During a meeting at the Texas Capitol this month, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said there has been a 25% reduction in crime at the Texas-Mexico border since 2014.
“I can tell you this: The crime [rate] right now on the border, according to the FBI, as reported by local officials through the Uniform Crime Reporting [Program], is safer than anywhere else in Texas,” McCraw said. “Since 2014, we began operations, and now, 2018, there’s a 25% decrease in crime across the board.”
Is that a fact? Madlin Mekelburg of the PolitiFact Texas fact-checking team based at the Austin American-Statesman has the answer.
Mekelburg says Texas has invested millions of dollars into border security since the early 2000s, but DPS started to significantly increase its presence around the border beginning in 2014. She says it’s unclear which locations along the border McCraw was speaking about.
“When you’re talking about communities on the border, we could be talking about cities, we could be talking about counties, we could be talking about any area within a certain mileage of the border,” Mekelburg says.
Hear how McCraw’s claim scored in the player above.
Written by Chloe Bennett.
