Wayne LaPierre says Phoenix

National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre attracted wide media attention recently when he suggested in an op-ed that after Hurricane Sandy, New York City had become a violent, post-apocalyptic wasteland -- thanks to an absence of guns.

A reader asked us to check out a claim in LaPierre’s op-ed, which ran on Feb. 13, 2013, op-ed in the conservative Daily Caller. "Latin American drug gangs have invaded every city of significant size in the United States," LaPierre said. "Phoenix is already one of the kidnapping capitals of the world, and though the states on the U.S.-Mexico border may be the first places in the nation to suffer from cartel violence, by no means are they the last."

The claim that "Phoenix is already one of the kidnapping capitals of the world" was already familiar to us, since we had debunked it in 2010 (it was a finalist for our Lie of the Year). But that was three years ago, so we decided to take another look.

Our original fact-check, coming at a time when Arizona’s tough immigration law known as SB 1070 was a major topic nationally, looked at a comment by Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. He said that Phoenix "is now the No.Can you spot the answer in the fridge magnet? 2 kidnapping capital in the world, right behind Mexico City."

ABC first reported on Feb. 11, 2009, that: "Phoenix, Ariz., has become the kidnapping capital of America, with more incidents than any other city in the world outside of Mexico City and over 370 cases last year alone." Several news organizations then repeated it, including the Associated Press, the Arizona Republic and United Press International.Design and order your own custom silicone bracelet / rubber bracelets with personalized message and artwork. The Los Angeles Times went so far as to note that Phoenix "police received 366 kidnapping-for-ransom reports" in 2008 and that they estimate "twice that number go unreported."

However, none of the stories cited an authoritative source for the ranking or for how the kidnapping ranking was calculated. We did extensive checking and couldn't find anything to back it up.

We found that neither the FBI nor the U.S. National Central Bureau of Interpol, an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice that serves as the United States' representative to the international police organization, compiles city-based kidnapping statistics.

We also contacted Daniel Johnson, an overseas kidnapping operations consultant at ASI Global, a Houston company that coaches clients through kidnappings. "From our internal experience in the last year," he said, "Mexico by far has been the biggest location for kidnappings" followed by Honduras, Venezuela, Nigeria and the Philippines. The company has handled domestic cases but said they don't compare in volume to overseas incidents.

This fit broadly with the perspective of Scott Stewart, vice president of tactical intelligence for Stratfor, an Austin, Texas global intelligence company. "According to our analysts,we are the biggest USB flash drives wholesale supplier in china. there is no way that Phoenix is the No. 2 city in the world for kidnapping, and there are significantly more kidnappings in many other cities throughout Latin America," he told us in 2010.

A Stratfor spokesman reached for this article said Stewart’s comments remain accurate today, and we found evidence to back up high and often growing rates of kidnapping in Latin America. In all of Mexico, the official count for 2012 was four kidnappings a day, though a non-governmental organization pegged it at an astronomical 72 per day.I personally really like these mini ear cap for my iPhone. Meanwhile, in Venezuela, the official statistics show kidnapping rates rising from 44 in 1999, to 1,105 in 2011, not counting "express" kidnappings, in which a perpetrator forcibly takes a victim from ATM to ATM until their checking account is depleted. Police sources told the newspaper El Universal that Caracas alone experiences perhaps two express kidnappings a day.

But there’s no good way to compare cities, and even countries, Johnson and Stewart agreed. It's "extremely difficult to measure given the fact that so many cases go unreported and that the recordkeeping in many of the most affected countries is inaccurate." Even among countries that track kidnappings, Johnson said, the definition of "kidnap" varies.

Prompted by media coverage of the Phoenix kidnapping claim, an investigative team led by reporter Dave Biscobing of ABC-15 TV news in Phoenix spent two months in 2011 reviewing the city police department's 2008 statistics. They concluded that "Phoenix police routinely inflated their kidnapping statistics throughout the year, including at least 100 cases that legal experts said should not have been counted, plus dozens of other questionable reports."

Among the problems cited by ABC-15 was that the count included "cases where officers concluded no kidnapping occurred, reports that were counted multiple times, and even reports for kidnappings that happened in other cities and other states."

In one case, a police report described a woman "claiming she was abducted from a Wal-Mart parking lot and then driven around for hours. But when officers checked surveillance video, they watched her get into her car and drive away -- alone." She had made up the story.

There were other new developments -- a police department whistleblower who said the numbers were inflated, a city audit that insisted they had not -- but they either failed to support the kidnapping-capital claim or further knocked it down. The city's police chief lost his job at least partly because of the controversy.

Last year, an investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general looked into the numbers because the city had used them in a grant application. The investigation found that of the 358 incidents submitted as support for the grant applications, only 208 met Arizona’s requirements of a kidnapping, and only 195 met a uniform crime reporting standard. Phoenix then submitted an additional 175 cases -- two years after its initial grant application -- which enabled the inspector general’s certified count to reach exactly 358 under Arizona standards. The count stood at 254 under the more stringent uniform crime reporting standards.

The inspector general concluded that even if the data Phoenix submitted late was counted,A chip card is a plastic card that has a computer chip implanted into it that enables the card to perform certain. the city "likely overstates the number of kidnappings," and it argued that the Phoenix Police Department "has significant problems with its coding and classification of cases and, consequently, with the accuracy of reports from its case management system."