The mainstream media loves to use federal statistics as a hook for their one-sided gun control narratives. The thing is, many of these statistics are questionable, even those from various federal agencies. The work of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) takes a deep look at the factual accuracy of these “official data.” When I contacted John Lott, the president and founder of the CPRC, he actually talked about his time as a senior advisor for research and statistics at the Office of Justice Programs—a division of the Department of Justice that awards about $5 billion in grants each year—during the Trump administration and his research on crime and gun ownership. He has a lot to say about the statistics these agencies release. Since crime is a major issue in this upcoming election, we decided it was time to talk to Lott about how politically skewed these federal agency numbers can be.
A1F: Just hours after Hunter Biden was convicted of gun possession, his father, President Joe Biden (Democrat), spoke at an Everytown for Gun Safety event. He began the speech by saying that the murder rate rose faster in the year before his presidency than at any time in history, while last year it fell more than at any time in history. Is that true?
Lott: This claim needs to be put into context. The first year of COVID saw a sharp increase in murder rates because many mayors and other officials in major cities decided not to put police on the streets during the unrest following the George Floyd incident. Many of these jurisdictions even cut police budgets and weakened criminal law. Additionally, many far-left district attorneys saw the unrest as a mandate to refuse to prosecute many violent criminals; in fact, many progressive judges released large percentages of inmates from local jails in 2020, 2021, and even 2022. In some urban areas, half, even two-thirds of inmates were released. So it’s not too surprising that crime rates have increased.
Biden would like to blame Trump for this increase, but the policies of the incumbent gun control advocates are undoubtedly a reason for the increase in the murder rate.
The most important thing to me is that law enforcement in this country has broken down in many areas because of the policies of gun control advocates. If you look at arrest rates for violent crime in major cities, you see that they have gone from a fairly consistent 44% before 2020 to about 20% by 2022 for reported crimes, according to FBI data. It doesn’t surprise me that if you don’t catch these criminals and punish them, there will be an increase in violent crime.
For example, if arrest rates fall – that is, people no longer believe that criminals will be caught and punished – the number of people reporting crimes to the police also falls.
In many jurisdictions, when you call 911, the dispatcher will ask you if it’s an emergency. What they literally mean by that is, is the perpetrator still there? If people say, “No, the crime was committed 10 minutes ago,” or something similar, the dispatcher will tell them to come to the police station and fill out a report. In years past, a police officer would have been sent to the house and written a report. But because of reduced budgets, that’s not always the case anymore. So a lot of these people just don’t bother going to the police station because they don’t think anything is going to be done.
We have another problem. A lot of left-wing prosecutors are downgrading a lot of crimes. That affects the statistics. The most common thing that gets downgraded is aggravated assault. It gets downgraded to simple assault. Aggravated assault is included in the FBI crime reports. Simple assault is not. The big difference between the two is whether a weapon is used. If a weapon is used, like a pistol, then that would be aggravated assault. A lot of these prosecutors refuse to charge people with gun offenses.
A1F: What about ordinary, law-abiding gun owners?
Lott: That’s right. I’m talking about criminals. As store owners in New York City have discovered, they target law-abiding citizens.
A1F: Isn’t it also true that some major cities have not submitted their data to FBI reports in recent years?
Lott: That’s right. In 2022, 31% of police departments across the country did not report their data to the FBI. In 2021, it was even worse, when 37% did not report. Before that, it was about 97% of police departments. In 2022, there were many police departments that stopped reporting, for example in New York City and Los Angeles.
The FBI doesn’t just put zeros on the lists when these places don’t report their crime data. The FBI tries to estimate the number of crimes. I think they did a poor job of estimating the number of crimes there.
A1F: Why this huge drop within a year? Have the forms changed or something?
Lott: The FBI has implemented a new system called the National Background Investigation Services (NIBIS). But you can access CompStat to get data for Los Angeles and New York City easily. It’s just that some places choose not to report that data to the FBI. So we have a lot of very large police departments where the vast majority of violent crime happens, but the data isn’t shared. Then the mainstream media makes certain claims — and politicians like Joe Biden use the data for political reasons — but upon closer inspection, their claims are misleading at best.
Incredibly, only about 8% of violent crimes (reported and unreported) in these cities result in an arrest. Only 1% of property crimes (reported and unreported) result in arrests. These are simply mind-boggling numbers. When criminals have a 92% chance of not being arrested, prosecuted, or convicted, they don’t fear the consequences if they commit more crimes.
The irony is that, on the one hand, Biden refuses to criticize prosecutors who refuse to prosecute violent criminals, but on the other hand he also wants to make it more difficult and expensive for law-abiding citizens to protect themselves.
A1F: What is the number of active murderers who are stopped by armed citizens? You mentioned that the FBI data on this is questionable.
Lott: That’s right, there’s something called Active Shooter Incidents reports that the FBI puts out every year. An active shooter incident is an instance where someone was shot with a gun in public – not as part of another type of crime, like a robbery or a gang fight in a drug zone. It can be anything from one person being shot at and missing to a mass shooting in public. And that FBI data has been used to claim that armed civilians rarely stop these types of active shooter incidents.
I was tasked with looking into this when I was at the Justice Department. I found that the number of cases they miss or misclassify is shocking. The FBI claims that in the nine years from 2014 to 2022, only about 4.6% of these shooting sprees were stopped by citizens with concealed weapons permits. Well, we looked into these cases and found it’s more like 36%. When I was at the Justice Department, I said, “Look, you have to distinguish attacks in places where guns are prohibited from those where people are allowed to possess them. You can’t expect citizens to stop these crimes in ‘gun-free zones.'” I pointed out that when you do that, you find that over 60% of these shooting sprees are stopped by law-abiding citizens. Yet they refused to manipulate the statistics. Remember, no one has to believe me for that. We list all the cases that the FBI has overlooked or misclassified, www.crimeresearch.org.
