Crime Prevention Research Center president John Lott penned an op-ed Tuesday in which he explained that despite establishment claims, violent crime actually rose under Biden and fell under Trump.
In the op-ed, published by the New York Post, Lott explained that there are two ways of examining occurrences of violent crime: One is the measure of those crimes reported to police and the other is the measure of those crimes which were not reported.
Lott wrote:
There are two measures of crime: One, the FBI’s NIBRS, counts the number of crimes reported to police yearly.
The other, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, asks about 240,000 people each year whether they have been victims of crime, in an attempt to measure both reported and unreported crimes.
He continued, “Since 2020, [the] two measures have been highly negatively correlated: The FBI has been finding fewer instances of crime, but people are simultaneously answering in greater numbers that they have been victims.”
As for the FBI stats, which are based on police precincts/departments reporting crime, on June 24, 2024, Breitbart News reported that thousands of police precincts had not been reporting crime data to the FBI.
The Marshall Project explained that in 2020 “almost every law enforcement agency was included in the FBI’s database.” However, in 2021, the FBI went to a new system for compiling data and would only accept police precinct reports through the new system.
The result? “Thousands of police agencies fell through the cracks because they didn’t catch up with the changes on time.” Thus, in 2022 there were far fewer police precincts turning in crime data; the Marshall Project reported in 2023 that “more than 6,000 law enforcement agencies were missing from the FBI’s national crime data last year, representing nearly one-third of the nation’s 18,000 police agencies.”
The point: Establishment media can report a decline in reported violent crime instances by relying on the FBI stats. So Lott looked at the unreported figures to see what was really going on and found, “For instance, in 2022, the FBI reported a 2.1% drop in violent crime, but the NCVS showed an alarming increase of 42.4% — the largest one-year percentage increase in violent crime ever reported by that measure.”
Near the end of the op-ed Lott pointed out, “Murder rates did drop by 13% in 2023, although the preliminary 2023 murder rate is still 7% above 2019 levels.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio, a member of Gun Owners of America, and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and has a Ph.D. in Military History. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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