Shooting Straight with John Lott
Photo: Dusan Smetana
By Frank Miniter. Aug 23, 2024
Article Source
The mainstream media likes to use federal statistics as hooks for their one-sided 'gun-control' narratives. The thing is, many of those statistics are suspect, even those from various federal agencies. The Crime Prevention Research Center's (CPRC) work goes deep into how factual this "official data" is. Indeed, when I reached out to John Lott, president and founder of the CPRC, he talked about his time working as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the Office of Justice Programs—a Department of Justice division that doles out about $5 billion in grants each year—during the Trump administration and about his research into crime and gun ownership. He has a lot to say about the statistics these agencies publish. As crime is an important topic in this upcoming election, we decided it was time to speak with Lott about how politically skewed these numbers from federal agencies can be.
A1F: Just hours after Hunter Biden was convicted of gun charges, his father, President Joe Biden (D), went to an Everytown for Gun Safety event to give a speech. He began the speech by saying that the year before he was president, the murder rate grew faster than it ever has in history, whereas, in this past year, it has fallen more than it ever has in history. Is this true?
Lott: This claim needs context. During the first year of COVID, there was a big increase in murder rates as many big-city mayors and other officials opted not to police the streets during unrest after the George Floyd incident. Many of those jurisdictions even cut police budgets and weakened criminal law. Also, many far-Left district attorneys saw the unrest as a mandate to refuse to prosecute many violent criminals; in fact, many progressive judges during 2020, 2021 and even 2022 released large percentages of inmates from local jails. In some urban areas, you had half, even two thirds of the inmates released. So, it's not too surprising that there were increases in crime rates.
Biden would like to blame this increase on Trump, but the policies from 'gun-control' supporters in office are undoubtedly part of the reason for the increase in murder rates.
To me, the most-important thing is how law enforcement in this country collapsed in many areas because of the policies from 'gun-control' advocates. If you look at the arrest rates for violent crimes in large cities, you see it has gone from a pretty consistent 44% prior to 2020, to, by 2022, according to the FBI data, about 20% for reported crimes. It's not surprising to me that when you're not catching these criminals, and you're not punishing them, you're going to see an increase in violent crime.
Also, when things like the arrest rates fall—when people don't believe the criminals are going to be caught and punished—you see a drop in the number of people who report crimes to the police.
What's happened in a number of jurisdictions is that, if you call 911, the dispatcher will ask you if it's an emergency. What they literally mean by this is, is the criminal still there? If people say, "No, the crime was committed 10 minutes ago," or something similar, the dispatcher will tell them to come down to the police station to fill out a report. In past years, a police officer would have been dispatched to the home and would have written a report. But, with reduced budgets, this isn't always the case anymore. So, a lot of these people just don't bother to go to the police station, as they don't think anything will be done.
We also have another problem. Many far-Left district attorneys are downgrading a lot of the crimes. That is impacting the statistics. The most-common crimes being downgraded are aggravated assaults. They're being moved down to simple assaults. Aggravated assaults are in the FBI crime reporting data. Simple assaults are not. The big difference between the two is whether a weapon is used. If a weapon is used, like a gun, then that would be an aggravated assault. A lot of these district attorneys are refusing to prosecute people for weapons offenses.
A1F: What about normal, law-abiding gun owners?
Lott: Right. I'm talking about criminals. As shop owners in New York City have found out, they'll go after law-abiding citizens.
A1F: Isn't it also true that some of the major cities have not given their data in recent years to the FBI's reports?
Lott: Right. Well, in 2022, 31% of police departments around the country weren't reporting their data to the FBI. It was even worse in 2021, when 37% weren't reporting. Prior to that, about 97% of police departments were. In 2022, you had many police departments, such as those in New York City and Los Angeles, that stopped reporting.
Now, the FBI doesn't just put zeros down when these places don't report their crime data. The FBI tries to estimate the number of crimes. I think they have done a poor job of estimating the number of crimes that are there.
A1F: Why that huge fall in one year? Did the forms change or something?
Lott: The FBI started a new system, the National Background Investigation Services (NIBIS) system. But you can go to CompStat to easily get data for Los Angeles and for New York City. It's just that a number of places are choosing not to report that data to the FBI. So, we have a lot of very large police departments where the vast majority of violent crime is occurring, but the data is not being shared. We then get the mainstream media making certain claims—and politicians like Joe Biden using the data for political reasons—but, on analysis, the claims they are making are misleading at best.
Incredibly, only about 8% of violent crimes [reported and unreported] in those cities result in someone being arrested. Only 1% of property crimes, both reported and unreported, result in arrests. These are just mind-boggling numbers. When criminals have a 92% chance of not being arrested, prosecuted or convicted, they don't fear the consequences of committing more crimes.
The irony is that, as Biden refuses to criticize these district attorneys who are refusing to prosecute violent criminals, he also wants to make it more difficult and costly for law-abiding citizens to be able to protect themselves.
A1F: What about the number of active murderers who are stopped by armed citizens? You mentioned that the FBI data on this is suspect.
Lott: Right, there's something called the "Active Shooter Incidents" reports that the FBI puts out every year. An active-shooting case is a case where a gun was fired in public at somebody—not part of some other type of crime, like a robbery or a gang fight over drug turf. It could be anything from one person being shot at and missed all the way up to a mass public shooting. And this data from the FBI has been used to claim that armed civilians rarely stop these types of active-shooting cases.
I was tasked with looking at this when I was at the Department of Justice. I found that the number of cases that they miss or misclassify is shocking. The FBI claims over the nine years from 2014 through 2022, that only about 4.6% of these active-shooting cases were stopped by citizens with concealed-carry permits. Well, we've gone through these cases and found that it's more like 36%. When I was at the Department of Justice, I said, "Look, you have to separate out attacks in places where guns are banned versus ones where people are allowed to have them. You can't expect citizens to stop these crimes in 'gun-free zones.'" I pointed out that when you do that, you find that over 60% of these active-shooting cases are stopped by law-abiding citizens. Nevertheless, they refused to fix the statistics. Realize that nobody needs to take my word for this. We list out all the cases the FBI missed or misclassified on crimeresearch.org.
