The Unreported Rise in Violent Crime in America: John Lott

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This is the TV version of Jan Jekielek’s interview with John Lott. The longer-form version was released on Epoch TV on August 15, 2024.

John Lott is the founder and president of The Crime Prevention Research Center. Jan Jekielek talks to him about his extensive research into national crime rates, arrest rates, as well as gun permit laws and how they impact crime.

“In 2022, the last year that we have the National Crime Victimization data, the FBI showed a 2% drop in violent crime. The National Crime Victimization data showed a 42% increase in total violent crime. And I think one of the big reasons for this is that you have a change in the rate that people are being arrested.”

CHAPTER HEADERS
0:00:00 Introduction – Disconnect Between Crime Reporting and Public Perception
0:01:44 Diverging Crime Data Trends – FBI vs. National Crime Victimization Survey
0:03:33 Plummeting Arrest Rates for Violent and Property Crimes
0:07:06 Challenges with Police Departments Reporting Crime Data to the FBI
0:09:56 Prosecutors Downgrading Felonies to Misdemeanors
0:12:55 Public Perception of Rising Crime Rates
0:15:23 Increase in Concealed Carry Permits and Constitutional Carry States
0:20:00 Concealed Carry’s Impact on Reducing Violent Crime
0:23:08 Conclusion – Making Crime Risky for Criminals

Why is there such a disconnect between FBI data showing that violent crime is down and the public’s perception that crime is surging? John Lott: “The media looks at the FBI reported crime data. The problem is a huge number of police departments are no longer even reporting data to the FBI.”

“If you look at large cities, over a million with population, and this is true across all cities, they had an average arrest rate for violent crimes of 44% prior to covid, it started falling in 2020 and by 2022 the arrest rates for reported violent crime was down to 20% from 44% to 20%. That’s over a 50% drop, and that’s just for reported crimes. If you look at arrests for total crimes reported and unreported, only 8% of violent crimes result in arrest, and only 1% of total property crimes result in arrests, and not everybody who’s arrested is charged, let alone prosecuted and convicted. And so that’s been a real sea change. I mean, you can look over the last 70 years of crime data and you see nothing like that, even over decades, let alone within a three year period of time.”

According to John Lott, “crime is kind of leaked out of the zip codes where it was traditionally the highest into other zip codes that in the past didn’t experience high crime rates. So you’ve had not only an increase in violent crime in areas where it’s traditionally been there, but you’ve also had it go into areas that had been safer before.”

“I think people realize to varying degrees that law enforcement’s collapsed in this country. You
know, we have about 22 million Americans with a concealed carry permit now in the United States. But even more than that, we have, we have 29 constitutional carry states now where you don’t even need to have a permit. So we did a survey last year to try to get information on
the rate that people are carrying permit concealed handguns. Pew had done one a few years
ago, where in 2017 they had like 5% of American likely voters were carrying all or most of the time. Our survey indicated that was about 15% now, so that’s a three fold increase that’s occurred between 2017 and 2023 and one of the reasons why you’ve had this big increase in the number of constitutional carry States over the last few years has been what happened during covid. You had this big increase in violent crime, and over 20 of the states stopped issuing concealed carry permits. And so people realized that they didn’t want to have to depend upon the government to issue a permit for them to be able to go and carry because if you have a disaster that occurs and the government shuts down issuing permits. Again, that’s exactly when you’re going to need to be able to go and carry.”

“If you want to reduce crime, you have to make it risky for criminals to commit crime."

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