John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said the alarming trends, based on conflicting data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, suggest violent crime isn't falling, but rather is increasing and going unreported.
Lott detailed this trend at a Trump campaign press conference on Friday, hours before the National Fraternal Order of Police endorsed former President Donald Trump.
The expert pointed to a wide gap between violent crime incidents reported in the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey and those reported by the FBI, which he said is particularly striking because historical data from both organizations show similar trends.
“There are two approaches the Department of Justice is taking to combat crime,” Lott explained.
One is the FBI data on crimes reported to the police, and the other is the National Crime Victimization Survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which measures total crime, both reported and unreported. They survey 240,000 people every year, and they've been doing this for 50 years.
“Prior to 2020, these two indicators broadly moved together, but since 2020 they have moved in opposite directions every year, and the movements have often been very large,” he added. “Looking at 2022, the last complete year for which we have final data for these two metrics, the FBI showed a 2% decrease in reported violent crime, but the National Crime Victimization Data showed a 42% increase in violent crime.”
In fact, in 2021, the F.B.I. Reported There are 387 violent crimes per 100,000 people in the city. This will decrease to 380.7 per 100,000 people in 2022. However, the National Crime Victimization Survey says the number of reported violent crimes is Increased From 16.5 cases per 1,000 people in 2021 to 23.5 cases per 1,000 people in 2022, a 42 percent decrease.
Lott said one reason for this trend is that enforcement for certain crimes has “broken down” in recent years.
We have a breakdown in policing of violent and property crimes in this country. If you just look at the FBI data that is generally covered by the media and the Democrats focus on, for example, the average arrest rate for violent crimes in large cities of over 1 million people over the five-year period before COVID was 44%. Then it started to decline, dropping 20% by 2022. That's a drop of more than 50% in three years. It has never been this low since we've had the FBI data.
Notably, in recent years, some Democratic-leaning states and Democratic district attorneys in major cities have adopted soft-on-crime policies, including cashless bail for certain felonies in some places, such as New York.
Lott emphasized that a factor in whether victims actually report violent crimes is whether they believe the perpetrator will be held accountable.
“So the question you have to ask yourself is is it more interesting to look at the number of reported crimes or to look at the total number of crimes,” he told reporters on a conference call. “And one of the reasons this collapse is important is we've known for a long time that the rate at which people report crimes to the police depends in part on whether they think something will happen, whether they think criminals will be arrested and punished.”
“If criminals don't believe they will be caught and punished, they are less likely to report crimes to the police,” he added.
