abiding, native-born Americans.
