Speaker 1: 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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Speaker 4: And welcome.
Speaker 3: You are listening to and watching the Financial Survival Network.
Speaker 4: I'm your host, Kerrie Lutzon.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: Like I got a.
Speaker 3: I can't even picture John like an FBI agent doing
a traffic stop.
Speaker 4: They don't know how to do that.
Speaker 3: But just their presence probably is making a big difference,
isn't it.
Speaker 4: I think so.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 4: That are there.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: They weren't try hard enough, you know, right, except number
one at one time?
Speaker 4: Right, yeah, well they were at one time.
Speaker 3: It sounds like the prosecutor went to the George Soros
School of Crime prevention.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: 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?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 4: Be done, and.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: Just like that.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's insane. And yet we're going to see.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: And then when he stops it, what do they say, then, Well, it.
Speaker 3: Really wasn't that bad, John, You know, like murders were
already down thirty percent.
Speaker 4: He already he only did he only fix what was
already being fixed.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: Hey, you know, I'm sure it's having a big impact
on home depot parking lots for sure.
Speaker 1: Easier to pull in there, I guess.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, the current leader and the mayor's race in DC,
the Democrat nominee, wants to continue undoing the work that
was done.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: They stopped doing it.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: I saw it with my own eyes.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: It's disgusting that the Liberals won't give Juliani credit for
what he did there.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: Hopefully we'll see that again.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: Be in our best interest for it to be occurring.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 4: They're not lationary.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: That's what they've done. Tariffs are the great equalizer.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: Well, our website is crimeresearch dot org. Crimeresearch dot org.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: Thanks very much, Thanks for listening to carry Letz's Financial
Survival Network, your solution to today's trying times. For the latest,
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