Fact checking claims from the Democratic debate in Las Vegas

Six Democratic presidential candidates sparred in a spirited debate in Las Vegas that included for the first time billionaire Mike Bloomberg as President Donald Trump held a rally in Phoenix.

A look at how some of their claims on Wednesday stack up with the facts:

MIKE BLOOMBERG, on the stop-and-frisk policing policy when he was New York mayor: “What happened, however, was it got out of control and when we discovered — I discovered — that we were doing many, many, too many stop and frisks, we cut 95% of them out.”

THE FACTS: That’s a distortion of how stop and frisk declined. That happened because of a court order, not because Bloomberg learned that it was being overused.

In Bloomberg’s first 10 years in office, the number of stop-and-frisk actions increased nearly 600% from when he took office in 2002, reaching a peak of nearly 686,000 stops in 2011. That declined to about 192,000 documented stops in 2013, his final year as mayor.

Bloomberg achieved his claim of a 95% cut by cherry-picking the quarterly high point of 203,500 stops in the first quarter of 2012 and comparing that with the 12,485 stops in the last quarter of 2013.

The former mayor defended the practice even after leaving office at the end of 2013 and only apologized for it a few weeks before declaring his candidacy for presidency.

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ELIZABETH WARREN: Buttigieg’s health care plan is “a thin version of a plan.”

PETE BUTTIGIEG: His own proposal “is the plan that solves the problem.”

THE FACTS: Warren, a Massachusetts senator, is quick to dismiss a plan that would cover virtually all U.S. citizens and legal residents.

An analysis of health care overhaul plans by the Urban Institute and the Commonwealth Fund found that an approach like the one advocated by Buttigieg, a former South Bend, Indiana, mayor, would reduce the number of uninsured people from 32 million to below 7 million, mainly people without legal permission to be in the country.

The proposal from Buttigieg features a new government-sponsored “public option” plan that even people with employer-sponsored coverage could join voluntarily.

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