The latest Federal Bureau of Investigation crime data for the first quarter of 2024 shows a substantial reduction in crime compared to the same time last year. In fact, the FBI reported that crime fell more than 15% from the first quarter 2023.
A comparison of data from agencies that voluntarily submitted at least two or more common months of data for January through March 2023 and 2024 indicates reported violent crime decreased by 15.2 percent. Murder decreased by 26.4 percent, rape decreased by 25.7 percent, robbery decreased by 17.8 percent, and aggravated assault decreased by 12.5 percent. Reported property crime also decreased by 15.1 percent”
Let me say up front that I don’t believe the FBI’s crime data, and not just because I’m leery of all government agencies under the Biden regime. A conversation I had a month or so back with Dr. John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, opened my eyes to some important truths you won’t hear in the so-called “mainstream” media.
One factor, according to Lott, is that when crime started increasing dramatically during the pandemic, many big cities, in an attempt to hide that trend, simply stopped reporting their crime figures to the FBI. In fact, 37% of police departments, including those in big, crime-ridden cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City, no longer report their crime data to the FBI.
Without those cities, the FBI data doesn’t give a true reflection of the current situation. Also, trends in whether or not citizens report crimes play a factor in the crime data numbers.
“There is a big problem with using the FBI Uniform Crime Report data on crimes reported to police because victims don’t report most crimes,” Lott wrote in a recent analysis. “More importantly, the number of crimes reported to police falls as the arrest rate declines. If people don’t think the police will solve their cases, they are less likely to report them to the police.”
As Lott pointed out to bolster this argument, although the violent crime rate reported to police declined 1.7% between 2021 and 2022, the National Crime Victimization Survey showed that total violent crime—both reported and unreported—actually jumped substantially from 16.5 to 23.5 per thousand during that period. Additionally, violent crime in 2022 was above the rate the last year before the pandemic in 2019 and above the average for the five years from 2015 to 2019.
All that said, the FBI crime data showing greatly reduced crime for the first quarter of 2024 is a hard pill for me to swallow. Most people can see that crime is increasing all around them, yet the “mainstream” media cling to the FBI data to try to prove things aren’t so bad under the Biden Administration.
However, for just a few moments let’s pretend that the data is correct and that crime has fallen substantially. With near record gun sales for almost five years, wouldn’t that reduction prove that Lott’s seminal book, More Guns, Less Crime, published back in 1998 and updated a number of times since then, is even more true today than it was then?
That’s the point Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, made in a recent Ammoland feature juxtaposing the lower crime rate in relation to incredibly high gun sales over the past several years.
“What this report shows is that blaming lawful gun ownership for violent crime is a non-starter, and it always has been,” Gottlieb concluded.
In the end, you can either believe your lying eyes that tell you violent crime continues to be on the upswing and the Biden Administration has failed Americans in that respect, or you can believe crime has gone down substantially in the wake of Americans buying more than 1 million guns a month for the past 58 months. Neither option looks good for the Biden gun-ban clan.
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