America's Criminologist 05 19 26 Guest John R. Lott, Jr

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Col steals.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Wait, just a.

Speaker 3 (00:12):
Shadows a Secrets America squam analogist.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Sales of the law inclosy, break and Tape.

Speaker 4 (00:31):
Bruce, And here's America's criminologist, doctor Kerry Myers.

Speaker 5 (00:42):
Thank you, mister producer, appreciate it. Welcome to America's Criminologists.
I'm doctor Curry Myers, retired major county sheriff, former special agent,
state trooper. Also spent fifteen years in the world of academia.
Don't hold that against me, serving as a school dean
and professor teaching criminology. This is a show where where
we talk about crime, culture and the foundations that sustain

(01:06):
civil society. I call it the three important pillars of society, Faith, family, information,
because crime doesn't just begin in the streets, it begins
when those foundations are weak. And I wrote a book
called The Avid of Faro Man where we talked about
the importance of reigniting faith, family information back into our lives.
As always, if you like to explore more about my

(01:27):
work and applied criminology, criminal justice, ethics, and the philosophy
quite frankly behind this program, you can visit my substack
page at doctor Currymeyers dot Substack dot com. This segment
of America's Criminologist is brought to you by Real Resilience.
That's our ee L. It's a transformative program helping inmates

(01:47):
prepare for successful re entry using inspirational films and guided discussion.
Real Resilience teaches practical tools to build resilience, strengthen relationships,
and restore hope for the future. It's real learning through
real stories where positive choices are modeled, not just preached.
Real Resilience because re entry isn't just released, it's a

(02:09):
second chance done right. Okay, Today I have a wonderful guest.
We're going to examine a couple issues here dominating the
national criminal justice discussion. First, whether intense media attention surrounding
high profile offenders inspires what's called copycat violence, the emerging

(02:29):
Luigi Mansion effect. And second, what the data actually says
about the defensive gun use in America. So first segment
of this we're going to get into that copycat violence.
The second segment we're going to talk about the defensive
gun use in America. Joining US is one of the
nation's foremost crime economists and firearms policy researchers, Doctor John Arlott, Junior.

(02:54):
He is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center,
former DOJSON senior advisor, prolific scholar, and author of More Guns,
Less Crime and Gun Control Myths. If you look above
my right shoulder, if you've got your cameras where you're
using it for those that are streaming, you can see
his book More Guns Less Crime right there. He also

(03:15):
wrote Gun Control Myths. We'll examine the criminological realities behind
media contagion, offender glorification, deterrence, and whether ordinary citizens use
firearms defensively far more often than criminals use them offensively.
We're also going to explore how modern media ecosystems, social
media algorithms, and cultural fascination with violent offenders may unintentionally

(03:40):
and sometimes intentionally incentivize deviant behavior by transforming criminals into
what's called the anti hero effect or celebrity effect. From
copycat violence and the erosion of moral accountability to the
debate over arm self defense and constitutional liberties, Today's discussion
cuts through the plitical narratives and focuses on empirical evidence,

(04:03):
public safety, and the deeper cultural forces shaping America today.
Joining us is doctor John R. Lott junior again. He's
president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and one of
the most cited economists in the world on crime and
public policy. On a personal note, doctor Lott has long
been a very well respected economists as far as I'm concerned,

(04:27):
He's somebody that I go to. And there's many economists
that have done a wonderful job in discussing and researching
crime statistics. I think they do more than most criminologists do.
Quite frankly. During the Trump administration, doctor Lott served as
Senior Advisor of Research and Statistics at the US Department

(04:48):
of Justice. He held positions at the University of Chicago, Yale, Stanford, UCLA,
Rice University, and the Wharton School. Is the author of
more than one hundred per viewed and academic articles, ten books,
including More Guns, Less Crime. As I cited earlier, The
Biased Against Guns and Gun Control Myths. One of my

(05:09):
other favorite economists, Milton Freeman, once said John Lott has
few equals as a perceptive analyst of controversial public policy issues.
Doctor Lot, my friend, thanks for coming.

Speaker 4 (05:23):
Appreciate it well, Thanks very much for having me on.
I greatly appreciate it.

Speaker 5 (05:27):
Very good. Well. In this segment, we're going to talk
a tackle about one of the most dangerous and underdiscussed
criminological phenomenons in American society is called the contagion effect.
Social contagions are alive and well right now, doctor Lott.
It's also fostered, I think more because of the use
of social media. I think we have also untreated mental

(05:50):
health and mental illness. That is adding to that. We
have places like California. They don't have mandated treatment for
mental health anymore. They don't have mandated treatment for drug
cases anymore, they don't have mandated jail. It just it
really depends on the prosecutor and the judges. And California,

(06:13):
for instance, is not taking too many people in because
they're not. The governor there has decided he's not going
to fund prisons. So those are some of the issues
that we're seeing. If in many ways, the broken window
theory here applies, and if we just follow it. We
were talking about this before the show started. If we
just follow really the main principles of the broken window theory,

(06:37):
it seems like we wouldn't be into the problems that
we're having today. What are your thoughts, Well.

Speaker 4 (06:42):
I mean, I think there are lots of things involved here,
obviously broken windows. The notion is is that if you
have a lot of low level crime that's occurring in
an area, people may be afraid or uncomfortable being outside.
And if you don't have people outside, you're going to
have fewer witnesses that are going to be there in

(07:03):
case crimes occur. Criminals are going to be able to
go and commit crime with kind of more with less
concern that they're going to be caught and punished. And
you know, it's not really rocket science that we're talking
about here. If you want to reduce crime, you have
to make it riskier for criminals to commit crime. That
means things like higher rest rates, higher conviction rates, longer

(07:24):
prison sentences. It also means being able to let victims
defend themselves. All those things make it riskier for criminals
to commit crime. And you know, it's no different than
anything else. I'm an economist, as you say, Economists say, well,
if the price of apples go up, people buy fewer apples. Well,
if the cost of committing crime from criminals goes up,

(07:48):
if it's riskier for them to do that, you're going
to see you're going to see less crime that's occurring.

Speaker 5 (07:55):
Well, and you as you noted, I think also it
affects the business side of it because based on the economy,
if you look again, states like California and Washington State, Oregon,
New York now where you have businesses actually abandon their
abanding their stores. And you know, some people are citing
business regulations, which is true, and taxes of course, but

(08:18):
the really the underlying issue is crime. Look.

Speaker 4 (08:23):
Look, there's the direct victims of crime, obviously, but you
have indirect victims of crime. So if I have more
crime in an area, I mean I may have more
theft and things like that, and that may cause stores
to close. But just the risk of being an area
where there's higher crime, stores may close. And the issue,

(08:45):
you know, I often a lot of this debate about
penalties has to do with well, you know, they are
concerned about the race of the criminal. My concern is
the race of the victim. And one thing people don't
understand is that people tend overwhelmingly to commit crimes against
people who are like the criminals. But ninety percent of

(09:10):
blacks are murdered by other blacks. But so you have
crime occurring in the areas which are similar to the
demographics of the criminals that are there. And so when
you have businesses closed, who works in those stores, who
shops in those stores, who disproportionately owned the businesses in

(09:30):
those areas, who owned homes in areas whose property values
are depressed because of things like higher violent crime rates
that are occurring, so they're poor as a result of that.
And so, you know, you have a very wide range
of victims beyond you know, obviously you have the direct victims,
the people who are murdered, the people who are raped

(09:52):
or assaulted but you are robbed, But you also have
all these other people who are hurt as a result
of the crimes.

Speaker 5 (10:04):
We have seen copycat cases. I've worked them before in
law enforcement when I was a special agent, when I
worked homicides. It seems to me that today we're seeing
even more copycat effects, and it's getting to the point
where they call it this Luigi Mangion effect. Can you
explain why that particular case gained such notoriety and perhaps

(10:28):
why in particular, this person became basically idolized by the left.

Speaker 4 (10:35):
Well, I mean, this type of copycat is something, as
you indicate, we've seen for a long time, you can
go and look at things like mass public shootings. For example,
going all the way back to Columbine, Dylan Cleebold and
Eric Harris, in their writings that they had there, made
it very clear that you know, they wanted to go

(10:56):
and obtain fame. And you see time after time and
the diaries of manifestos that these mass murderers leave behind,
they talk about wanting to go and kill more, get
more media attention. Then you know some other previous killer
had gotten and you know, you look at something like

(11:16):
the Sandy Hook killer. He had done what police described
as essentially a doctoral dissertation where he looked at mass
shootings over the previous forty years, and according to one
police report, he had graphed out the relationship between the
number of people killed in different tacts around the world
and the amount of media attention that they got. He

(11:39):
wanted to go and kill more people than the Norway
killer had killed, who killed sixty seven people if you
just look at the gunshot deaths, not including the bombing
deaths that he had there, and you know that's more
than any mass public shooting in the United States. And
he thought that if he could go and kill more
people than that, then he could get even more worldwide

(12:01):
media attention. My own belief, I have no proof for this,
but my own guess is that one of the reasons
why he attacked an elementary school was in part because
of the shock value of killing little kids, and that
he might have thought that that was going to help
get him even more media attention. But you have individuals

(12:22):
who are suicidal, who feel unappreciated, who but they want
people to know that they were here, and so, you know,
people have always wanted to commit suicide, but someplace along
the line, people realize that they could get attention by
going and killing lots of other people. And you know,

(12:46):
it's important to understand that for a couple of reasons.
But one of the reasons why it's very important to
understand that is that if you're going to stop these attacks,
you have to understand what's motivating them, and you have
to be able to go and take it away. Now,
I don't think you need to go and have something
like rewrite the First Amendment. I'm not even sure how

(13:09):
you would do something like that, and I'm not supporting it.
But once you realize that their goal is to get
media attention, and they explicitly, time after time in their
diaries of manifestos talk about how if they can only
kill more people than such and such did they can
get even more media attention. The question becomes, then, how

(13:31):
can you limit the amount of harm that they can
do so you can limit in their minds the amount
of media attention they're going to get. And that has
to do with issues like gun free zones and stuff.
And it's the reason why they explicitly, time after time
talk about why they pick the targets that they do.
It's one of my biggest pet peeves with the media

(13:53):
is that the media refuses to go and cover those
parts of their diaries and manifestos where they explain why
they picked the targets they do. You just will never
see even though the media covers the diaries of manifestos,
they refuse to cover those parts of the diaries of
manifestos where they explain why they picked the targets that

(14:14):
they do. And I think that's a big mistake.

Speaker 5 (14:18):
But with the band, some places, we have some places
where law enforcement has refused to put out the manifestos too.
Were you know that's rare.

Speaker 4 (14:28):
I mean, you've liked the Nashville school shooting case, the
Catholic school shooting case. There, the Biden administration quickly got
a hold of the manifesto and they held that up.
It was parts of it were leaked, and then finally
under the Trump administration last year, they released the whole
manifesto that was there. But usually almost right away, you know,

(14:52):
within less than a day, you'll get it. And I
forced myself to read through these things and we have
we have links to them on our website at crimeresearch
dot org, and literally dozens of times you'll see explicit

(15:13):
discussions in there about why they picked the targets that
they do. But you know, with regard to Luigi Mangioni,
you know, the thing is here, you have all these
women and other things. You know, they're just kind of
swooning over the guy, and you know, so it's not
too surprising that you have other people who want to

(15:36):
go and get that type of attention for themselves. And
we put up a post on our website recently where
we just went through quotes from people who have been
committing these types of attacks afterwards after his where they
kind of reference his as you know, kind of the
motivation that they'd like to get similar type of attention.

Speaker 5 (16:00):
Well, and when you see that with serial killers too,
or high profile murder sometimes they'll get all of a
sudden tens of you know, dozens of women that boyfriends
and have You know, there's another thing that's I did

(16:21):
research starting in about twenty sixteen looking at mass shootings,
and it was very interesting to see the trend increase
in transgenderism related or let me rephrase that, gender fluidity
as being one of the issues, or maybe they didn't
bring it up as an issue, but they were going

(16:41):
through gender identity issues. And starting in about twenty twenty,
it seemed like about fifty percent of the mass shootings
that we saw had some link towards that kind of
mental illness. Is that something else that is done through
kind of a copycat or As a researcher, how do

(17:03):
you try to identify causal reasons why we're seeing that increase?

Speaker 4 (17:08):
Well, I mean there are two issues. One is is
there a pattern, and the other one is causality. Causality
is harder to prove, but I think you know a
lot of the media has written articles saying, well, trans
individuals just don't make up that large of percentage, you know,

(17:30):
like ten percent or whatever of these types of attacks,
and that's small. Well, I think that's pretty misleading because
you have to go and compare them to their share
of the population. So if they make up less than
one percent of the population, but they make up ten
percent of the attacks, you know, that's that's pretty disproportionate there.

(17:54):
And on our website we go through you know, simple
statistical tests that are there to go and show how
disproportionate it is. I don't know of any other group
in the population that's as disproportionately involved in either mass
public shootings or in terms of active shooting attacks then

(18:18):
either trans individuals or I guess Muslims. But those are
basically the two groups that you see are disproportionately involved.
And to me, it's not super shocking with regard to
the trans individuals. And the reason is is because, as
I mentioned before, you're overwhelmingly talking about individuals who are suicidal,

(18:41):
and we know that trans individuals are quite disproportionately suicidal,
and so, you know, and they feel unappreciated or they
feel put upon in some way, and so it's not
shocking to me that they are so overrepresented there. But

(19:04):
you got to do You've got to look at it
differently than I think the legacy media has been looking
at it. You have to go and say, not just
their share of the attackers, but also kind of compare
it to their share of the population that's there.

Speaker 5 (19:21):
Do you think social media now is one of the
biggest accelerants for these kinds of violent contagions.

Speaker 4 (19:29):
Well, it's hard to prove, but I think it probably
has something to do with it. I think it has
a lot to do with people being depressed. I think
it has a lot to do with kind of people
kind of getting into certain types of you know, rabbit holes.

(19:49):
In terms of convincing themselves of different things. People kind
of isolate themselves in terms of having individuals who are
of the same view. You may only have a tiny
percent of people in the country as a whole who
do that, and particularly you know, you may have very

(20:11):
few people in your local area who may have a
certain view. But when you have social media that allows
you to go and be contacts with people you know
across the whole country or world, it's very likely that
you can run into people who you know have similar
views and they feed on each other there I'm most concerned.

(20:36):
We recently put up a survey from you gov which
looks at whether people think that violence is an appropriate
way to deal with political differences that are there, and
it's really pretty amazing. You see, you know, people who
classify themselves as very liberal think that that type of

(20:57):
violence is acceptable at a rate that's about nine and
a half times the rate that people who classify themselves
is very conservative view such violence as acceptable. And you know,
a lot of it, I think has to do people
have to be careful about the type of language that
they're using. I mean, if people really believe that individuals

(21:19):
are Hitler or fascist or whatever, I'm not sure what
worse terms one can possibly use than those. But if
you get even a tiny fraction of people who sincerely
believe that those types of claims are accurate, it's not
too surprising that you're going to see violence that occurs.

(21:41):
And Luigi, you know, obviously, in his case, he thought
he was justified in killing somebody who is a healthcare
ensure that's there, and apparently there's a number of other
people who feel he was justified in using that type
of violence.

Speaker 5 (22:01):
We also seem to be seeing an increase in the
dark psychological traits, and in particular, I mean we already
have kind of advanced narcissism. Does that notoriety kind of
motivate those kinds of persons that are suffering from those
dark traits, especially if they're not getting the middle illness
treatment that they should be getting well.

Speaker 4 (22:23):
I think it goes and helps drives why they commit
these crimes to get attention. They crave attention anybody who
And I forced myself to read the diaries of manifestos
for these mass murders because they're pretty depressing type of things.
But you have time after time that people feel that

(22:43):
they're not appreciated. Women won't go out on dates with them.
You read the diaries of manifestos and you pretty much
understand why they're not getting dates. But you know, so
they want their name to be in the history book,
they want to be famous, they want to leave their
mark on the world. And you know, obviously that's somebody

(23:07):
who is very obsessed with kind of how others view
themselves and how they view themselves. You know, it probably
fits fits your discussion of narcissism that's there, and you
know they view themselves as being more important than others. Obviously,

(23:27):
they're willing to sacrifice the lives of others in order
to go and and get this what they perceive as
this notoriety, this personal benefit that they're going to obtain
by going and murdering or harming other people. So yeah,
I mean I think I think there's a lot too

(23:48):
what you're asking about.

Speaker 5 (23:50):
And your males are you know, if you look at
the again the data, younger males are the ones that
are disproportionately involved in the dark psychological traits or suffer
from those. Is there something that we could get into
a whole show about culture and what we're doing to
affect manhood in many different ways? Is some of this

(24:16):
a result of this attack on the American male or
in males in general in general.

Speaker 4 (24:23):
Well, I mean, obviously, if you look at mass public
shooters over the last twenty five years or so, you're
going to see like ninety seven percent of them are men.
So they're obviously disproportionate there with regard to the ages.
I think it's much broader than most people might think.

(24:44):
The highest rates of mass public shooters are twenty five
to thirty and basically then from like thirty five to
forty or forty to forty five, and then you'll get
you know, sixteen to twenty. But so the highest rates

(25:04):
are actually kind of more older age individuals. But they
are men, there's no doubt about that. They're people who
are depressed, who kind of feel that the world's not
appreciating them. And you know, they often are very intelligent individuals,

(25:25):
but they have gone down to this dark side and
they are obsessed.

Speaker 5 (25:30):
You know.

Speaker 4 (25:30):
One of the things is also about half of these
mass public shooters we're actually seeing mental health care experts
prior to their attacks. One of the things that's interesting
is that despite them seeing those there's not one single
case where any of these mental healthcare professionals that they

(25:53):
were seeing identified any of these individuals as a danger
to themselves or others. In fact, there's a whole whole
academic literature out there that tries to explain for psychologists
and psychiatrists why they fail to identify these individuals as
a danger to themselves or others. And you know, the

(26:14):
big thing that they go is just how rare these
cases are compared. You know, you look at schizophrenia, you
have like two and a half million people who have
schizophrenia at any point in time. And yet you know,
over the last twenty five years you'll maybe find maybe
two of the mass public shooters who had schizophrenia. And

(26:35):
so they'll say, look, even if you could pick the
thousand who would be most likely to do that, you know,
even if it's one of those, you'll likely be wrong
nine hundred and ninety nine of the thousand times that
are there. And so that's kind of their explanation. But
the big thing is, it's the problem with the way
psychology and psychiatry has been set up. They are set

(26:58):
up for people with problems to come to them, to
ask for help, and so they assume that the people
that they're talking to are being honest with them. And
if you read the diaries of manifestos with these guys,
it's kind of like, you know, I'm not that stupid,
they say, to go and tell them I'm going to
do something if something like the Buffalo mass murder.

Speaker 5 (27:21):
He had.

Speaker 4 (27:23):
Been in school. A teacher had asked him what he's
going to do over the summer. He said, He's going
to find a school of the summer, shoot it up,
kill lots of people and commit suicide, but she was
very concerned. She flagged him. He saw two mental health
care professionals. He said, oh, it was a stupid joke.
I shouldn't have said it. They basically took him at
his word and let him go. The Santa Barbara mass

(27:47):
murderer similar type of story. He was seeing the head
of psychiatric services at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, one
of the leading experts of youth violence in the world,
and he just said, look, I just have to tell
the guy I'm not thinking about violent thoughts and he
believes me.

Speaker 5 (28:04):
Wow. Yeah, incredible. Folks. We've been speaking with nationally renown
crime economist and author John Arlott, Junior President of the
Crime Prevention Research Center. You're listening to America's Criminologists with
Doctor Curry Myers. Will continue after this commercial break. Doctor
Lott will be back with us in the second half. Hi, folks,

(28:38):
Doctor Curry Myers here to let you know that my
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Hey, my friends, is doctor Curry Myers, America's criminologist. I
have a new sponsor for my show. I mean Real Resilience.
That's our a e l transformative program helping inmates prepare
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(31:32):
an important tool, Real Resilience because reentry isn't just released,
it's a second chance. Done right, All right, folks, welcome back.
Please remember you can view my work on substack doctor
Currymeers dot substack dot com. Check it out. Hope you

(31:53):
like it well. Welcome back. We have doctor John lot
With US, President of the Crime Provision Research Center again
has some excellent books, more than ten books, hundreds and
hundreds of articles of his books, More Guns Less Crime,
the Bias against guns, gun control miss again. Milton Freeman

(32:14):
once referred to doctor Lott as he has few equals
as perceptive analysis or analysts of controversial public policy issues.
I want to talk about crime statistics before we get
into defensive gun use versus offensive gun use. There are
a lot of people that don't understand true crime statistics.

(32:34):
I think we do a horrible job with crime statistics.
To begin with, it is always old and historic number one,
so we don't see it. A lot of agencies don't
give out the full data skews that they should. Many
times it's very historical and could be a year or
two old. I think evidence based policing would help with that,

(32:58):
but there's key assumptions that are missing crime statistics. The
lack of police officers on the street could be a
key assumption victimology or the reference to the National Survey
on drug on excuse me, on victimization. More and more
people are saying, I'm not calling police because it's not
doing any good, and I've called them numerous times before.

(33:21):
We're also seeing the effects of decriminalization. When you have
the whole world of decriminalization, that means law enforcements no
longer resting people for those crimes that are taking off books.
And so we have a lot of things to understand
with with excuse me, not just drug but crime data.
Can you help dive into this and explain that we're

(33:41):
missing some important data points in the retrieval of crime
statistics right, Well, you've.

Speaker 4 (33:48):
Given a good thirty thousand foot discussion on it. Look,
there are two measures that we have of crime. There's
crimes report to the police and that's the FBI crime data,
and then we have of total crimes. People don't understand
that only about forty percent or so of violent crimes
are report to police, only about thirty percent of property

(34:09):
crimes are report to police. And so in order to
get a handle on what total crime is a little
bit over fifty years ago, the Department of Justice set
up something called the National Crime Victimization Survey, where they
survey about two hundred and forty thousand people each year
and in order to get a measure of what total

(34:32):
crime is. And generally, prior to twenty twenty, those two
sets of numbers, both report to crimes and total crimes
tended to go up and down together. Since twenty twenty,
they've pretty much gone in opposite directions, and you've raised
some important reasons for that. One of the things that
we know, we've known for a long time that affects

(34:54):
whether people report crimes to the police is whether they
think the criminals are going to be caught and punished.
If people don't think the criminals are going to be
caught and punished, and that can change over time, that
will affect the rate that people are going to report crimes.
So you look at twenty twenty two, for example, in
large cities with over a million in population, only about

(35:17):
twenty percent of reported violent crimes result in arrest, only
about eight percent of total violent crimes resulting in arrest,
only about one percent of total property crimes result in
arrest in those places, and so and so you know,

(35:41):
you can understand why people might not think it makes
a lot of sense for them to take the time
to go and report them. But there's another thing that's
happened too, and that is after COVID, we've had a
loss in number of police in many parts of the country.
You know, six seven years ago, if you call it
one to one, they would go and send out a

(36:02):
police car to go and take a police report. Now
there's still parts of the country where you call up
and they'll say, they'll last year, is the criminals stole
there committing the crime. And people will virtually always say no,
the criminals already left, and they'll say, well, you can
come down to the police station and you can wait
in line and fill out a police report. And you know,
the bottom line is, if you make it more costly,

(36:24):
more time consuming, more difficult for somebody to go and
get a police report filled out, you're going to have
some people who are going to say, look, it's just
not worth my time to go and do that.

Speaker 5 (36:36):
And I'll move out of the city.

Speaker 4 (36:39):
Yeah, you do things like move out of the city.
The stuff that we started talking about the very beginning
of the show, the fact that it has all these
other effects on businesses, and where people want to live
and all sorts of things that are there, and I agree. So,
you know, the interesting thing is, if you look this

(36:59):
last year, it looks like we have the lowest murder
rate ever recorded. The final data is not going to
come out until September, but they really only have national
murder data starting in nineteen hundred, and the lowest murder
rate since nineteen hundred before last year was four point

(37:22):
five per hundred thousand. It was about site less than
five per hundred thousand and twenty twenty four, but it
looks like this last year it could actually be below
four per hundred thousand for the first time. Now. With
regard to crime generally, during the four years of the

(37:45):
Biden administration, reported violent crime, according to the FBI, fell
by about eight percent, but total violent crime, rape, robbery,
eggvate assaults actually increased by fifty nine percent. It's the
largest percent increase that we've ever seen in total violent
crime that was occurring. My guess is when we have

(38:06):
the final numbers that come out in September for both
reported and total crime, what we're going to see for
total violent crime is a huge drop that occurred. And
you know, to me. This isn't rocket science as we
were talking about earlier. I think you have lots of
things that have changed. The FBI, for example, in twenty

(38:29):
twenty five, had about twice as many arrests, more than
twice as many rest as they had in twenty twenty four.
You have US attorneys around the country who are actually
prosecuting violent criminals now as compared to what was happening
under the Biden administration. You had Trump federalizing law enforcement
in two areas, DC and Memphis, where we had among

(38:53):
the highest murder rates in the United States, and doing
it to a lesser extent in cities from Portland to Chicago.
But the other thing that I don't think people are
appreciating as much is the deportation of illegal aliens. I
think I don't think people realize the media will claim

(39:16):
otherwise the high rate of violent crime by illegal aliens.
They about seventy percent of the people who were deported
last year had criminal records. Now I know the media
will go out and say, well, you know, it's like
twenty five percent or thirty percent, But they're defining criminal
records differently than I'd always known it to be defined

(39:39):
before it's not just whether somebody has been convicted of
a violent crime, it's whether or not they've also been arrested.
Because often what will happen is somebody will be arrested,
they'll be taken in for arraignment, and ice officials will
be there to pick them up when they're being arraigned
and go and deport them at that point in time.

(40:02):
But the other thing is also these numbers that you
see in the press don't include whether they have a
criminal record in their home country. Okay, you know, if
somebody's committed murder or rape or something like that in
their home country. I mean, that seems something you'd want
to maybe take into account and whether or not you
wanted to go and deport the individual. But it's much

(40:23):
more than that. It's much more than the individuals that
you've deported. You have all these other criminals who don't
want to be deported. Well, how do they keep from
being deported? They have to keep off of police radar,
And how do they keep off of police radar, Well,
they don't commit too many crimes right now, because the
more crimes they commit, the more likely the police are

(40:44):
going to catch them, and then they'll be deported, and
so it's it's not just the ones that you've deported,
but also the fact that you're changing the behavior of
the ones that you haven't even caught yet. I think
all those things matter. Just an idea of the crime
rate by illegal aliens. In November last year, ICE came

(41:09):
out with some numbers showing that in New York State
about fourteen percent of the incarcerated population there had were
illegal aliens. And that's pretty clearly an underestimate for multiple reasons.
One reason is obviously New York was not helping ICE
identify whether people in their jails and prisons were illegal,

(41:32):
so undoubtedly they even say themselves that they had missed
some that were there. But on top of that, when
you had illegals who were being arraigned or when they
were convicted, were often picked up by ICE before they
even got into the prison system there and were deported

(41:53):
at that time. So they're underrepresented in the prison system
compared to their rate of committing crime. But if you
compare that even that fourteen percent, which is again is
probably a significant underestimate of their share of committing crimes
compared to the highest estimates of the percent of the
illegal population of New York, which the highest estimates put

(42:15):
it like four percent, which may itself be an underestimate,
but that's still like three and a half times that
fourteen percent is still three and a half times their
share of the overall population that's there. So you know,
that's pretty much out there in terms of the rate
of committing crimes. So I think all those things matter,

(42:38):
and you know, the higher rests, the prosecutions and dealing
with the illegal aliens and other things all.

Speaker 5 (42:47):
Matter, oh no doubt. And you just hit on some
excellent things that people really need to pay attention to
your data because it's so important to understand the entire picture.
Make also an argument on the from the immigration standpoint,
that very true. That's one of the reasons is is
having a positive impact on crime statistics in somehow era.

(43:11):
But I sometimes refer to a blue state red state phenomenon.
Crime is going down in some red states because we're
prosecuting and arresting people again the full force. In blue states,
we're decriming where don't have enough police, and it's going
down because we're not paying attention to criminals. And you know,

(43:32):
it's almost like two different reasons why crime may go down,
and the illegal immigration, a lot of people may be
committing crime that that's really called underground crime, that they're
doing it in that illegal community that's never going to
be reported.

Speaker 4 (43:47):
Oh that's an extremely important point. And it gets back
to something we were talking about earlier, and that people
tend to commit crimes against people who are similar to themselves.
So well, you know, blacks are disproportionally murdered by blacks,
Hispanics are disproportionally murdered by Hispanics, but illegal aliens are

(44:09):
disproportionally committing crime against other illegals that are there. And
you know, and so you have a situation where exactly
what you're saying, those victims may be less likely to
go and report the crimes that are being committed to.
This is one of the things that this puzzles me
so much. People go and talk about the demographics of

(44:31):
the criminals. You know, are blacks disproportionally in prison? Are
Hispanics disproportionately in prison? And they care about that, and
I can understand that, but but the thing is, why
aren't they equally concerned about the victims that are there?
You know, why aren't they equally concerned about the fact
that who are the victims of these criminals that are

(44:54):
doing it. You know, it's the same types of people
in terms of racial groups that are the victims of
the crimes. And so, you know, they say they care
about illegals. Okay, well that's great. I'm glad you care
about illegals. But why won't you deport criminal illegal aliens,
you know, people who are raping others, who are going

(45:15):
and murdering other people, who do they think they're committing
the crimes disproportionally against. If they care about illegals generally,
why why not protect the illegals that aren't committing crimes
compared to the illegals that are committing crimes.

Speaker 5 (45:30):
Yeah, and again in document, in blue cities, you have
homeless encampments that are still not being addressed. They're being
addressed in red areas, but there's no tracking of crimes against.

Speaker 4 (45:41):
Oh yeah, no crime going on.

Speaker 5 (45:44):
Everything from rape to killing people. It's just death. They're
just it must be an overdose.

Speaker 4 (45:50):
Yeah, no, I'm just look at the violence against animals
and stuff that's occurring in places like Los Angeles. It's
heartbreaking to see, how, you know, the drug addicts are
essentially injecting the drugs and stuff into the dogs to
kind of test it out before they go and use
it on themselves.

Speaker 5 (46:09):
Yeah, well, you hit on some major things, and this
is why it was so important to have you on
your show to really give clarity because again, if you
look at the data, violent offenders are the ones that
reoffend somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty three percent. If
they get out of prison after five years, it's almost
seventy percent. There was a prosecutor in California who's just
retired that did his own analysis on people who were

(46:32):
left who made cash bail or cash lists bail just
got out. The recidivism rate was over seventy five percent
for violent offenders for those that committed those you know.
The other thing about murder I think that needs to
be brought up is that we are better with triage

(46:52):
than we've ever been in the history of man in
preventing deaths. So our medical increases and our first response
has been significant compared to You can't compare murders to
twenty years ago because there are people that are being
saved that would have made the list twenty years ago
because of murder cases.

Speaker 4 (47:12):
You're right, You're exactly right about it.

Speaker 5 (47:17):
The one thing I look at with manpower and it's
so true as case closures we have right now, especially
in blue cities, pathetic case closures that are somewhere in
the neighborhood of thirty thirty five percent. It used to
be that you'd get fired if you weren't hitting seventy
percent case closures on violent violent offenders and eighty percent.

(47:39):
We have horrible case closure rates. You look at New
York City doc they're trying to go down to twenty
seven thousand. They have almost five thousand detective slots unfilled
in a department that used to be nearly fifty thousand people.
It's supposed to go to somewhere south of thirty thousand
in two years. It's incredible.

Speaker 4 (47:59):
Yeah, no, look, there's so many points to bring up there.
I can't remember the national closure rates for murder, but
in Chicago, when Mayor Daily the Younger was in office
got into office, about sixty seven percent of murders resulted
in the rest. By the time he left, it was

(48:20):
down to thirty percent. When rom Emmanuel left office, it
was down to twenty percent. And over the last decade
it's kind of bounced around in the teens many times
that are there and you're talking about I mean, that's
on average. And when you're talking about murders by gangs,
which are particularly difficult to go and solve, you end

(48:41):
up in a situation where people, even if they're witnesses
for something, they don't want to come forward because they
believe that there's a good chance that nothing's going to
happen with those individuals that are there. And so, you know,
one thing, you know, you mentioned kind of the blue
and red differences there. You know, it's very clear that

(49:02):
the murder rates in blue areas are much much higher
than they are, you know, in blue counties compared to
Republican counties. The other thing just to point out is
I don't think people appreciate how incredibly geographically concentrated murders
are in the United States compared to the rest of
the world. Fifty six percent of the murders in the

(49:26):
United States occur in two percent of the counties. Seventy
three percent of the murders in the United States take
place in five percent of the counties, So you have
like over half the counties of the United States have
zero murders in any given year. About seventy percent of
the counties have either zero or one murder in the
course of a year. And the thing is, even if

(49:49):
you look at those two percent of the counties that
make up fifty six percent of the murders about if
you have a murder map of those counties, what you'll
find is, on average, about two thirds words of their
murders take place in ten block areas within those counties.
So it's very heavily concentrated in very tiny areas in

(50:10):
the country here. So I think it's really a misnomer
to talk about a US murder rate, okay, just because
there's this such huge differences in murder rates. You know,
basically you're talking about gangs, gang related directly or indirectly
type murders in those areas. You know, people talk about

(50:34):
the demographics of people who commit murders, but one of
the things that's left out is that about ninety percent
of murderers have a violent criminal record. You know, these
are not normal people in any sense of the word
that's there, and you know, if so anyway, but it's
just no, it's amazing.

Speaker 5 (50:55):
We got to switch because about this, you wrote again
another seminal piece of work recently on defensive gun use
versus criminal offensive gun use. Can you explain that research
and the data behind it and kind of give us
a summary of that before we close. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (51:11):
Sure. So if you look at the National Crime Victimization
Survey data, it estimates that there's about three hundred thousand
crimes that occur in the United States each year involving firearms.
But there are estimates that they're like one point six
million or so defensive gun uses that occur in that

(51:34):
same year twenty twenty one, and so you're talking about
defensive gun uses being over five times occur more frequently
that year. Then you have crimes committed with guns, and
this includes crimes not necessarily that the gun was fired,
but somebody may have threatened somebody with a weapon that
would be still classified as a firearms related to crime.

(51:57):
That's there. Know, it just gives you kind of some
perspective on this thing, you know. So you know, it's
just kind of the rate that people use guns defensively
to stop crime is so much more frequent than you see. Now.
You know, some of the stuff that happens one of

(52:18):
the big things that affects the firearms debate is that
people constantly hear about bad things that happen with guns.
They rarely hear about the benefits that happen. And a
lot of that's understandable. You know, if ninety five percent
or so of the time that people use guns defensively,
simply brandishing a gun is efficient to stop a criminal attack.

(52:40):
Let's say you're an editor of a newsbureau and you
have two stories that come across your desk. One there's
a dead body on the ground, and another case, let's
say a woman's brandished a gun that would be attackers
run away, no shots are fired, no dead body on
the ground. You're not even sure what crime would have
been committed if the person has been able to use

(53:00):
a gun defensively. Which story are you going to run
with in your newspaper? It's pretty clear I think I
would run with the dead body on the ground versus
the other now, so it's understandable in terms of what
makes something newsworthy, you know, if it bleeds, it leads.
But people need to understand that just because something's newsworthy
doesn't mean it reflects reality. In terms of giving people

(53:23):
kind of a balanced perspective on the rate that guns
are used defensively. So that explains a lot, but doesn't
explain everything. Your website. Since twenty twenty one, we've collected
over fifty cases where police have said that if it
wasn't for the presence of a concealed carry permit holder,

(53:45):
there would have been a mass public shooting that occurred.
And yet you look at those cases and they very
rarely get anything other than local media coverage.

Speaker 5 (53:53):
There.

Speaker 4 (53:54):
You know, you've just over the last decade, I'll just
give you a couple of examples. You know, everybody knows
about Parkland, but do you know that just shortly after that,
at another public school in Florida, there was an elementary
school in Titusville, Florida. There was a get together of

(54:15):
students and the teachers and the parents at a park
right next to the school, literally hundreds of students that
were there. A man came up started firing his gun. Fortunately,
because it was in a park not in a school,
somebody there was able to go and have a permittent
concealed handgun. He shot and wounded the attacker before anybody

(54:37):
was killed. You look at the pulse nightclub shooting that
occurred in Florida, which at the time was the worst
mass public shooting that had occurred in US history. One
week after that, there was a copycat attack at a
nightclub in South Carolina. The person shot three people before
a permit holder stopped him. Well, the difference between the

(54:59):
two the guy's still had like one hundred and twenty
five rounds of ammunition on him when he was stopped.
That got like no national coverage. The difference is that
Florida is one of ten states that banned people having
permanently concealed handguns and establishments that get more than fifty
percent of their revenue from alcohol. South Carolina was one
of the forty states that allowed it. But anyway, it

(55:20):
just it has a big impact on people's perceptions, what
the media decides to cover or not and how they
cover it.

Speaker 5 (55:29):
Doc quickly, how can we follow your work?

Speaker 4 (55:32):
Then go to our website at crimeresearch dot org. Crimeresearch
dot org.

Speaker 5 (55:38):
Thank you so much for everything. Just you're a light
of information and I really appreciate everything that you've done
in the field of criminology and the work and with
I don't know where we'd be without your quite frankly,
doctor Lott. So thanks to you personally for everything that
you've done to make us safe for in America today.

Speaker 4 (56:00):
Thank you very much for your service. It's greatly appreciate it.

Speaker 5 (56:03):
You bet folks, this is a retired sheriff Curry Myers.
You've been watching America's Criminologist on k M E T.
Stay safe, stay informed, and remember to check out my
work on substack, doctor Curry Myers dot substack dot com.
Stay safe and see you next week.

Speaker 3 (56:23):
Came Steale, Susta show us trust A Shadows, Secus Line,
Doctors scram analogist, Come Seals goes a crown Pray again

(56:50):
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