WCCO | CBS News Minnesota refuses to correct blatant crime misinformation

By Crime Watch MN, Aug. 22, 2024

The phrase “fake news” gets tossed around a lot, often to the chagrin of media consumers exhausted from constant bickering in what many view as political-based jabs.

But the “fake news” assertions can often be borne out as fact by those who care to dig into the full story, and not just take for granted the convenient soundbites that play on a loop online and on televisions, which often serve political purposes.

This week, local TV station WCCO (a CBS affiliate) ran a story by reporter Ubah Ali which purported to address the youth auto theft problem occurring across the Twin Cities and the tough time law enforcement officials are having dealing with the brazen youth who often taunt police with their actions.

During the broadcasts, which initially ran on WCCO’s Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning news programs and was later posted online, a statistic flashed across the screen (below) stating that Hennepin County auto thefts total 475 so far this year, and that 247 of them were committed by juveniles.

Wait… what?? Anybody who’s been paying any attention at all knows that the metropolitan Twin Cities area is having an auto theft crisis, and that Minneapolis alone has had thousands of auto thefts already this year — Minneapolis is fully contained in Hennepin County.

The Minneapolis Police Crime Dashboard (above) shows over 4300 auto thefts in the city of Minneapolis so far this year, through Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024, including 624 auto thefts just in the last 28 days in the city.

Ubah Ali’s voiceover in the video accompanying WCCO’s story and the verbiage posted online in the article (below) clearly repeat the false information.

Crime Watch dug in to find out where this falsely stated figure may have come from and found that the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office (HCAO) online dashboard (below) listed just over 475 auto thefts that have been submitted to their office for prosecution from local law enforcement agencies as of Wednesday, and that 247 of them had been committed by juveniles. These are clearly the figures that Ubah Ali incorrectly used when (falsely) stating the total number of auto thefts committed in Hennepin County.

Crime Watch pointed out WCCO’s error in posts on both X/Twitter and Facebook on Wednesday and Thursday calling for a retraction or correction from WCCO and Ubah Ali, and asking our followers to contact WCCO at (612) 339–4444 to demand a correction.

Misstating auto theft numbers by thousands is a gross and inexcusable disservice to the viewing public, especially at a time when the cities are still being rocked by high crime numbers that still haven’t receded to pre-2020 riot levels in many cases.

As of late Thursday night, WCCO still had not retracted or corrected their online article, nor have they issued any type of statement addressing the publicized false information.

This is not the first time WCCO has been caught in a lie recently.

WCCO garnered national ridicule at the end of July after the station’s Esme Murphy claimed that now presidential candidate Kamala Harris never supported the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF) during the 2020 riots in the Twin Cities.

The WCCO story prompted the X platform (formerly Twitter) to place a user-generated “Community Note” on WCCO’s post indicating that their framing of the article was incorrect (above). Then Senator Harris (who was running as a candidate in the 2020 presidential election at the time) posted on X on June 1, 2020, a request for people to donate money to MFF. At the time Harris made her tweet, the riots, arsons, and lootings by protesters had been going on for days across the Twin Cities. The end result was more than $500 million in damages to businesses, buildings, and infrastructure.

And as Crime Watch has tracked, the Minnesota Freedom Fund has irresponsibly bailed out numerous dangerous offenders who have gone on to commit new crimes, including murders, with the $40 million windfall they acquired with the help of Kamala Harris and other celebrities.

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