OVV Doubles Down on Violent Death Count it Already Admitted is Wrong
Last month, OVV accepted that its estimate of 27,875 violent deaths in 2015 was flawed and needed revising. So why is Roberto Briceño Leon repeating it?
Last month, Caracas Chronicles published a minutely researched article raising serious questions about the Observatorio Venezolano de Violencia’s headline finding that there were 27,875 violent deaths in Venezuela in 2015. The estimate, Dorothy showed fairly decisively, probably overstates the body count by around 6,000 deaths.
To our surprise and delight, OVV essentially agreed. In paragraph 14 of their response to us they own up that they had misinterpreted a crucial data point from 2013 and that when you recalculated murder totals on the basis of the corrected 2013 data, you found a substantially smaller number than 27,875.
We think their correction didn’t go far enough: but one thing is not in doubt, both explicitly in their communications to us and more circumspectly in their public response, OVV accepts that their original number needed correcting.
That was 39 days ago. This was yesterday.
El director de la organización no gubernamental (ONG) Observatorio Venezolano de Violencia (OVV), Roberto Briceño León, aseguró este martes que ha aumentado la incidencia de los delitos no violentos en la nación caribeña, que registra altas tasas de criminalidad y que se espera que este año se reporten al menos 30 mil muertes violentas.
Aseguró que reportan un incremento general de los delitos en Venezuela y, aunque reconoce la dificultad de hacer proyecciones en materia de criminalidad, estima que 2016 cerrará con aproximadamente 30 mil muertes violentas, frente a las 27.875 reportadas por esa ONG para 2015. Frente a los datos de la ONG, las cifras oficiales cifraron, sin embargo, en 17.778 los muertos en casos de homicidio intencional o doloso en 2015, lo que representa una tasa de 58,1 homicidios por cada 100.000 habitantes.
OVV head Roberto Briceño Leon just went back to using a figure that OVV, in its own obtuse way, had already recanted!
Better yet, he went on to project 2016’s violent death tally…in August! Because who needs to wait until the end of the year when you’re projecting murder numbers on the basis of zero new evidence?
I’ve long suspected that OVV operates on Trumpian levels of tirapiedrismo, but now I have evidence. Now we know OVV spreads information it knows to be false.
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