Violent Crime REALLY Was Lower Under Trump--and Skyrocketed Under Biden-Harris: A Video Helps to Explain It All
The Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data just released its 2x a year NCVS (survey) that contradicts, yet again, numbers that we were led to believe were favorable to the current administration.
To say that I am becoming more and more dismayed by the lack of trust our government is instilling in us with its phony numbers across different sectors, is an understatement.
A recent debacle is the Bureau of Labor Statistics revising the jobs numbers down by 818,000! Zero Hedge (@zerohedge on X), a prescient finance blog, actually saw the cooked numbers, via the Philadelphia Fed, way back in March 2024 which saw that payrolls were overstated by 800,000. Yet, the Biden-Harris Administration still claimed the success of Bidenomics with the phony numbers.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-jobs-revised-down-818000-election-year-shocker-second-worst-revision-us-history
So I suppose I shouldn’t be terribly surprised when all of the touting and braying by the Biden-Harris Administration and mainstream media that crime was down, TURNED OUT TO BE FALSE! Those of us with eyes can see that our lived experiences (our and multiple neighbors’ catalytic convertors stolen, as well as entire cars; merchandise locked up at Target, acquaintances assaulted, etc.) and what we saw on alternative and social media platforms belied the narrative that was fed to us.
https://crimeresearch.org/2024/09/new-bureau-of-justice-statistics-crime-data-just-released-violent-crime-rape-robbery-and-aggravated-assault-soaring-under-biden/
https://nypost.com/2024/09/13/us-news/violent-crime-has-increased-doj-report-says-after-david-muir-disputed-trumps-claim-that-crime-is-through-the-roof/
(LINKS TO THE ACTUAL BJS/NCVS SURVEY RESULTS NEAR END OF THIS ARTICLE)
Below, John Lott (@JohnRLottJr on X), who is someone I would highly recommend that you follow, is founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. I first discovered him after seeing his gun crimes’ data. He is unparalleled and decidedly anti-narrative with facts and data to back up his assertions. He recently sat down with American Thought Leaders’ Jan Jekielek to discuss the recent revised crime data.
I will select excerpts from the interview to highlight; they will be italicized, but I will add bold and CAPITALIZATION for emphasis. You can listen via YouTube or Apple Podcast; video is around 35 minutes.
Jan Jekielek (JJ): “In this episode, I sit down with John Lott, founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, to discuss his extensive research into national crime rates, arrest rates, as well as gun permit laws, and how they impact crime. Why is there such a disconnect between media reporting that violent crime is down, and the public's perception that crime is surging?”
John Lott (JL): “A lot of the media is talking about crime rates going down the last couple of years. The problem is, is I don't think most of the media understands the different numbers that are being put out. You have two different sources on crime numbers, both from the Department of Justice.
One's the FBI data collecting the number of reported crimes to police [Uniform Crime Reporting, UCR]. And the other one is something called the National Crime Victimization Survey [NCVS], which surveys about 240,000 people each year, to try to get a measure of total crime, both reported and unreported. We know most violent crime, most property crimes are reported to police, but we know that from the National Crime Victimization Data….
And there's a simple reason, I think, for why that's the case. But these numbers traditionally have moved together. The FBI reported crime data traditionally has moved up and down with the National Crime Victimization Data, except for the last three years.
IN THE LAST THREE YEARS, THEY’VE GONE IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS. They've been perfectly negatively related to each other. So for example, in 2022, the last year that we have the National Crime Victimization Data for, while 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. Law enforcement in this country has basically collapsed. And people have some idea about this.
They go to a CVS or a Walgreens in many parts of the country, and everything's behind glass. They know that that wasn't true a few years ago. But it's much more systematically across the spectrum…
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.
And one of the things we know, and we've known for a long time, and that is as people don't think the criminals are going to be caught and punished, they're less likely to go and report the crimes. It's also become more difficult for people to report crimes too.”
JJ: “You were pointing out that there are a lot of CVSs and other type stores that are open around the clock that have a lot of their products behind glass. I've seen that in New York. I've seen that in DC.
But that's not violent crime. And so the overall rates going up, is that the case across all types of crime?”
JL: “Yeah. If you compare murder before COVID to now, it's still about 7% higher. But other types of violent crime have gone up much more than that.
And property crime has soared. What's happened is, is that as we've had cuts back in police, the police have focused on the most severe crimes, murder primarily, and moved resources away from other types of crimes. And so these other types of crimes have simply gotten much worse.
You know, it's, criminals have little to worry about in terms of getting caught and punished. So you see more crime…
So in many parts of the country now, if you call up 911, they'll ask you, is this an emergency? And basically, they're trying to figure out, is the crime still in progress? If the crime is still in progress, they'll send a police car out.
If it's not, they say, well, you can come down to the police station now and report the crime. That wasn't true four or five years ago. Before, if there was a crime, they'd send out a police car all the time.”
JJ: “Okay. Well, so tell me a little bit about what's happened to police departments. This is something I've covered quite a bit on the show in the past, but I'd love to know where we're at now, because we've had a number of stories of kind of turnarounds in certain states and districts and so forth.”
JL: “Right. Well, I mean, you had lots of big cuts in many places in 2020, 2021. In the last year or so, they've started to go back and hire police.
But you also had a lot of retirements that were occurring for police officers. So you may have lost somebody who had 15 years of experience, and now you've hired somebody who's been on the job for six months or a year. They simply aren't going to be as effective as of a police officer, as somebody who had 15 years.
I did want to mention one thing on the murder, and that is one big problem that we have right now is that a HUGE NUMBER OF POLICE DEPARTMENTS ARE NO LONGER EVEN REPORTING DATA TO THE FBI. So starting in 2021, there were changes in the rules there for reporting. In 2022, for example, 32% of police departments were no longer reporting any data to the FBI.
That compares to about 3% in 2020. And another 24% of police departments were only partially reporting crime data. So that means LESS THAN HALF OF POLICE DEPARTMENTS NOW, as compared to 97% before, are reporting complete crime data to the FBI.
Now, the FBI will kind of guess and make estimates on what the missing data is. But there are problems with them doing that. And it includes everything from murder to all sorts of other violent crime and property crimes there, that they're having to guess and estimate and there are problems with that.
So, and those are the guesses and estimates that are making it into that FBI database that you're describing.”
JJ: “So why are they not reporting anymore? I mean, that's a huge shift.”
JL: “There were changes in reporting requirements put into effect by the Biden administration. They were requiring more information on some things, and they were requiring more frequent reporting. And a number of police departments just say, this is just too onerous….
Now, for many cases, they're requiring that you come into the police station to do the report. I don't think a lot of people understand that simply calling up 911 doesn't result in the crime being reported. You have to actually have an officer fill out a police report.
Other problems that you have is that you have many places downgrading crimes. So like in New York City and Manhattan, where Alvin Bragg, who's been in the news a fair amount recently, he's downgraded 60% of felonies, violent felonies. The vast majority of those are aggravated assaults.
And what he's done is he refuses to prosecute people for firearms offenses. So what can make something an aggravated assault, which is a felony, as compared to a simple assault, which is a misdemeanor, is whether a weapon was used in the assault. And since he's refusing to prosecute these criminals for weapons offenses, he's downgraded, not only has he downgraded 60% of the felonies, but almost all those have been downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor, from aggravated assault to simple assault, because he's kicked out or removed the weapon part of that.
And that affects the FBI data, because the FBI data only includes aggravated assaults in the violent crime numbers, not simple assaults. And so by moving these crimes from aggravated to simple, that helps reduce the FBI number of reported crimes. But the national crime victimization data picks them up.
And the reason why they pick them up is because, in these 240,000 people that they're interviewing, they'll ask you what happened with the crime. And they'll say, I was assaulted, the person had a gun. And so the national crime victimization data will record that as an aggravated assault, even though the FBI data will record it as nothing, because it's not an aggravated assault anymore.”
JJ: “Are there other databases that will tell you that seem to have this incongruence, or other sets of databases in other areas that...”
JL: “Well, I mean, I know the crime data the best. You know, we know that there have been some issues with the FBI reported crime data before, and so kind of the gold standard that we've used over time has been the national crime victimization data, because we care about total crimes, not just what's reported. And I think a lot of people have an understanding that a lot of violent crimes aren't reported, but the only way we know that, the measure that we have that is the national crime victimization data.”
JJ: “What about, you know, perception, sort of societal perception of crime? I mean, my sense from talking to people, and this is just very anecdotal, is that they sense that there is more.”
JL: “You see headline after headline in the news articles saying, crime is falling, but people think that it's increasing. I mean, I can give you dozens of headlines like that. And what they're doing is they're looking at surveys from Gallup to Harris to Rasmussen to others that are showing people have increasing fears about violent crime, that they say that it's been increasing.
But then the media looks at the FBI reported crime data and said, well, that's falling. And so you have all these news articles saying that people just have this mistaken impression. They blame it on the news media for covering crimes or something like that as creating the impression….
What you've seen over the last few years is that crime has 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. 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…”
END OF EXCERPTS
BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS’ CRIME DATA SURVEY RESULTS, PDF:
https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv23.pdf
BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS’ CRIME DATA SURVEY RESULTS, WEBSITE:
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimization-2023
Additional material to chew on: notice a common theme?
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/meet-americas-10-most-dangerous-cities-5504102
Pray for our nation.
The media and Democrats like to state crime has dropped and they refer to the FBI UCR. However, most major cities are no longer reporting their crime stats and that skews the numbers. I like seeing the NCVS data.
There’s lies, damned lies, and nearly every statistic put out by the academic/political/professional left.