By Curmudgeon
The Standard Examiner this morning has a front page story discussing crime rates in Ogden in 2007. It reports that aggravated assaults and robberies were up 19%, burglaries up 10% and auto thefts up 7%. An included graph shows that homicides, larceny and arson are also up (Click to enlarge image):
And how does the Standard-Examiner headline the story? This is how:
"Ogden Mayor: Fight Against Crime Going Better in '08"
Here is what Hizzonah has to say in the story. [Note: he has his verbal fog machine on overdrive]:
City officials anticipated a rise in 2007 crime statistics and reacted last summer, said Mayor Matthew Godfrey.... "With the Crime Reduction Squad and the focus we were putting on (central Ogden), crime stats are going to shoot up."Let me see now: the Mayor put special emphasis on controlling crime and so, he says, naturally, crime rates were going to increase? [Up is down, In is Out, War is Peace in the happy world of Matthew Godfrey.] While arrest stats might increase as a result of a Crime Suppression drive by the Mayor and City police, crime rates should not. But they did.
But wait. Hizzonah is not finished yet. He then told reporter Sam Cooper this: "But what we've seen is crime is already starting to go down. In the last six months we've seen a dramatic reduction of crime."
Did the Mayor offer any statistics to back up that claim? If he did, the Std-Ex isn't telling. Did Mr. Cooper press him for some corroboration of his claim? If he did, the story doesn't say.
So, a long story reporting rising crime rates in very nearly all categories in Ogden in 2007, and what does the headline point to? The Mayor's one sentence uncorroborated claim based on numbers we're apparently not permitted to examine, that things are getting better.
A sad performance by the Std-Ex this morning. And a very inaccurate headline that counters very nearly the entire import of the article beneath it and that highlights instead the Mayor's uncorroborated and unsupported [and apparently by Mr. Cooper unexamined] claim that things are getting much much better now.
