CPRC in the News: New York Post, Newsweek, Wisconsin Politics, The American Spectator, Zero Hedge, New American, and much more
Mainstream media argue that our cities are safer, yet overlooked data — and public perception — suggest the opposite, explains John R. Lott, Jr at The Wall Street Journal: “92% of Republicans and 58% of Democrats” think crime is rising, and “Americans aren’t mistaken.
News reports fail to take into account that many victims aren’t reporting crimes to the police, especially since the pandemic.”
In 2022, “31% of police departments nationwide, including Los Angeles and New York, didn’t report crime data to the FBI.”
Arrest rates are also plummeting, with only 20% of violent crimes yielding an arrest in large cities, vs. 44% pre-Covid.
Those who do believe crime is falling tend to be in a higher income bracket. “It isn’t surprising that affluent people can insulate themselves from spikes in crime — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.” . . .
Editorial Board, “Data check: No, Crime Isn’t Dropping,” New York Post, April 28, 2024.
This Newsweek piece contained a couple of errors. For example, 42% of violent crimes are reported to police. Other work that my discussion is based on can be found here and here.
John Lott, the president of the nonprofit right-leaning Crime Prevention Research Center who held a brief role in the Dept. of Justice under former President Donald Trump, told Newsweek that the FBI statistics are incomplete at best.
“It’s just a small portion of the issue,” Lott said. “The reason why we have the National Crime Victimization Survey [an annual survey conducted by the DOJ] is because we know most crimes are not reported to police.”
According to the FBI statistics, murders decreased by 26.4%, rapes were down by 25.7%, robbery decreased by 17.8%, aggravated assault was down by 12.5%, and property crime was lower by 15% in the first quarter.
But Lott said those statistics make up less than 45% of the violent crimes that are committed in the U.S. and only 32% of property crimes. Victims are not reporting incidents as often because they don’t believe anyone will be punished, he said.
Lott claimed that only 8% of total violent crimes in cities result in arrest, and the number is even smaller for property crimes. Newsweek was not able to immediately verify those claims.
The underlying issues are multiple, Lott said. There are fewer experienced officers on the streets, fewer police reports are being made, crime victims are not going down to the station to fill out forms, and — perhaps most significantly — certain reporting standards have changed. For instance, if a felony assault was pleaded down to a misdemeanor in court, it would not be included in the FBI’s data. . . .
Monica Sager, “FBI Stats Show Plunge in Violent Crime, But There’s a Catch, Newsweek, June 11, 2024
Similarly, Dr. John Lott, the President of the Center for Crime Prevention, told the committee, “Ballot boxes facilitate vote harvesting, and vote harvesting facilitates vote buying.” Critics may argue that ballot drop boxes enhance accessibility and convenience for voters – though voters in Wisconsin can still return their completed absentee ballots through the mail or by delivering them in person to officials. We cannot overlook the inherent vulnerabilities associated with drop box voting. Drop boxes are susceptible to election mischief, posing a threat to the integrity of the electoral process. Given that protecting the sanctity of every ballot is paramount to upholding the ethics and professionalism of elections, it is imperative that states authorizing the use of ballot drop boxes adopt statutory safety measures for their integrity. . . .
John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center who served in the Trump administration’s DoJ, told Newsweek the FBI’s numbers “make up less than 45 percent of the violent crimes that are committed in the US and only 32 percent of property crimes. Victims are not reporting incidents as often because they don’t believe anyone will be punished.”
Lott added, “The reason why we have the National Crime Victimization Survey [an annual survey conducted by the DoJ] is because we know most crimes are not reported to police.” . . .
So, while gun ownership has increased, crime has decreased. Just as John Lott discovered and revealed in his 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime.
That book is now in its third edition, and includes much additional data since the original publication — all of which confirms the title.
Lott’s book turned the head of an academic who initially had a negative view of firearms and their role in the culture. But he and his wife were expecting a child and he wanted to make certain to raise him/her with a proper understanding on the issue. . . .
Post on Twitter Posted in Not the Bee, June 12, 2024.
Bonchie cited a recent NRA-ILA report explaining how the Crime Prevention Research Center found that “one factor contributing to the ostensible dip in violent crime is that almost 40% of local law enforcement agencies are no longer transmitting their information to the national Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) database.”
You heard that correctly.
Violent crime across America must be so out of control in failed leftist metro areas that radical leftists in local governments just stopped reporting crime data to the FBI. This is an admission the woke utopia of criminal and social justice reforms is an utter disaster.
Here’s more from the NRA-ILA report:
In “2021, 37% of police departments stopped reporting crime data to the FBI (including large departments for Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York),” and for other jurisdictions, like Baltimore and Nashville, crimes are being underreported or undercounted. This leaves a large gap; by 2021, the real crime data collected by the FBI represented only 63% of police departments overseeing just 65% of the population. When compared to pre-2021 data, the result is a questionable “decline” in crime
“Scouring FBI data, John Lott, the founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center, found that arrests for reported violent crimes in major cities fell 20 percent in 2022, from 42.5 percent in 2019 — the year before the COVID pandemic and BLM protests in response to George Floyd’s death while in police custody,” he wrote.
“The percentage of murder and rapes cleared by arrests fell to 40.6 percent from 67.3 percent in those years; for rapes from 33.8 percent to 17.4 percent, and arrests for reported property crimes in major cities dropped to 4.5 percent in 2022 from 11.6 percent in 2019,” Varney added. . . .
Economists John Lott and Daid Mustard found that increased prevalence of concealed carry in municipal jurisdictions probably explained the drop in contact crimes . . .
Jonathan Wright, “What is a ‘gun culture’ and does South Africa have one?” Biz News, May 23, 2024.
The debate over concealed carry weapon (CCW) laws is as heated as ever. With out-of-control crime and a flood of illegal alien criminals, citizen concealed carry is needed now more than ever, as recent self-defense events illustrate. Well-funded Gun control advocates tirelessly argue that these laws lead to more crime, but a new research paper “How Does Concealed Carrying of Weapons Affect Violent Crime?” by John R. Lott and Carlisle E. Moody is making waves by challenging these claims head-on. Here’s what you need to know about their findings, especially if you support gun rights.
The Claims: More Concealed Carry Holders, More Crime?
Anti-gun activists often say that right-to-carry laws, which allow citizens to carry concealed firearms, lead to two main problems:
1. More Stolen Guns: They argue that more people carrying permitted guns means more chances for those guns to be stolen and end up in the hands of criminals.
2. Interference with Police: They claim that armed citizens make it harder for police to do their jobs, reducing their effectiveness and potentially increasing crime.
The Research: Setting the Record Straight . . .
Take gun-free zones, for example. As has been pointed out repeatedly by Crime Prevention Research Center — an organization that provides verifiable data but gets overlooked because it goes against the gun-control grain — gun-free zones are not safe. In fact, they are very dangerous. . . .
