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Former President Donald Trump recently laid out a tough-on-crime agenda during his visit to battleground Michigan, where he compared crime rates under his administration to those under President Biden and Vice President Harris.
Trump asserted that crime has surged since he left office, directly contradicting claims that crime has decreased under the current administration.
During his speech, Trump referenced data from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), noting that violent crime fell by 177% during his administration. He challenged the narrative that crime decreased under Biden.
He stated, “Is it true? Did crime rise under Trump and fall under Biden? No, the opposite is true.”
To support his claims, Trump cited John Lott, president of the CPRC and author of More Guns, Less Crime. Lott explained in an interview on NewsMax2 that there are two primary measures of crime: the FBI’s data on reported crimes and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization data, which includes both reported and unreported crimes.
He pointed out a significant divergence in these data sets since 2020, with the FBI showing a 2% drop in reported violent crime in 2022, while the National Crime Victimization data reported a 42% increase.
Lott explained:
And before 2020, those numbers usually went together. When one went up, the other went up. Since 2020, they’ve consistently gone in opposite directions, and by huge amounts. You take the data for 2022, which is the last year that the Bureau of Justice Statistics data is available. Well, the FBI showed a 2% drop in reported violent crime, but the National Crime Victimization data showed a 42% increase in violent crime. We’ve never seen such a large increase in one year or two years ever in the data.
Lott also highlighted a decline in police departments reporting crime data to the FBI, with participation dropping from 97% in 2020 to less than half in 2022. He noted that this, combined with what he described as a “collapse in policing,” has led to a significant decrease in arrests for reported crimes in major cities.
Lott used the example of retail theft in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where stores have resorted to locking up merchandise behind glass due to increased theft.
“Look, people can go to a CVS or Walgreens in many major cities from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles and see that everything’s behind glass now,” Lott told NewsMax2.
“That if you want to go and buy something, you have to have a sales clerk come over and unlock the glass and stand next to you while you go and read the ingredients on the packages and decide what to go and buy,” he continued. “People know that that wasn’t the case a few years ago.”
NewsMax2’s Ed Henry also pointed to the ongoing gun violence in Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention was held. He noted that “every single weekend, dozens of people are shot,” yet few arrests follow, based on Lott’s data.
At the end of the day, Trump’s gotta clear message for voters: crime has risen sharply under the Biden-Harris administration. No doubt the former president is using this issue to draw a stark contrast between him and his opponent as the 2024 election nears.
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