CPRC in the News: Washington Times, Newsweek, Red State, Akron Beacon Journal, Wyoming Tribune Eagle, and much more.
John Lott of the Crime Research Center points out that the government maintains two crime measures. The first is the Uniform Crime Reporting program, which is based on crimes reported to the police and forwarded to the FBI. How these reports are filed and reported was altered in 2020 and several major cities like Los Angeles and New York don’t provide the data and are therefore not included in the reports. It is these reports, which have increasingly underreported what’s actually going on, that allowed Ms. Harris to make such claims during the debate.
The more accurate measure comes from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, which measures reported and unreported crime. The data from this survey suggests that something like 42% of the crime that people fear is ever reported and that since 2022, the situation that appears to be getting better may actually be getting worse. . . .
John Lott, president of the nonprofit, right-leaning Crime Prevention Research Center who held a brief role in the Department of Justice (DOJ) under Trump, previously 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.” . . .
Gabe Whisnant, “America Sees Rise in Minors Accused of Crimes,’ Newsweek, September 23, 2024.
Rockford touts the debunked claim that a law-abiding citizen is more likely to be killed or have his firearm illegally used than for self-protection. Professor John Lott’s research showed there are 2.5 million defensive uses of firearms by law-abiding citizens annually . . .
Jack Jones, “Grossly inaccurate portrayal,” Akron Beacon Journal, September 22, 2024.
“…Over the last few years, while the number of crimes that the FBI has that are reported to police has gone down, the total crimes, both reported and unreported, has soared during the Biden administration. Total violent crimes—rape, robbery, aggravated assaults—have gone up by 55%. That’s compared to a 15% drop that occurred during the Trump administration. Rapes have gone up 42%. Robberies have gone up 63%. Aggravated assaults have gone up 55%. Those are huge increases that have occurred.” -John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center
“And what you find,” Lott continued, “is that over the last few years, while the number of crimes that the FBI has that are reported to police has gone down, the total crimes, both reported and unreported, has soared during the Biden administration. Total violent crimes—rape, robbery, aggravated assaults—have gone up by 55%. That’s compared to a 15% drop that occurred during the Trump administration. Rapes have gone up 42%. Robberies have gone up 63%. Aggravated assaults have gone up 55%. Those are huge increases that have occurred.” . . .
Lott further argued that soft-on-crime law enforcement policies that have been put in place in recent years by left-wing governments in large cities are likely contributing to spiking criminality.
“We know that the rate that crimes are reported to police has fallen, at least according to the FBI data,” he noted. “And if you look at the FBI data alone, there’s a good reason for that. And that is, law enforcement in this country, particularly in large cities, has collapsed. You look at cities over a million, for example. In the five years before COVID, 44% of reported violent crimes resulted in arrests. By 2022, that had fallen to 20% of reported violent crimes—that’s over a 50% drop. You had an even larger drop in arrests for property crimes in those cities [which have] fallen to 4.5% of reported property crimes. We’ve never seen such low arrest rates since they’ve been collecting the FBI data for 70 years. What you find is that if you look at arrests for total crimes, not just reported crimes, only 8% of total violent crimes resulted in arrest, and only 1% of total property crimes in those cities resulted in arrest.”
Lott continued, “And as many people know, just because somebody is arrested doesn’t mean that they’re going to be charged, let alone prosecuted or convicted. And so for many crimes in large cities—it’s true across the country though, too—these criminals have little reason to fear being caught and punished. And the problem is that when people don’t think criminals are going to be caught and punished, they’re less likely to report crimes to the police, and so you’ve seen a drop in the rate that people have reported crimes to the police.” . . .
Secretary of State Chuck Gray also testified Thursday, reiterating his strong belief that gun-free zones should be eliminated for safety reasons, and that something should be done sooner, rather than later. Gray cited the research of John Lott, an influential economist in gun-friendly spaces, whose work has been questioned in academic circles.
“This has been debated for a decade, and the time for excuses that contradict each other has passed,” Gray said. . . .
A recent op-ed by Dr. John Lott, Jr., the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) discusses how the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been hiding data that support the deterrent effect of “good guys with guns.”
For almost a decade, the CDC had “referenced a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report noting that people used guns to stop crime anywhere from about 64,000 to 3 million times a year.” This changed under the Biden-Harris Administration, due to pressure from gun control groups. Dr. Lott states that “gun control activist Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, lobbied the CDC to remove ‘misinformation’ regarding defensive gun use estimates because they are cited by ‘gun rights folks’ to stop gun control legislation.” . . .
. . . 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. . . .
John Lott and the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) have been tracking where mass murder has been stopped by armed defenders who are not police. The CPRC found the FBI was under-reporting defensive gun use from 2014 to 2022. The FBI only found 14 cases where an armed defender stopped an active shooting situation. The CPRC found 157.
