John R. Lott, Jr. - President, Crime Prevention Research Center Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Seven fifty one is our time here in Houston's Born News.
As I said, the Federalist has a story they've written
that says that, with deportations on the rise, the US
is on track for the lowest murder rate on record. Now,
what do you read into that. I would read into
that that we had a lot of illegal aliens committing
murders in this country. John Lott Junior, joins, US president

(00:20):
of the Crime Prevention Research Center. Is that true, John,
Did we have that many murders committed by illegals?

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Oh, we don't have any official records that go and
count the number of murders by illegals. We know generally,
during the end of the Biden administration, we had put
out a report indicating for some of the illegals that
were in the country what the crime rate was. So
there were seven point four millions so called non detained

(00:52):
illegal aliens, and of those about six hundred and sixty
two thousand had criminal records in their home countries. The
problem is, there are many reasons to believe that that's
a big underestimate. One of the reasons is the number
of countries like Venezuela, for example, would not cooperate and

(01:14):
identifying the criminal records for those individuals. The other thing
is almost all those individuals were illegals, were people that
had voluntarily turned themselves in at the border. Presumably those
aren't the ones that you should be most concerned about.
The so called two million plus guideaways the Kurk during

(01:36):
the Bide administration, people that we saw coming across the
border but were unable to catch, plus the millions more
that we didn't even see. We had seventy six percent
of the border agents that would normally be guarding the
border have been pulled off of that duty and instead
been used to go and process the illegals who had
voluntarily turned themselves in. And on top of that, you

(02:01):
had about a third of the passive monitoring equipment along
the border was broken during the buy An administration, and
they had not tried to fix it in anyway. So
there are large portions of the border that were we
had neither humans nor passive monitoring equipment to chuck. So
we have no idea how many more millions, but those

(02:21):
are the ones that presumably had a reason for not
kind of voluntarily turning themselves in, you know, and getting
the twenty five hundred dollars prepaid credit card or the
food and housing and other benefits, you know, cell phones,
other benefits right that were there?

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Let me let me let me quickly ask you, because
we're up at the end of the show here, I
want to ask you as well if you could maybe
maybe comment a little bit on what's been going on
with our court system. I would love to know. I
don't know if you folks keep statistics on this, but
I would love to know how many repeat offenders it
relates to murders or accused murders that have been out

(03:00):
on personal recognizance bond or low bond and repeat their crimes.
How many murders we can attribute or how many murders
we can eliminate potentially by by keeping these people locked
up when they're charged with a capital crime.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Unfortunately, there's no national numbers that are kept on that. Obviously,
one can go and point to various local data and
there's you know, the issue is you have a very
small percentage of people, you know, about five percent, who
commit about eighty percent of the violent crime that occurs,

(03:36):
and you know, those people just keep cycling through the
system all the time. And you know, if you don't
go and make sure that those individuals are locked up. Obviously,
Harris County has had a number of situations as well
as other places where they have let people out without

(03:59):
keeping them for bail. And so you know, you can
have a big impact on crime numbers just by making
sure that those particular individuals are detained when we've caught
them for a crime.

Speaker 1 (04:13):
I would think so, John, thank you appreciate your time
this morning. John Lodgun, you're president of the Crime Prevention
Research Center,