Numbers don’t add up in Yost’s spot against Dettelbach
THE AD: “Steve Dettelbach Doesn’t Do the Work,” a 30-second TV spot by the Republican attorney general candidate, Ohio Auditor Dave Yost, hitting his opponent, former U.S. Attorney Steve Dettelbach, over Dettelbach’s record as a prosecutor.
WHERE TO SEE IT: Statewide on broadcast and cable. Yost’s campaign would not disclose how long it would run or the value of the buy.
VIDEO: The ad opens with a portrait of Dettelbach in a chair, presumably in a courtroom. As the narrator recites ways Dettelbach allegedly didn’t do his job, Dettelbach’s image melts away. The ad then shows an image of Dettelbach in front of a government building, then video of Yost speaking to police and in a courtroom.
SCRIPT: “Steve Dettelbach doesn’t do the work. As U.S. attorney, gun crimes went up, but Dettelbach indicted less. Opioids flooded Ohio, but Dettelbach’s drug prosecutions went down by a third. And illegal immigration reached record levels, but Dettelbach immigration cases dropped by half. Do-nothingDettelbach turned his back, and he’s a dangerous choice for attorney general. Dave Yost is tough on crime and helped put corrupt politicians from both parties behind bars. Driven to protect. Dave Yost for attorney general.”
ANALYSIS: This is a classic soft-on-crime attack. The Yost campaign uses statistics from Dettelbach’s tenure as U.S. attorney for the northern district of Ohio to paint him as going easy on the bad guys. Yost spokesman Carlo LoParo said Dettelbach’s predecessor prosecuted an average of 603 cases and 1,012 defendants per year, while Dettelbach prosecuted an average of 506 cases and 718 defendants per year. A look, however, at all the numbers from 2000 to 2015 shows that the number of cases has been relatively stable throughout and that the number of defendants has generally trended downward since 2005.
In terms of non-marijuana drug cases, the statistics LoParo provided only covered two years before Dettelbach was in office and seven years while he was in. The number of such cases for 2007 — 142 — could be an outlier. The number for the other year Dettelbach was not in office — 84 — is mostly in line with those for the following seven, which average 73. Dettelbach’s campaign pointed out that those figures don’t address the quality of those cases. It said that the Trump administration thought so highly of his drug chief, Joe Pinjuh, that U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions appointed Pinjuh to help run the Justice Department’s national narcotics program.
The Yost ad’s assertions are at their dodgiest when it comes to immigration. LoParo didn’t send stats to back up the claim that Dettelbach’s immigration prosecutions dropped by half, and it’s not hard to see why. The number of such prosecutions averaged 29 from 2007 to 2015. With such small numbers, it doesn’t take much of a change in absolute terms to bring about a big change in percentage. And that’s just what happened. If you look only at the immigration prosecutions for 2015 — 15 — that’s a 54 percent drop from the 33 in 2007, two years before Dettelbach took office. But it ignores the fact that they averaged 28 during his tenure.
Dattelbach’s campaign said it also ignores the fact that his office in 2015 prosecuted a high-profile human trafficking case that involved a Marion County egg farm.
Another immigration assertion in the ad is clearly false. Its claim that “illegal immigration reached record levels” is popular in Republican circles, but the facts don’t bear it out. The overall number of undocumented immigrants has been relatively stable since before Dettelbach took office in 2009, according to FactCheck.org.
And the rate of people actually crossing the border illegally has been dropping for a lot longer than that. That rate, typically measured in the number of apprehensions on the Southwestern border, peaked at 1.6 million a year in 2000 and was less than half that while Dettelbach was in office, according to government figures.