Fox News Discusses Our Work: “Violent crimes have increased under Biden-Harris admin despite Dems’ denials: expert”
Fox News reporter Emma Colton interviewed Dr. John Lott for this news article.
.
. . . “When David Muir goes and says the FBI shows that crime is down, that’s not what the FBI is measuring,” Crime Prevention Research Center President John Lott told Fox News Digital in an interview this week. “What the FBI measures is that reported crime went down, and that’s a big difference between total and reported crime. We know most crimes aren’t reported to the police. And the rate that people report crimes to the police depends in part on things like whether they think the guys are going to be arrested or not.”
.
Lott noted that arrest rates have dipped, with 2022 data showing only 20% of reported violent crimes resulted in an arrest in major cities.
.
“So, if people don’t think that the criminals are going to be caught and punished, it reduces the returns for some people reporting the crimes to the police to begin with,” he argued. . . .
.
Lott, who also served as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs, authored an op-ed for Real Clear Politics this month and detailed that the DOJ survey found that total violent crimes are 55.4% higher in 2023 than in 2020, the end of Trump’s tenure, while rape crimes increased by 42%, robbery by 63%,and aggravated assault by 55%. The DOJ survey does not include surveys on murder, but that category is almost always reported to police departments, and subsequently to the FBI, he noted, and makes up about 1% of the U.S.’ total violent crimes.
.
The FBI’s quarterly data found murders dropped by 13% in 2023 compared to 2022, but the rate remains 5% higher than pre-pandemic data from 2019, Lott explained.
.
The Associated Press published a fact-check following the presidential debate and determined Trump’s claim that violent crime has been on the rise under the Biden-Harris administration was false, citing the NCVS study outlining that the rate of violent victimizations in 2023 was not statistically different from the rate in 2019.
.
“The 2023 rate was higher than the 2020 (6.6 per 1,000) and 2021 (7.5 per 1,000) rates but was comparable to 5 years ago in 2019 and consistent with the overall downward trend since 1993 (33.8 per 1,000),” the NCVS study states.
.
Lott countered that the AP report failed to “mention whether the rate is statistically different than in 2020 or 2021.”
.
“Nor do they mention how large the increases are. Trump’s point was that violent crime had increased during the Biden-Harris administration. The rate in 2022 was statistically significantly higher than in either of those previous years. The violent crime rate in 2022 and 2023 was also significantly higher,” he wrote in his Real Clear Politics op-ed.
.
“Total felonious violent crime increased by 19% from 2019 to 2023, and there is only one other time when the increase over four years was larger.”
.
Lott found that the 55% increase in total violent crime between 2021-2023 was the “largest percentage increase over three years” in the roughly 50 years the NCVS has collected crime data.
.
“The next largest percentage increase over three years was in 2006 and that was 27%. The percentage increase under Biden is slightly more than twice the largest previous increase. Now, if you want to take it from 2019 for serious violent crime, then what you see is it’s increased by 19% from 2019 to 2023. That’s the second-largest percentage increase in serious violent crime that we’ve ever seen. That’s a huge increase. And those percentage increases are both very statistically significant,” he said.
.
