Trump was correct, as Crime Prevention Research Center president John R. Lott Jr. wrote in a detailed piece published the next day:
In fact, Trump was correct about the increase in crime under Biden. While violent crime fell by 17 percent under Trump, Biden has seen it rise by 43 percent.
Muir doesn’t understand what the FBI is measuring. The FBI counts the number of crimes reported to police. Trump was right that less than half of police departments are now giving that data to the FBI, but, more importantly, Trump was discussing what was happening to total crime, not just the number of crimes reported to police.
According to John Lott, the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, “In 2022, 31% of police departments nationwide, including in Los Angeles and New York, didn’t report crime data to the FBI.
“Another 24% of departments only partially reported data. So less than half of police departments reported complete data in 2022.”
Muir claims crime is down when half the departments in the country either didn’t send data, or sent incomplete numbers.
What’s more, Muir’s FBI numbers rely on crimes reported to police.
Those numbers are going way, way down.
In the past approximately 40% of the violent crimes were reported to police (and that’s nothing to crow about) and an even fewer 30% of the property crimes were reported.
If victims believe nothing will happen even if the crime is reported, then why bother?
Victims have a point!
Law enforcement since “Saint” George Floyd died has collapsed.
Lott again, “And among cities with more than one million people (where most reported violent crime occurs), arrest rates plunged, by more than half, from 44 percent to 20 percent.”
. . . Up until 2020, these two reports – the Uniform Crime Report and the Crime Victimization Survey – generally tracked each other. But “the two measures have diverged since 2020: The FBI has been reporting less crime, while more people say they have been victims,” notes John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. . . .
. . . When Trump said, “Crime in this country is through the roof,” Muir again objected, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”
But as we and many others have pointed out, these FBI statistics are very suspect. John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, wrote this month that the FBI’s reporting is actually the product of a dramatic drop in reported crimes. “All these numbers are from the FBI’s look at reported crimes, and as law enforcement has collapsed, the rate at which crimes have gone unreported has increased,” he said.
Trump himself tried to make this point to Muir, saying that the FBI “didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud.” But Trump shouldn’t have been debating Muir; the public had tuned in to watch him and Harris debate each other. . . .
Crime Prevention Research Center President John Lott said despite recent claims that crime has fallen during the Biden-Harris administration, “violent crime has soared dramatically over the last few years. Total violent crime fell 17 percent during the Trump administration, and then it’s increased by 43 percent under Biden.” He explained of the two measures of crime statistics, the FBI data and the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey, the latter is more accurate.
Many crimes are not reported to the police, who then turn that information over to the FBI, he said.
“If you look at total crimes in those cities using the National Crime Victimization data, only 8 percent of total violent crimes and only 1 percent of total property crimes result in arrests,” he said. . . .
In a recent study conducted by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), it was found that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are shifting further left on issues surrounding crime, policing, and gun control.
This trend raises serious concerns for those relying on these technologies for objective research and information, especially students, journalists, and social media influencers who frequently use AI to craft reports and papers.
The CPRC study examined 15 popular AI chatbots, including ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s Grok 2 (Fun Mode), analyzing their responses to a series of questions about crime and gun control. The research highlighted a disturbing shift: almost all chatbots demonstrated liberal views, particularly when it came to gun control issues. This finding is alarming for those who value a balanced perspective, as the chatbots’ influence continues to grow across media and educational platforms.
According to the study, when asked questions about crime prevention—such as whether higher arrest and conviction rates deter crime—the chatbots leaned liberal. Their average score on a scale from zero (liberal) to four (conservative) was 1.4, indicating a strong left-wing bias. This was a significant drop from the scores recorded in March 2024, showing an ongoing shift toward more liberal viewpoints.
The results were even more striking in terms of gun control. Aside from Musk’s Grok 2 (Fun Mode), all other chatbots displayed a left-leaning stance. For instance, on the question of whether laws mandating gunlocks save lives, the average chatbot response was an overwhelmingly liberal 0.87. Similarly, responses to questions about red flag laws and background checks for private gun sales also skewed heavily to the left. . . .
Don’t Jail Parents for School Shootings. John Lott writes that placing the blame on parents is misguided and distracts us from finding genuine solutions. . . .
We know this is true because, as John Lott has analyzed repeatedly, most comprehensively in his book More Guns Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, the NRA is right: An armed society is a polite society. And if you don’t want to believe John Lott or the NRA, believe the Obama administration’s study showing that, as of 2013, guns were making Americans safer. They were used defensively between 500,000 to 3 million times per year, far outstripping annual gun deaths. . . .
One of the problems with the FBI data, according to researcher John Lott, director of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), is that not all police agencies report crimes to the FBI; in fact, many stopped doing so in 2021 and 2022. This greatly skews the numbers.
According to Lott, prior to 2021, about 97% of police departments around the nation reported their crime data to the FBI; however, in 2021, 37% of police departments didn’t report their data. And in 2022, 31% of police departments, including those in big cities like New York City and Los Angeles, weren’t reporting their data to the FBI. Consequently, crime numbers appear substantially lower than they really are.
With the FBI statistics now being unreliable, the true picture concerning violent crime can better be seen by exploring the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). And, as Lott pointed out in a recent analysis, although the violent-crime rate reported to police declined 1.7% between 2021 and 2022, the National Crime Victimization Survey showed that total violent crime—both reported and unreported—actually jumped substantially from 16.5 to 23.5 per thousand during that same period. Additionally, violent crime in 2022 was above the rate of the last year before the pandemic (in 2019) and above the average for the five years from 2015 to 2019.
As Lott also pointed out in a recent interview with America’s 1st Freedom Editor-in-Chief Frank Miniter, far-left district attorneys downgrading a lot of crimes has led to even more problems with the data.
“That is impacting the statistics,” said Lott. “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.”
Unfortunately, that’s not the only way that the FBI is playing fast and loose with the facts to give gun-control advocates ammunition to bolster their cause. As Lott told John Stossel in a September 10 report at Stossel TV, FBI statistics about active-shooter incidents completely ignore many cases where good guys with guns stopped bad guys with guns.
In the interview, Lott pointed out how the agency’s data on active-shooter incidents ignores many cases in which armed citizens stopped such attacks before the death toll could get higher.
“They’re simply missing a huge number of cases,” said Lott. “When a civilian tries to stop one of these instances, they’re overwhelmingly successful.”
But media outlets, aided by the FBI’s incomplete data, tend to shy away from reporting on that matter. One good example is the mass murder at the Pulse nightclub in Florida in June 2016.
Just a week after that, there was a similar attack at a nightclub in South Carolina. During that incident, however, an armed citizen took down the murderer before more people could be killed.
“The thing is, it got virtually no news coverage,” said Lott. When Stossel mentioned that 49 people being killed is a bigger news story than three casualties, Lott countered that the South Carolina incident could have been much worse if not for the armed citizen.
“I understand, but the guy still had like 125 rounds of ammunition on him when he was stopped,” said Lott. “You would think at least some of the news coverage would at least mention, ‘Here’s another case that almost turned out to be the same, but it was stopped.’”
Similar coverage—or lack thereof—occurred in an armed-citizen incident shortly after the Parkland school murders.
“Just a few months later in Titusville, Florida, there was an elementary school that was having a big event at a park right next to the school,” said Lott. “It had hundreds of students there. And a man came up and started firing his gun. [But an armed citizen] was able to seriously wound the attacker and stop him before he was able to go and kill anybody.”
While the incident got some local coverage, it was largely ignored by the mainstream media.
On the CPRC website, Lott has a complete list of active-shooter incidents that were stopped by armed citizens, including those ignored by the FBI and, consequently, the media. Lott believes the omissions are mainly due to politics.
“There’s a lot of political views that people let infect their data,” he told Stossel. “I had interactions with the people in the FBI and I had people … tell me, ‘Well, I’m a Democrat,’ as a response. As if somehow that’s how we determine whether or not to fix the data.
“I think the people at the top are more politically motivated than maybe your rank-and-file FBI agent. If they think that it would go against the narrative that they want to … push, then they’ll fight you.”
Now, I’m not a gun person. I was raised among lefty gun haters. I assumed Hollywood and “experts” were right.
When I saw economist John Lott’s book, “More Guns, Less Crime,” I rolled my eyes. But now I understand that Lott makes a good point.
“A couple million times a year, people use guns defensively,” he says in my new video. “When a civilian tries to stop one of these instances, they’re overwhelmingly successful.”
But FBI reports say self-defense with guns is rare.
“They’re simply missing a huge number of cases,” says Lott. He’s posted a list of cases the FBI ignored, where civilians stopped shooters.
The FBI lists the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Forty-nine people were killed.
“One week afterwards,” says Lott, “there was a similar attack at a nightclub in South Carolina.”
Dr. John Lott, a criminologist, supported these claims by pointing out the discrepancies in crime reporting under the current administration. “While the FBI showed a 2% drop in reported violent crime, the national crime victimization data showed a 42% increase in violent crime,” Lott explained. . . .
The highest recent rate of violent crime during the Biden years was in 2022, when the survey counted 9.8 instances per 1,000 people over the age of 12 being victims, Rape increased from 1.2 incidents per 1,000 in 2020 to 1.7 in 2023. Robbery rose from 1.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 2.6 per 1,000 in 2023. Aggravated assault rose from 2.9 per 1,000 in 2020 to 4.5 per 1,000 in 2023. As Crime Prevention Research Center president John Lott tried to explain in a piecepublished after Muir’s deliberately misleading “factcheck,” . . .
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