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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.

6,853 published reviews in this topic

FACTLYCrime & justice

Video of a scuffle between police and hawkers in Bihar.

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The claim concerned a video said to show police and hawkers scuffling in Bihar. FACTLY’s review identifies the video as showing a different location: Mankhurd, in Mumbai. It says the confrontation occurred when police tried to topple a street vendor’s vegetable cart in an area contained because of coronavirus spread. The review therefore concludes that the video does not depict an incident in Bihar. [S1]

FACTLYCrime & justice

Video a man attacking a Muslim woman in France following the attack in Nice

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The claim concerned a video said to show an attack on a Muslim woman in France as a response to the attack in Nice. FACTLY says the video was old and depicted a separate incident: in July 2020, a man attacked women, including a Muslim mother with children, at a park in Nizhnekamsk, in Russia’s Republic of Tatarstan. The review therefore found the footage did not document an attack in France connected to Nice. [S1: “In July 2020, a misogynist attacked a Muslim mother with children at a park in Nizhnekamsk, Republic of Tatarstan.”] To investigate the footage’s origin, the review describes reverse-image searches of screenshots from the video. It says similar visuals appeared in a July 8, 2020, post by Documenting Oppression Against Muslims (DOAM), which identified the setting as a park in Nizhnekamsk and described a Muslim mother being attacked. [S1: “On reverse image search of screenshots in the video, similar visuals were found in a video shared by the ‘Documenting Oppression Against Muslims (DOAM)’ organization on their Twitter handle on 08 July 2020.”] FACTLY also reports finding a similar visual in a Russian news article dated July 7, 2020. According to the review, that article described a man detained for beating girls at a park in Nizhnekamsk. Together, these reported matches place the video in a different country and earlier incident, rather than in France following the Nice attack. The excerpt does not provide the underlying posts or news article in full, so details beyond what FACTLY reports cannot be independently assessed from the supplied material. [S1: “On searching for other sources using the keywords, a similar visual was found in an article published by a Russian news website on 07 July 2020.”]

YouturnCrime & justice

பீகாரில் சிறுமியை கற்பழித்து கொன்றவனை சிறைக்கு கொண்டு செல்லாமல் அந்த இடத்திலேயே எங்கவுண்டர் செய்து சுட்டு கொன்ற அதிகாரி பூஜாவுக்கு ஒரு லைக் உண்டா?? பாராட்ட நினைத்தால் ஷேர் பன்னுங்க மக்களே.

Publisher’s rating: Fake

Vamsi Krishna PothuruCrime & justice

Video of burqa-clad woman being assaulted in France

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The claim concerned a video of a burqa-clad woman being assaulted in front of children. Social media posts placed the incident in France, using the caption “Trends start coming from France.” NewsMeter’s review concluded that the video was not filmed there: it identified the incident as taking place in Nizhnekamsk, in Russia’s Republic of Tatarstan, in July 2020. To trace the video, the review says it reverse-searched a keyframe using Yandex. That search led to a YouTube video uploaded by RuNews24 on 8 July 2020, titled “A maniac who attacked women was detained in Tatarstan.” The review also reports finding a Komsomolskaya Pravda article dated 8 July 2020 that featured the same viral video and described women being attacked while walking in Nizhnekamsk’s Family park. The review says the incident was also reported by Tatarstan24 and TV Channel 360. Its conclusion—that the video showed an assault in Tatarstan, Russia, rather than France—rests on matching the viral footage to local reporting and the earlier RuNews24 upload. The supplied excerpt does not identify the woman or specify the exact day in July when the assault occurred.

BBC Reality CheckCrime & justice

Joe Biden ending cash bail would free "400,000 dangerous criminals"

Publisher’s rating: This needs context. Joe Biden does want to end the cash bail system, but Mr Trump is wrong about its impact.

The BBC review examined Donald Trump’s campaign claim that Joe Biden ending cash bail would free “400,000 dangerous criminals.” It explains that Biden had pledged to end cash bail, which the review describes as a deposit a defendant pays to avoid detention while awaiting trial. Biden’s website, as quoted by the review, argued that the system incarcerates people presumed innocent. The review puts Trump’s figure against the roughly 450,000 people then detained before trial in the United States. But that total does not mean all those people were being held because they could not afford bail: the review says a significant proportion were not offered bail, particularly people charged with serious crimes. It reports that experts therefore considered Trump’s figure too high. The claim also labels everyone unable to pay bail a “dangerous criminal.” The review challenges that characterization, quoting Harvard professor Crystal Yang on how cash bail can detain a low-risk person who cannot afford payment while allowing a wealthier, high-risk person to be released. The evidence supports a more limited conclusion: Biden did support ending cash bail, but the review says Trump’s estimate overstated the number affected and wrongly characterized those detained.

FACTLYCrime & justice

Video of a man assaulting a woman in a lift in Hyderabad metro

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The claim concerns a video of a man assaulting a woman in a lift, presented as an incident in Hyderabad metro. FACTLY’s review says the footage was instead of a thief attacking a woman in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and that it had no connection to Hyderabad Metro. The review’s conclusion addresses the location attribution attached to the video, rather than disputing that an assault is shown: it describes the footage as an attack on a woman in Malaysia. To investigate, FACTLY reports using reverse image search on screenshots from the circulating video. It says this search led to a 2019 news article containing images similar to those in the shared video; according to that article, the footage showed a thief attacking a woman in Kuala Lumpur. FACTLY also points to another news article about the incident and says a news agency shared the video on its Facebook page. On the basis of those comparisons and reports, FACTLY concludes that the lift-assault video was recorded in Malaysia, not Hyderabad metro. The evidence described in the excerpt supports the distinction between the location claimed in the social-media post and the location attributed to the footage by the reporting FACTLY consulted.

Myth DetectorCrime & justice

A Facebook group Travel Georgia published a post on October 25, 2020 claiming that the News program on Mtavari Channel aired a fake story about an armed robbery at a bank in Gurjaani. According to Travel Georgia, Mtavari Channel used a photo from a robbery in Oklahoma, U.S. to illustrate the fake news. The page calls on its users to share the post to expose Mtavari Channel in spreading lies. A screenshot is attached to the post where two African American robbers are circled in red and a logo of Mtavari Channel News at 9, as well as a title of the news on the bottom of the screen, but according to the screenshot, the news is called “Armed attack in Dmanisi”, not in Gurjaani. The post by Travel Georgia does not provide a link to the specific TV program or report which contains the given image.

Publisher’s rating: The information disseminated by Travel Georgia is not true and is a photomanipulation. There is no news about a robbery in Gurjaani on the webpage of Mtavari Channel. The TV reports about the robbery in Dmanisi were aired on News at 9 on October 21-22 and they did not include the image, shown by Travel Georgia. Disseminating photomanipulations aims to discredit oppositional media in the run-up to the election.