Remember the 31 drivers out of 45 illegal story: it was false.

31 persons illegal out of 45+ vehicles quickly became:

31 drivers out of 45 (LovinMalta, MaltaIndependent).

It even morphed to “31 out of 45 people” on Reddit last week
[https://www.reddit.com/r/malta/comments/1n0ez0q/31_out_of_45_people_stopped_at_a_roadblock_are_in/](https://www.reddit.com/r/malta/comments/1n0ez0q/31_out_of_45_people_stopped_at_a_roadblock_are_in/)

The story had the bad luck to be sandwiched between the “Maltese being outnumbered (in these towns)” article two days before it and Times of Malta Fact-Check of Delia’s “800.000 people” claim two days after it. So everybody used the 31 out of 45 to proof Delia is probably right, and Malta must have an unimaginable amount of illegals.

The story is incorrect. I contacted the Community and Media Relations Unit of the Malta Police Force and they responded:

-31 “drivers” headlines are incorrect, the official police statement only said “31 persons”.

[https://pulizija.gov.mt/en/more-results-from-traffic-controls/](https://pulizija.gov.mt/en/more-results-from-traffic-controls/)

-out of 45 ‘cars’ / 45 ‘people’ claims are incorrect, the official statement said “more than 45 vehicles”

-everybody doing any 31 out of 45 (=69%) calculation or variation of this is incorrect.

The Police has clarified their statement to me, and say it was “all types of vehicles including buses”. They never released the number of how many “people” were checked. Local Councilor of St Paul’s Bay happened to be on one of those buses, and stated they found 1 on her bus.

—

Discussion: do you think the Maltese media now has to rectify this story?

Question: is the use of race and ethnicity in selection decisions during police checks legally allowed in Malta? (where they “randomly” only select Indian-looking Y-plate drivers) In other countries this is considered a form of discrimination.

It certainly fueled a lot of angry comments by people using this 31 out of 45 to confirm their beliefs.

(while for all I know half of the vehicles were full buses, and they found a percentage of illegals that’s actually normal based on the official estimates)

@ LovinMalta (and others), if you’re planning to use this Reddit post as a source for the rectification, please credit me (=LimestoneJungle on Instagram), not my Reddit! You can contact Mr Brandon Pisani (Community and Media Relations Unit of the Malta Police Force) and Local Councilor Mrs Sandra Gauci to verify it.

Some people have nothing better to do

Mym