Sunday 25 September 2011

Caracas or Venezuela, 5 thousand or 17 thousand murders, whatever

Updated

Here you see a BBC video on Caracas' crime. The BBC journalist Jonathan Dimbleby (which I wrongly took for Will Grant) goes around with the Caracas policemen in one of their night patrols.

At the beginning of the video Dimbleby says there has been over 17000 murders in Caracas last year. In reality the number should be for all of Venezuela. This blog has a lot of posts about crime. I know the level of violence and lawlessness in Venezuela just horrible. Still, I find it is a real pity a journalist from such an organisation as BBC juggles in such a careless way with numbers.

If you want to see a more careful report on crime in Venezuela, you can check out an old post by Rory Carroll, who did deliver a good picture and a more in-depth analysis. Rory used the low range (14000 plus) but he correctly refers to the country, to the city, to ratios and to the fact stats in Venezuela are usually a mess. Perhaps the journalists from the BBC could learn a bit from him.

Ps. I still find it annoying they don't send a BBC journalist who speaks some Spanish. After all, Spanish is the second or third most widely spoken language on Earth...and it is not as if Spanish were so hard to learn for someone whose mother tongue is also Indo-European.


2 comments:

  1. Will Grant or Jonathan Dimbleby ? I think the later.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, I see now. Now I am the one getting it so wrong - about the name :-). Then I correct the name and the fact he doesn't live in Venezuela. The rest stays the same: 17000 Caracas-Venezuela
    Thanks again

    ReplyDelete

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