American Thought Leaders - What the Media Is Leaving Out of Its Reporting on Crime: John Lott

Episode Date: August 17, 2024

In this episode, I sit down with John Lott, founder and president of The Crime Prevention Research Center, to discuss his extensive research into national crime rates, arrest rates, as well as gun permit laws and how they impact crime.“In 2022, the last year that we have the National Crime Victimization data for, while the FBI showed a 2 percent drop in violent crime, the National Crime Victimization data showed a 42 percent increase in total violent crime,” says Lott.Why is there such a disconnect between media reporting that violent crime is down and the public’s perception that crime is surging?“If you look at arrests for total crimes, reported and unreported, only 8 percent of violent crimes result in arrest,” says Lott.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Only 8% of violent crimes and only 1% of total property crimes result in arrest. In this episode, I sit down with John Lott, founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, to discuss his extensive research into national crime rates, arrest rates, as well as gun permit laws, and how they impact crime. Why is there such a disconnect between media reporting that violent crime is down and the public's perception that crime is surging? The media looks at the FBI reported crime data. The problem is a huge number of police departments are no longer even reporting data to the FBI. You have prosecutors who are refusing to prosecute violent criminals. I mean, what's the risk of committing crime?

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. John Lott, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Well, it's great to talk to you again. Thanks for having me on. Well, John, I've always come to you for trying to understand what's going on with crime statistics, right? And one of the things we observed at the Epoch Times is that in some cases you even have agencies that are telling us kind of different stories with different numbers that they're publishing.

So I'm trying to make sense of this. So what are you seeing right now? A lot of the media is talking about crime rates going down the last couple years. The problem is I don't think most of the media understands the different numbers that are being put out. You have two different sources on crime numbers, both from the Department of Justice. One's the FBI data collecting the number of reported crimes to police, and the other one is something called the National Crime Victimization Survey, which surveys about 240,000 people

each year, to try to get a measure of total crime, both reported and unreported. We know most violent crime, most property crimes, aren't reported to police, but we know that from the National Crime Victimization data. So, for example, about 42 percent of violent crimes are reported to police. About 32 percent of property crimes are reported to police. About 32 percent of property crimes are reported to police. And the amount that's been unreported has been changing a lot over the last few years. And there's a simple reason, I think, for why that's the case. But these numbers traditionally have moved together. The FBI reported crime data traditionally has moved up and down with the national crime victimization data, except for the last three years.

In the last three years, they've gone in opposite directions. They've been perfectly negatively related to each other. So, for example, in 2022, the last year that we have the national crime victimization data for, while the FBI showed a 2% drop in violent crime, the national crime victimization data showed a 42% increase in total violent crime. And I think one of the big reasons for this is that you have a change in the rate that people are being arrested. Law enforcement in this country has basically collapsed. And people have some idea about this. They go to a CVS or a Walgreens in many parts of the country, and everything's behind glass.

They know that that wasn't true a few years ago. But it's much more systematically across the spectrum. If you look at large cities, over a million with population, and this is true across all cities, but they had an average arrest rate for violent crimes of 44% prior to COVID. It started falling in 2020. And by 2022, the arrest rates for reported violent crime was down to 20%, from 44 percent to 20 percent. That's over a 50 percent drop. And that's just for reported crimes.

If you look at arrests for total crimes reported and unreported, only eight percent of violent crimes result in arrest and only one percent of total property crimes result in arrest and not everybody who's arrested is charged, let alone prosecuted and convicted. And so that's been a real sea change. I mean, you can look over the last 70 years of crime data, and you see nothing like that even over decades, let alone within a three-year period of time. And one of the things we know, and we've known for a long time, and that is, as people don't think the

criminals are going to be caught and punished, they're less likely to go and report the crimes. It's also become more difficult for people to report crimes too. You were pointing out that there are a lot of CVSs and other type stores that are open kind of around the clock that have a lot of their products behind glass. I've seen that in New York. I've seen that in D.C. But that's not violent crime. And so the overall rates going up, is that the case across all sort of types of crime? Yeah. The one murders, if you compare murder before COVID to now, it's still about 7% higher. But other types of violent crime have gone up much more than that, and property crime has soared. What's happened is that as we've had

cuts back in police, the police have focused on the most severe crimes, murder primarily, and moved resources away from other types of crimes. And so these other types of crimes have simply gotten much worse. You know, criminals have little to worry about in terms of getting caught and punished. So you see more crime. So that accounts for the sort of lower uptick in murder because that's where all the resources, they're going to the most serious things. Right. Exactly. And you see this just in police response.

So in many parts of the country now, if you call up 911, they'll ask you, is this an emergency? And basically they're trying to figure out, is the crime still in progress? If the crime's still in progress, they'll send a police car out. If it's not, they say, well, you can come down to the police station now and report the crime. That wasn't true four or five years ago. Before, if there was a crime, they'd send out a police car all the time. But, you know, it's just an example of them kind of triaging that they

have limited resources. Murders, obviously, they'll send somebody out all the time for that. But some of these other types of violent crimes, they won't send somebody out. And so with murder, I guess the reporting rates and the real rates are probably close? Yeah, murder is the one type of crime where there's not the same type of reporting problems that you see with other types of crime. That's exactly right. Okay. Well, so tell me a little bit about what's happened to police departments. This is something I've covered quite a bit on the show in the past, but I'd love to know where we're at now, because I've also been, we've had a number of stories of, kind of turnarounds in certain states and districts and so forth. Right. Well, I mean, you had lots of big cuts in many places in 2020, 2021. In the last year or so, they've started to go back

and hire police. But you also had a lot of retirements that were occurring for police officers. So you may have lost somebody who had 15 years of experience, and now you've hired somebody who's been on the job for six months or a year. They simply aren't going to be as effective of a police officer as somebody who had 15 years. I did want to mention one thing on the murder, and that is one big problem that we have right now is that a huge number of police departments are no longer even reporting data to the FBI. So starting in 2021, there were changes in the rules there for reporting. In 2022, for example, 32% of police departments were no longer reporting any data to the FBI. That compares to about 3% in 2020.

And another 24% of police departments were only partially reporting crime data. So that means less than half of police departments now, as compared to 97%, before are reporting complete crime data to the FBI. Now, the FBI will kind of guess and make estimates on what the missing data is, but there are problems with them doing that. And it includes everything from murder to all sorts of other violent crime and property crimes there that they're having to guess and estimate and their problems with that. So, and those are the guesses and estimates that are

making it into that FBI database that you're describing? Right, exactly. Right. So why are they not reporting anymore? I mean, that's a huge shift. There were changes in reporting requirements put into effect by the Biden administration. They were requiring more information on some things and they were requiring more frequent reporting. And a number of police departments just say this is just too onerous. We're not going to do it. Plus, I think some places just used it as an excuse. I mean, go to their websites and you can find out what the crime data is for places like New York City and Los Angeles. But they just have decided not to report the data to the FBI. Are you familiar with the actual numbers of the decline in different departments around the country?

You do see a drop in reported crimes that's in the FBI data. Now, the National Crime Victimization data also has a measure of reported crimes. And in their measure, not only is their total measure different from the FBI measure of reported crimes, but their reported crime measure is different. So in 2022, while the FBI, as I said, showed a 2% drop in reported crimes, the national crime victimization data showed a 29% increase in reported crimes. And there are lots of reasons for that. One of the things, you know, I was mentioning before about how before they'd send out a police

car, if you called in, now for many cases they're requiring that you come into the police station to do the report. I don't think a lot of people understand that simply calling up 911 doesn't result in the crime being reported. You have to actually have an officer fill out a police report. Other problems that you have is that you have many places downgrading crime. So like in New York City and Manhattan where Alvin Bragg, who's been in the news a fair amount recently, he's downgraded 60% of felonies, violent felonies. The vast majority of those are aggravated assaults. And what he's done is he refuses to prosecute people for firearms offenses. So what can make something an aggravated assault, which is a felony, as compared to a simple assault, which is a misdemeanor,

is whether a weapon was used in the assault. And since he's refusing to prosecute these criminals for weapons offenses, he's downgraded, not only has he downgraded 60% of the felonies, but almost all those have been downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor, from aggravated assault to simple assault, because he's kicked out or removed the weapon part of that. And that affects the FBI data because the FBI data only includes aggravated assaults in the violent crime numbers, not simple assaults. And so by moving these crimes from aggravated to simple, that helps reduce the FBI number of reported crimes. But the National Crime Victimization Data picks them up.

And the reason why they pick them up is because in these 240,000 people that they're interviewing, they'll ask you what happened with the crime. And they'll say, I was assaulted, the person had a gun. And so the National Crime Victimization Data will record that as an aggravated assault, even though the FBI data will record it as nothing because it's not an aggravated assault anymore. Are there other databases that will tell you that seem to have this incongruence or other sets of databases in other areas? Well, I mean, I know the crime data the best. We know that there have been some issues with the FBI reported crime data before. And so kind of the gold standard that we've used over time has been the national crime victimization data because we care about total crimes, not just what's

reported. And I think a lot of people have an understanding that a lot of violent crimes aren't reported, but the only way we know that, the measure that we have that, is the national crime victimization data. What about perception, sort of societal perception of crime? My sense from talking to people, and this is just very anecdotal, is that they sense that there is more. You see headline after headline in the news articles saying crime is falling, but people think that it's increasing. I mean, I can give you dozens of headlines like that. surveys from Gallup to Harris to Rasmussen to others that are showing people have increasing

fears about violent crime, that they say that it's been increasing. But then the media looks at the FBI reported crime data and said, well, that's falling. And so you have all these news articles saying that people just have this know, have this mistaken impression. They blame it on, you know, the news media for covering crimes or something like that as creating the impression. And as, you know, our first discussion about you go to CVS or Walgreens, you know, even though that's property crime that's there, people know that three or four years ago, everything wasn't behind glass in a lot of these stores. And they know that these companies aren't doing this for fun.

I mean, you go in, I've gone into places and tried to buy things. I have to get a clerk to come over to unlock it. They have to stand next to me while I'm reading the package ingredients. I feel bad making them have to do that. It's costly for them to do that. They only do it because they have to because of all the property theft. I did a study looking at the geographic distribution within the county of Los Angeles of crime,

and I've done a little bit of work for other places. And what you've seen over the last few years is that crime has kind of leaked out of the zip codes where it was traditionally the highest into other zip codes that in the past didn't experience high. So you've had not only an increase in violent crime in areas where it's traditionally been there, but you've also had it go into areas that had been safer before. That's across the board? The only data that I've looked at really carefully has been Los Angeles County, but I've also looked at Cook County a little bit, and you seem to have a somewhat similar pattern there too. So the other thing that, again, I've seen some statistics around is that there's more people going out and buying guns for protecting themselves.

Right. I think people realize to varying degrees that law enforcement's collapsed in this country. And, you know, you have... Can I just ask you to clarify that? When you say law enforcement's collapsed, I mean, I see functioning police departments. It's just like a big, it's a very strong statement, right? Right. But I mean, to have the arrest rate for violent crimes go from 44% to 20% in large cities, that's a huge drop. And that's arrest rates for reported crimes.

To have it so that arrests for total violent crimes for those cities be 8% and for total property crimes be 1%. I mean, what's the risk of committing crime in those areas? And not even all those people who are arrested get charged, let alone prosecuted or convicted. And so, you know, you have a real problem there. I mean, I'm not going to go and say that it's not worse than some other countries. I was just giving talks in Brazil. Only 9% of murders do they identify the person who committed the murder. Only 3% of murders result in a trial. And only 2% of murders result in a conviction in Brazil. So are there other countries where it's a lot worse?

Yeah. But that's still, compared to kind of the traditional rates in the United States, we're at very low rates of catching and punishing people. It's not just the arrest rates. You have, in many major urban areas in this country, you have prosecutors who are refusing to prosecute violent criminals, who are refusing to prosecute for property crimes, and that also demoralizes the police. I mean, they figure what's the point of arresting somebody, you know, because there's a risk to them taking to arrest somebody. Something could go wrong,

they could get hurt. And if they arrest them, the person's immediately put back on the street and not charged. And so that takes away their incentive to go and do that. And there are other rules that are out there. In California now, I mean, just take something trivial like traffic stops. You go and stop somebody and you give them a ticket. You have to fill out a forms that take like 40 minutes for you. You know, you have yet the forms even include things like you have to guess the sexual orientation of the person that you pulled over for the traffic stop.

But you're not allowed to ask them what their sexual orientation is. You're just supposed to guess. There's a whole series of questions about race and other things, age, you know, why you pulled them over, when you pulled them over, characteristics of the car, things that just take a lot of time. So a lot of police officers, it looks like are stopping fewer people for running stop signs or speeding. And I'd like to get the data just to see, because I know the rate of traffic stops has dropped tremendously in California after they've had these rules, and I want to see what's happened to traffic accidents.

If you think giving people tickets for running stop signs, you know, deters them from running stop signs, presumably a few more people are running stop signs than they did before. And, you know, if you believe that there's a reason why you have laws against running stop signs, because you think it's more likely to result in traffic accidents if they do that, presumably you're going to have more traffic accidents if they do that. Presumably you're going to have more traffic accidents that are going to occur. So let's go back to this. Is it in fact the case that there's an increase in people arming up? Yeah, it's been a big increase. You know, we have about 22 million Americans with a concealed carry permit now in the United States.

But even more than that, we have 29 constitutional carry states now where you don't even need to have a permit. So we did a survey last year to try to get information on the rate that people are carrying permanent concealed handguns. Pew had done one a few years ago where they had in 2017 where they had like five percent of American likely voters were caring all or most of the time our survey indicated that was about 15 percent now so it's so that's a big it's a three-fold increase that's occurred between 2017 and 2023. And so, you know, I think people are responding to the fact that they have these concerns about violent crime. I mean, obviously, that varies tremendously across

the states, places like California and New York and New Jersey and places like that, you know, you don't have very many people carrying, but there are other states. And one of the reasons why you've had this big increase in the number of constitutional carry states over the last few years has been what happened during COVID. You had this big increase in violent crime and over 20 of the states stopped issuing concealed carry permits. And so people realized that they didn't want to have to depend upon the government to issue a permit for them to be able to go and carry. Because if you have a disaster that occurs and the government shuts down issuing permits again, that's exactly when you're going to need to be able to go and carry. The idea behind people carrying is there's a deterrence element here right like that look just as you can make it risky for criminals to commit crime with higher arrest rates higher conviction rates longer prison

sentences the fact that would-be victims might be able to go and defend themselves also makes it riskier for criminals to go and commit crimes i was i was chief economist for the U.S. Sentencing Commission in Washington, and I must have read over 1,000 trial transcripts. And you constantly are coming across cases where, you know, you'll have one robber turn state's evidence against another robber, and they get asked the same questions. You know, why did you pick the particular target that you did there? And they'll say, well, you know, we were talking about going after the drug dealer down the street. He has lots of money, but he has lots of guns.

It would be crazy to go after him. And we were thinking, we talked about going after a cab driver. But a lot of the cab drivers have guns. And so we saw this small woman walking alone across a parking lot late at night, and she looked like an easy target and so we went after her and so you know if if you have it so that victims are able to make it riskier for criminals to go and commit crime they respond to that but you have to make it so that the people who are the most likely victims of violent crime are the ones who are carrying.

You know, you have states like Illinois where it may cost $450 to go and get a concealed carry permit with the fees and the training costs. So you basically have people who live in the suburbs go and get concealed carry permits. Well, they're not the ones at risk. I could have 100% of the population in an area where there's zero crime carrying a permit, and it's not going to have any impact on crime. I have to have it so that the people who are the most likely victims of violent crime are carrying. And my research indicates to me that the people who benefit the most from carrying

are basically poor blacks who live in high-crime urban areas, the people who are the most likely victims of violent crime. The other group of people that my research shows who benefit the most are people who are relatively weaker physically, women and the elderly. You're almost always talking about a young man doing the attack. And when a man is attacking a woman, there's a much larger strength difference that exists there on average than when a man is attacking another man. And so the presence of a gun represents a much bigger relative change in a woman's ability to go and protect herself than it does for a man. If my research convinces me of anything, it's the most vulnerable people in society who benefit the most from having the option to protect themselves and as as law enforcement as is collapsing I think people are moving to

protect themselves so is there data out there that shows you know we're in places where well I guess first there would be two variations here one would be the states that switch to constitutional carry. Do you see reductions in violent crime? That's one. And two, the states where I guess concealed carry comes in or there's an increase in concealed carry. Does that change?

What we'll find is that moving to constitutional carry, because presumably a lot more people are carrying in those places, we no longer have the numbers, we don't have data on the number of permits, because people can carry without a permit, you see, as states move, you see large drops in violent crime rates. The states that don't have constitutional carry and rely solely on issuing permits, as the percentage of the adult population with permits increase, you see drops in violent crime. But it's particularly important who is carrying.

So if I have lower fees and lower costs for people carrying, I see more minorities, more poor people carrying, and that's particularly important in reducing violent crime rates. People can go to our website at crimeresearch.org. We have peer-reviewed academic research on this. We also put out a report each year, and we've been doing this since, I guess, by 2013, on the number of concealed carry permits by state to track that over time. And so, you know, we've been able to go and see how, as permits are increasing in this state, what's happened to the violent crime rates. And so, and the main factor that kind of changes things is the cost of the permit, it sounds like. That has a big impact.

You know, you make apples more expensive, people buy fewer apples. I'll give you a simple example. I mentioned Illinois. Illinois, about 4% of the adult population has a concealed carry permit. In neighboring Indiana, it's about 23%. Why the difference? It's pretty simple. In Illinois, as I said,

it costs $450 to go through the process to get a permit. In Indiana, it's zero. They don't even charge for a background check that's there. So not only do you have a lot more people caring, but you have a lot more zip codes, which are low income and heavily minority having permits in Indiana than you have in Illinois. So the very people who benefit the most from being able to go and carry are the ones who are carrying in Indiana. So you don't expect, even though they both have concealed carry laws, you don't expect to see much of a drop in violent crime in Illinois if even the 4% that you have are people who are wealthy people who live in low crime areas to begin with. John, I want you to tell me a little bit how you came to be such an expert in this

topic. And, you know, I've had you on the show before. We've talked a little bit about it, but I think it's actually very valuable for our viewers to know that. Well, I have a PhD in economics and economics has a couple of basic ideas. But one of the ideas is that incentives matter. If something's more costly, people do less of it. If they get greater returns, they do more of it. And that applies not only to the price of apples, but applies to crime. You know, if crime becomes riskier for criminals to engage in, they commit less crime. It's not rocket science to me why we have increases in violent crime rates when the arrest rate plummets in different areas, or

criminals aren't being prosecuted. You know, I did some work starting with my dissertation that dealt somewhat with crime, but I served as chief economist for the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Most recently, I was senior advisor for research and statistics in the Department of Justice, both the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy. So, you know, I've been in government. I've kind of argued with the people who are putting the data together and talked to them. And I know the definitions that are there, and I know how the data is collected. But you didn't come into this thinking you would find everything, I mean, everything you found, right? Of course not. And as I say, the problems with the numbers have changed over time. I wouldn't have been having this conversation with you five years ago about the issues with the FBI data

versus the national crime victimization data. Those are problems that have really arisen over the last few years. What about places like California and New York, and especially the big cities, where there are a lot of restrictions on arming up, for example, where crime rates are going up, from what I understand? Right. Well, I mean, I think crime rates are going up in a lot of places. But I think, you know, one of the ironies is that California, Illinois, New York, they not only want to make it so that the legal system isn't making it risky for criminals to commit crime,

but they don't want to make it so that individuals can defend themselves at the same time. At least you could say they're consistent. They don't want to make it risky for criminals to commit crime in terms of what they face from law enforcement or from private individuals. So it's not too surprising to me that you're going to see problems with crime occurring in those places. Have you had a chance to speak with people who have this philosophy and like the logic behind

the approach? Well, I try to debate people. It's very hard to get people to debate on this, on either the guns or the crime issue. You know, I listened to some of these prosecutors and I hear them say that you can pretty much eliminate prisons, and you're not going to have any impact on crime rates. And I think kind of the proof's in the pudding there. If you make it so you're not going to prosecute people for aggravated assaults, you're going to get more aggravated assaults that are going to occur. But your data tells you that.

Yeah, well, I mean, the data tells me that. But, I mean, it's just, I think it's something that most people understand in an intuitive level. I mean, anybody who's had kids or whatever knows, you know, if you don't give them guidelines and tell them there'll be consequences for their actions. But, you know, as I say, look, maybe it's just innate in me being an economist,

but to me, this doesn't seem like rocket science. Are there states that are significant or states or particular places that are significantly shifting their policies recently that you're aware of? A lot of places. You've had this huge increase in the number of constitutional carry states over the last few years. Any surprises in that? I mean, I think there are a couple reasons that we've had this. One, as I say, you had a number of states shut down issuing permits during COVID. And people realize, you know, you don't want to be in a situation where you feel you have to carry and now you're not allowed to do so. The other thing is, you had situations where women

would be stalked or threatened. And it would take 90 days for them to get a concealed carry permit. You know, in Connecticut, it could take a year to get a concealed carry permit. You know, in Connecticut, it could take a year to get a concealed carry permit. You know, and they may not be able to wait a week. You know, the threat's there right now. And telling them they have to wait 90 days or whatever, they may be dead at that point, or some other type of harm may have occurred to them by that point. And the other thing is, constitutional carry has basically been a continuation of a trend. When states adopted concealed carry laws to begin with, they often had high fees, had high training requirements, had lots of restrictions on where you could carry. Gun control advocates made predictions about all the horrible things that would happen when you allowed that.

And they lost some credibility. And then they went back and they said, okay, we're going to get rid of a few of these gun-free zones. And the gun control advocates, again, predicted disaster. And it didn't happen. And they got rid of a few more. And they lowered the fees. You know, Texas, I think it was like in 2012, 2013,

lowered fees from $140 to $40. All the Republicans voted in the legislature to reduce the fees. I think maybe one Democrat voted the same way. All the other Democrats voted against reducing the fees. So you go from $140 to $40, and now you don't need to pay a fee. So it's just been a continuation of a trend there. Well, basically you're describing a situation to me where states will try to make a shift and just look at their data and see if they created a problem.

They learn. They learn. And I think the gun control advocates constantly saying the sky's falling with each change. You know, people learn that they are wrong on these things. And it's happened many, many times. I mean, these states often will come back every year or two and gradually loosen the rules, and you see the same predictions of disaster. And, you know, at some point, people stop listening to them. And so when I said any surprises,

I was just curious if there's any states that have recently gone to constitutional carry that one might not expect. The more recent states, I mean, the most recent two are South Carolina and Louisiana. But I mean, you have states from the Northeast, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, you know, all the way to Arizona, you know, on the Southwest, you know, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, you know, Ohio was maybe a little bit of a surprise doing it, but you have Ohio and Indiana and the Midwest there. So you have, you know, Tennessee, Kentucky, you know, all the South, basically. North Carolina is the one holdout. I mean, Virginia also. But, you know, depending upon the gubernatorial election this

year, you're very likely to get in North Carolina could change too. Well, John, this has been a wonderful conversation. A final thought as we finish? You know, if you want to reduce crime, you have to make it risky for criminals to commit crime. Well, John Lott, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. Well, thank you very much for having me. I greatly appreciate it. Thank you all for joining John Lott and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.