What explains most of the variation and crime rates are law enforcement, higher rest rates, higher conviction rates, longer prison sentences, the death penalty explain over half of the variation that you see in crime rates over time and across places. And so if you want to go and deal with this, you want to make it risk here for criminals to go and commit crimes. And I agree with you that
that's going to be the result. Now, there are some things that Trump's already done that's helped reduce crime across the country. One of them has been deporting illegal aliens, particularly emphasizing those who have criminal records.
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I'm your host, Kerrie Lutzon.
Today we're joined by doctor John Lott Junior, one of the most respected and controversial voices in the gun policy debate. His seminal work I read I highly recommend more guns, less crime, and he's also a founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center. Really thrilled to have you back on here. John, I saw you at Freedom Fest this summer. It was great to bump into you, I should say, last summer,
and well, we got some things going on here. It looks like even the left doesn't believe that if more guns, if they belong to the National Guard, and more policemen, that that's going to bring down crime. What we're talking about, obviously, is President Trump federalizing the DC Police Department, which you can do by the nineteen seventy three Home Rule Act that gave a DC limited ability to rule its own affairs,
which we see how wonderful that has worked out. And he's called an eight hundred guardsmen and roving bands of FBI DEA agents.
Like I got a.
I can't even picture John like an FBI agent doing a traffic stop.
They don't know how to do that.
But just their presence probably is making a big difference, isn't it.
I think so.
I mean, it's not rocket science about what's going on. If you want a lower crime, you have to make it more costly riskier for criminals to go and commit crimes. You can do that with higher rest rates, which putting more people on the street is surely going to help with that, more prosecutions and actually punishing people, and maybe one can also add letting victims be able to go and defend themselves. But you know, you look at what
the situation was just before Trump got involved. You have about four hundred or so patrol officers on duty at most at any point in time in DC. That's four hundred people to go and protect seven hundred and twenty one thousand people out there. That's asking a lot. And I think the police unions were right there saying that they were stretched incredibly thin. Plus there were all sorts of other restrictions.
That are there.
So the first night that Trump rolled out his new policy there they added another eight hundred and twenty officers on the street, law enforcement people on the street. That's you know, essentially no trouble the enforcement effort that they had before. That's a huge change that's there. And you know, with regard to prosecutions, prosecutions of adults are handled by the US Attorney for DC, and during Biden the person that was there was just refusing to prosecute cases of
the arrests. In twenty twenty two, the guy refused to actually prosecute sixty seven percent of the arrests. In twenty twenty three, he still refused to prosecute fifty five percent of the arrests that were there, and even the ones that they prosecuted, it was often for very reduced penalties. And so you know, you're not arresting people. The people that you are arresting, you're not prosecuting, you know, just crazy.
And of course there's the police union has been pushing hard on the scandal, saying that the city has been kind of corrupting the crime data there, kind of reclassifying what would have been a felony as a misdemeanor in order for it not to be rooted in the FBI data. So like take aggravate assaults and reclassifying them there's simple assaults, and so you know, there are lots of problems over there, but you know, one thing, it's more difficult to hide
as murder data. In twenty twenty three, of the sixty most populous cities in the United States, d C ranked fifth in terms of murder rates.
They weren't try hard enough, you know, right, except number one at one time?
Right, yeah, well they were at one time.
It sounds like the prosecutor went to the George Soros School of Crime prevention.
Right.
Well, it's not too shocking, I mean, given that he was a Biden appointee there, you know, But you're right. They make the similar types of things in other places where you have George Soros prosecutors Alvin Bragg in New York City in Manhattan. One of the things that he's been known for has been refusing to prosecute criminals for
firearms offenses. What makes it, for example, what makes the difference between something being aggravated assault, which is a felony and simple assault, which is a misdemeanor, as whether or not a weapon was involved. And so if they're refusing to prosecute these individuals as firearms offenses, they lower these
cases from felonies to misdemeanors. And then they put pressure on the police not to initially record whether a firearm was used in the offense because prosecutors don't want to take the full blame for kind of reducing the penalties for these cases. And So what happens is is that Manhattan then under records the number of violent crimes that are there, and it kind of messes up the FBI data because the FBI relies on that.
Yeah.
Well, during Giuliani, I remember there was a commander that fudged the numbers at one of the precincts and they fired that guy almost instantaneously, who might have been an inspector whatever, whoever they have at the major precincts, they have a high ranking police official running. He lied, They fired him on the spot. Bratton went there and took his badge. And where is Bratton when you need him?
Right?
Well, I mean, because the police unions in DC made such a stink about it in July, the person was suspended there, but he hasn't been fired yet. But you know, something needs to.
Be done, and.
It's just the media bias in terms of discussing all this has been just kind of outrageous. They'll go and mention that these official crime numbers have gone down the last few years, but in many cases they're still very high compared to what they were prior to COVID. You look at carjackings, which is one of the things that
kind of got this going. When the Dodge former Dodge official was attacked in twenty twenty three, there were nine hundred and sixty nine of these carjackings that had occurred, or twenty four it was down to like four hundred and ninety five. But that's still you know, so they say, look, it's falling, but that's still five times higher than what it was in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen before COVID, and so you know, then it was kind of in
the nineties that you had these numbers. And so you know, the fact checkers in the media say, well, Trump's wrong about it being up compared to five years ago. They don't mention the five years. They just go and say, you know, it's it's fallen, and just look at the last two years.
It's like inflation numbers. You know, if we checked inflation the way we did in the eighties, it would be double the rate that it is now. But when you don't like the results, you just use it different to a ruler. I remember there were some shady personal injury lawyers in New York and they would take pictures of holes in the ground that supposedly their clients tripped over and they had a custom made ruler that said it
was twelve inches long, but it was only eight inches long. Fine, you know this is the kind of thing when you when you go changing everything around, you know this what happens. So hopefully we're going to see a major, a major drop in crime. I can't see how we can't see it.
And if Trump really does turn DC into a showcase, what does does that say to all the other blue cities that are failing, like your Detroit's Detroit's better than it was, but it's still unacceptable, like New York, like Philly, Baltimore especially. You know, that's going to make them look really bad.
Just like that.
The Libs said that couldn't stop the the people coming over the border, the invasion over the boarder, and Trump did it in a week. Can't stop the crime because you got to get to the basis of crime, because you know, he had a tough toilet training, Johnny, and therefore he became a serial killer.
I mean, it's insane. And yet we're going to see.
A historic drop in crime, I almost guarantee you, because he will feed as many people into that inferno as he needs to stop it.
And then when he stops it, what do they say, then, Well, it.
Really wasn't that bad, John, You know, like murders were already down thirty percent.
He already he only did he only fix what was already being fixed.
Right, Yeah, Look, I mean you're exactly right on all the points that you raise. I was going to raise, in fact, also the point that I think this could have an impact across the country. Constituencies are going to say, look, this worked here, why don't we do the same things. You know, there's a lot of academic work. I've done some of this myself. When you look at things like income and poverty and unemployment, does only explain one to
two percent of the variation in crime rate. What explains most of the variation and crime rates are law enforcement, higher rest rates, higher conviction rates, longer prison sentences, the death penalty explain over half of the variation that you see in crime rates over time and across places. And so if you want to go and deal with this, you know you want to make it riskier for criminals to go and commit crimes. And I agree with you
that that's going to be the result. Now, there are some things that Trump's already done that's helped reduce crime across the country. One of them has been deporting illegal aliens, particularly emphasizing those who have criminal records, and that does it in two ways. One is it's removed some of these criminals from the country, but even the ones that they haven't caught, it's affected because they know that if
they get arrested, they'll be deported. And one way to reduce the probability of being arrested is to try to stay off police radars. And the way you stay off police radars is not to commit crimes right now. And so I think it's had an impact both in terms of removing criminals and also causing other criminals to kind of keep their heads down right now. So I think
they've already had some beneficial impact. But hopefully this will educate people, just as you say it's correctly educating people about the border.
Hey, you know, I'm sure it's having a big impact on home depot parking lots for sure.
Easier to pull in there, I guess.
Now.
So one thing, John, let's go back to Juliani, because he was really the test case that proved that through effective policing, enforcing minor laws, the so called broken windows theory of policing, that you can effectuate huge declines, generational declines in crime. And what did they say. They said, well, it was demographic because the number of lawbreakers that sixteen or fifteen to twenty four demographic. The number of them
had gone down dramatically. As somebody who was in New York City during the term of David Dinkin seeing crime exploding and watching it go all but disappear in many parts of the city, I know that to be a lie.
Right, Yeah, well, I mean you're exactly right. I mean, famously proved the point, and he educated people around the country and you had a number of police departments kind
of go and follow the rule. I mean, it's an idea that James Q. Wilson, for the famous criminologists unfortunately who's no longer with us, put out there that you know, if you make it so that a place is more livable, people will be outside more, you'll have more witnesses, you'll make it more difficult for criminals to go and commit crime. And that's the policy that they did, and they moved One of the other things they did is they moved
the police to places where crime was. Every morning they would go and see where were the crimes occurring last night, and they would go then and move the police there. You know, the criminals can move someplace else, but they'd follow them, and they just make life very difficult for the for the criminals, and they had a huge impact on the crime rate.
You know.
Unfortunately, the current leader and the mayor's race in DC, the Democrat nominee, wants to continue undoing the work that was done.
Yeah.
Yeah, And there was another program that he had that I think it was a cop who once told me it was called life in Jail a day at a time, and that meant that they knew you were going to get kicked out of jail for these minor quality of life offenses like you know, public relieving, urination, that type of thing. But nonetheless, they still arrested you smoking in
the subway. You'd get arrested, you'd spend the day in jail, you'd get out, and then you'd do it again and they'd arrest you again, or dealing marijuana on the street. And an amazing thing happened. They stopped doing it after a while. After spending you know, day after day after day in jail.
They stopped doing it.
And the whole thing of disincentives, carrot and stick, it made a huge difference. And the other thing, John that happened during that whole Giuliani period economic expansion because people felt safe to go outside even in poorer areas, and more people working as a result of that economic expansion, and less of them turning to crime.
I saw it with my own eyes.
Yeah, Gerry me, you're exactly right. People don't appre You know, obviously you have the direct victims of crime, but you also have all these other indirect effects that are there. So if I have more crime in an area, I'm going to have businesses closed down. The ones that stay in business are going to have higher costs. That hurts so many different people. People who lost their would lose their jobs. People who would have gone shopping in those areas now have to go farther away to be able
to go and shop. People who own businesses lost money. People who own home in those areas. What do you think happened to the property values for those homes when crime rates went up in those areas? You make those people poor as a result of that, You make them lose their jobs. So, you know, people are harmed in many different ways from crime that I don't think is properly appreciated.
It's disgusting that the Liberals won't give Juliani credit for what he did there.
You know.
And Juliani, we didn't know it at the time because the only thing he had ever run was the US Attorney's office. But he turned out to be an incredibly effective manager of the city's workforce. And look, he had the Democrat council going against him, and yet he managed to make deals and get things done.
Hopefully we'll see that again.
Hey, we're going to cover tariffs real briefly, tariff seemed to be working. They don't seem to be causing inflation, at least according to the measurable numbers China. That deal keeps getting put off ninety days, ninety days. I think the reason why that isn't really publicized. China's having an economic collapse, and the United States cannot be afford afford to be seen as literally piling on and basically enhancing that collapse, even though it might.
Be in our best interest for it to be occurring.
Right, So, yeah, I just had a piece just so people know. I've been to I have a PhD in economics. I've been an academic most of my life. I've had positions at Stanford, University of Chicago, the Wharton Business School, Yale, UCLA, and I've written about one hundred and twenty peer reviewed articles, including issues like trades. I've some background in this area, and what I didn't even appreciate until recently myself is that, you know, the arguments against tariffs are that they're going
to distort trade, you know, hurt consumers, reduce production. All those things are true, but that's true of all taxes. Sales taxes reduce trade.
They're not lationary.
Taxes are deflation area. You know, income taxes make it so that people don't work as much, they're not selling their labor as much as they would have otherwise. It reduces investment. Corporate taxes reduce output, reduce investment. So all taxes are distortionary. And one thing that's important to understand is that the size of the distortion increases at an increasing rate with the level of taxes. So a twenty percent tax produces more than twice the distortion that a
ten percent tax does. And so what you need to do as an economists, because we're going to have taxes. You know, we may want to cut the federal budget, but even if we succeed in cutting it a lot, it's still going to be have to have taxes to pay for things. You have a situation where you know you're going to want to try to make it so
that the distortions are minimized. And so if I have a tariff of two point five percent, that's there, and the income taxes, when you add this average state tax there goes up to forty three percent, and for corporate taxes federal and stature, it's twenty seven percent on average. You know you have much bigger distortions in those other areas, and so you know it may make sense to increase to some extent the sale the tariff at the same
time you're reducing those other taxes. And what Trump has done, combined with the budget Reconciliation bill, kind of accomplishes that to some extent. Now what the write about is, I don't know. Now, just as a quick comment on the on the inflation, I guess I'm a Milton Friedman type monetary theory type guy, and that is basically inflation is
a monetary phenomenon. If you're not changing the money supply in velocity, then if some prices go up, other prices are going to have to go down, so that on average, the tolls amount spen it's going to be the same. So I may have taxes on particular items that causes those prices to go up a little bit, but it's not inflationary. It's not going to change the overall price level as long as you know, as long as the money supply is not changing.
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. And I am a free trade person through and through, but free trade has been weaponized against the United States post World War Two. Maybe in the beginning initial phases there was reasons there was no reason to allow China to weaponize trade.
That's what they've done. Tariffs are the great equalizer.
Prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve and the income tax, the government financed all of its operations through tariffs and excise taxes on alcohol and I guess some on tobacco perhaps, But you know, part of the problem with prohibition was it took away that revenue source from the government and it became the justification for the income tax, so you know you're looking at it. You know it's a tax, yes, but like you said, all taxes are
deflationary because they they have the crowding out effect. They take from those who produce and give to those who don't produce. And that's the whole mess that we're in now. John, where's the best place to find you these days and connect with you on the web.
Well, our website is crimeresearch dot org. Crimeresearch dot org.
G all right, and the link is in the show notes to this interview. If you got a question for John myself, shoot me an email kl at Carrie dot com. John, We will talk to you again soon. Thanks for that great article. Be well, it's been great talking to you.
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