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PeakMetrics / Fact Checks

Crime & justice fact checks

Explore claims publishers have checked about crime & justice. Read their original ratings and follow the evidence.

6,849 published reviews in this topic

FACTLYCrime & justice

Visuals of Uttar Pradesh police manhandling a woman

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The review checks a social-media post that presents a video of police manhandling a woman as evidence of police conduct in Uttar Pradesh under the Yogi Adityanath administration. It concludes that the video does not show an incident in Uttar Pradesh: the footage instead depicts an incident in Jharkhand in 2020. The article identifies the officer as the SHO of Barhait police station in Sahibganj district and says the woman was at the station in connection with a case related to a love marriage. [S1: “A social media post accompanying a video of police manhandling and abusing a woman is being widely circulated attributing it to Uttar Pradesh.”; “These visuals are related to an incident that took place in Jharkhand back in 2020.”; “SHO of Sahibganj district’s Barhait police station manhandled a woman, who was at the police station in a case related to love marriage.”] To investigate the video’s provenance, the article says it performed reverse image searches on screenshots from the footage. Those searches yielded news articles that had reported the same visuals in July 2020 as being from Jharkhand. The review uses that reporting to distinguish the video’s documented location and time from the post’s attribution to Uttar Pradesh; it does not describe the footage as a separate Uttar Pradesh incident. [S1: “Reverse image search of the screenshots of the video yielded multiple news articles which reported these visuals back in July 2020.”; “As per these reports, these visuals are from Jharkhand, wherein a police officer from Sahibganj district’s Barhait police station manhandled a woman, who was at the police station in a case related to love marriage.”] The review also reports that Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren took notice after the video went viral, asked the state DGP to investigate, and that the officer was eventually suspended. These details provide further context for the video’s identification as the Jharkhand incident, rather than the Uttar Pradesh setting claimed in the post. [S1: “Further, as the video went viral, the Chief Minister of the state took cognizance of the video, and through a tweet asked the DGP to investigate the incident, eventually, the officer was suspended.”]

dpaCrime & justice

ANP wist al op voorhand van de aanhouding van Willem Engel

Publisher’s rating: ANP bracht het bericht pas veertig minuten nadat jurist Jeroen Pols had aangegeven dat Engel was aangehouden. De bron hiervoor was een Twitterbericht van Pols zelf. RTL bracht het nieuws over de verlengde aanhouding van Engel nadat zowel het Openbaar Ministerie als de rechtbank van Rotterdam het nieuws wereldkundig hadden gemaakt.

The claim arose from a screenshot shared on Facebook, said to show ANP reporting Engel’s arrest at 11:03, twelve minutes before his arrest at 11:15. The review checked the underlying timing rather than treating the screenshot’s displayed time as proof: it says the time shown on a webpage depends on the computer’s time zone, and compares the screenshot with the article’s source code and ANP’s original press alert. The review reports that the source code gives the article’s Dutch publication time as 12:03 on March 16, 2022, while ANP’s press alert went out at 11:54.

FACTLYCrime & justice

Video of police taking custody of the man who issued death threats to the Karnataka High Court judges over hijab verdict

Publisher’s rating: MISLEADING

The claim attached to the video was that it showed police taking into custody the man who had issued death threats to Karnataka High Court judges over the hijab verdict. FACTLY’s review distinguishes the video from the separate arrests of the people accused of making those threats: it says Bengaluru police took Jamal Mohammed Usmani and Kovai Rahmathullah into custody, while the circulated visuals did not show those arrests. [Supported by S1: “Earlier, the Bengaluru police have taken custody of Jamal Mohammed Usmani and Kovai Rahmathullah, members of Tamil Nadu Thowheed Jamath (TNTJ), an Islamic religious outfit for issuing death threats to the Karnataka High Court judges over the hijab verdict.”; “However, the visuals shared in the viral post do not show the arrest of the above-mentioned people.”] To check the video’s provenance, the review reports that a reverse image search found news articles carrying the same visuals. It describes one report, dated 15 March 2022, as identifying them as footage of Naya Abadi police in Madhya Pradesh taking Amjad Lala into custody. The review identifies Lala as a serial offender who had been absconding for six years. [Supported by S1: “Reverse image search of the viral visuals yielded couple of recent news articles which reported the same visuals.”; “As per one such article dated 15 March 2022, the visuals show Naya Abadi police in Madhya Pradesh taking custody of Amjad Lala, a serial offender, who was absconding for the last 6 years.”] The review says another article reporting the same visuals also named Lala and described his custody by Naya Abadi police. Thus, the arrest footage and the Karnataka threats case concern different people and events: the fact that Bengaluru police did arrest two men over the threats does not make this video evidence of those arrests. [Supported by S1: “Another news article that reported the same visuals also identified the person as Amjad Lala and reported that he was taken into custody by the Naya Abadi police.”; “While it is true that Bengaluru police have arrested two men who issued death threats to the Karnataka High Court judges over the hijab verdict, the viral visuals do not show these arrests.”]