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The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Truth with Lisa Boothe: John Lott Exposes Crime Data Manipulation, Media Bias & the Truth About Illegal Alien Crime
00:35:42
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- [00:00]
A
This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human. Welcome to the Truth with Lisa Booth where we get to the heart of the issues that matter to you today. We've got renowned crime expert Dr. John Lott, the president of the Crime Prevention Research center on the show. He also previously served as a senior advisor for research and statistics at the US Department of Justice. But he's going to break down the shocking statistics on illegal alien crime in New York City. What you need to know about the crimes being committed in New York. We'll also talk about the sanctuary policies, about how they endanger Americans. And we'll take a look about the alarming outlook under New York City's socialist mayor, Zoran Mamdani. Also a little bit of good news. We'll dig into the record breaking plunge in US Murders thanks to real enforcement, what you need to know about that. But we're going to dig into the Data and the Truth with Dr. John Lott. Well, John Lott, it's always great to have you on. You always dig deeper than other people do and really looking at the crime statistics because, you know, unfortunately we've really seen a desire on behalf of the media and the left to lie to us about the state of crime in the country and what it all means in pretty much every capacity from police shootings, two mass shootings and then now what we're going to talk about today with crimes committed by illegal aliens. So we always appreciate you for digging into it and bringing us the truth. So thanks for coming on.
- [01:35]
B
Well, thanks for having me on, Lisa. It's great to talk to you.
- [01:38]
A
You know, I guess we'll kind of start about the big picture. Why do you think the media lies so much about crime in the country? Because, you know, it kind of started out or, you know, probably beyond this. But at least for my, from my perspective of, you know, after the Hill, hands up, don't chew in Ferguson, Missouri about the lies about Michael Brown. And then we sort of had this war on police and these lies about police shootings. And then now that's kind of like seeped into these lies about ICE and DHS and what they're doing. But why do you think the media always desires to sort of paint law enforcement as like the criminals and the villains in the story?
- [02:19]
B
You know, it's pretty strange. The biases are more than just the media. It also has to do with the data people at the federal government, with the FBI. I think the FBI interfered in the election in 2024 in terms of hiding the changes in crime rate data that they had. But, you know, the thing that's most bizarre about this is they focus a lot, the media does, on the Democrats, on the race, criminals, okay, in terms of kind of the claimed racial bias in the legal system. And you have people like Alvin Bragg in New York who wants to go and make sure that criminals, the percentage of blacks who were arrested or Hispanics are equal to their shares of the population rather than the rate that they commit crime. And what's ignored is who the victims of the crimes are. Criminals tend to commit crime against people who are like themselves. 90% of blacks who are murdered are murdered by blacks. So if you make it so that you're not punishing black criminals, who do you think you're hurting? You're hurting black victims because you're making it so that you're going to have more of those. You know, we had Trump when he was federalizing law enforcement in D.C. you had people like Wes Moore, the governor of Democratic, governor of Maryland and other Democrats saying that Trump was racist because. And the only reason why he was doing it was because, you know, D.C. was heavily black. You know, as if somehow that was being an imposition on black criminals. But he ignores is in the latest data we have there, 96% of those who were murdered in D.C. were black. And so you go 18 days without anybody being murdered in D.C. when they federalize the law enforcement there. And who do you. Whose lives do you think you saved? And yet somehow that's supposedly racist because they're looking at the race of the criminals.
- [04:38]
A
But I guess, you know, and John, to that point, you know, so the U.S. attorney for a District of Columbia, Janine Pirro, obviously, I know, we know quite well from Fox as well, had said that, you know, they looked at, at least in the. Looking at the Metropolitan Police Department and, and found that, you know, they reviewed 6,000 reports and interviewed over 50 witnesses showing that they intentionally miscited crime reports to make D.C. crime look artificially lower. And you had reference sort of the manipulation of data earlier when you were talking, how much does this happen elsewhere in the country? And then, like, how, you know, how do we even know what's happening in the country when it comes to crime if none of the data is real, Right?
- [05:24]
B
No, I mean, people thought that the murder data at least was solid data, but it turns out in D.C. and Chicago and other places that it looks like they're even manipulating the murder data. You know, you had a detective in D.C. who had issued a sworn statement that said that a case that was A murder case, he was ordered to have it reclassified as taking someone to the hospital. So it was taken from a murder to not even a crime. You have other cases where a murder has been reclassified as unknown or as an accidental death when it clearly. So look. And you have other problems. You know, New York City, for example, and other places where you have these Soros district attorneys, they're refusing to prosecute firearms crimes by criminals. And as you probably know, the difference between what's a simple assault, which is a misdemeanor, and an aggravated assault, which is a felony, is often whether a weapon was used. And so if they're. And the thing is, it's just not the prosecutors, because the prosecutors put pressure on the police not to record a weapon being involved, because the prosecutors in Alvin Bragg's office don't want to take the entire hit for looking at like they're reducing the penalties for these criminals. And so they put pressure on the police. And the police don't want the prosecutors yelling at them all the time. And so they just leave that out of their reports. And if you have something as a simple, simple assault that doesn't get into the FBI crime data, that's there so you can make it look like crime is falling from the FBI reports that get put out every year. And it's just another reason why there are two measures of crime that we have. We have the FBI data on crimes reported to police, and then we have the National Crime Victimization Survey data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. And it's one of the many reasons that those two numbers have gone in opposite directions over the last four years. The FBI data on reported crime showed an 8% drop in crime during the Biden administration. The National Crime victimization data showed an unprecedented 59% increase in violent crime during that period of time. We've never, over any four year period of time, we never had such a large percentage increase in violent crime. And, you know, we had all these news stories in 2024 before the presidential election where you'd have headlines from New York Times or NPR or whatever that would say crime is falling, violent crime is falling, but people mistakenly think that it's increasing. And there are many reasons for it. One is we've had this huge drop in arrest rates. And one thing we've known for many decades is that the rate people report crimes to the police depends in part on whether they think the criminals are going to be caught and punished. If you don't think they're going to be caught and punished, you know, why take the time to go and report crime to the police? In 2022, for example, only in large cities, over a million in population. So there's nine of those cities, only 20% of reported violent crime resulted in arrest. Only 8% of total violent crime resulted in arrest. And if you look at property crimes, only 1% of total property crimes resulted in arrest. And the other thing that you've seen is just as we've seen a drop in the number of police in the country, particularly after Covid and the budget changes. And you mentioned some of the reactions to the George Floyd case and others, you have a situation where, you know, six, seven years ago, if you had called up the police, you know, 9, 1 1, they send out a police car and they take a police report. Now in many parts of the country, you call up and they'll say, well, is the criminal still there? And of course people almost always say the criminals left. And they'll say, well, you can come down to the police station and wait in line and fill out a police report. And you know, you make it more costly, more difficult for people to go and get a police report put together. You're going to have some people, you know, it may vary how many, but you may have some people who are going to say, you know, it's just not worth my time because they're not going to catch them anyway for a property crime. They're not going to catch them. And why should I go and wait, you know, an hour plus travel time to go and get a police report filled out for it.
- [10:36]
A
Got to take a quick commercial break. More with John Lott on the other side.
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C
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- [11:05]
A
Plan video chat feature available as benefit to AHS members with select plans. See ahs.com for hours and details. You know, we, we look at the reporting recently that the US is poised to end 2025 with the largest. Well, I guess now we're in 2026. So ended with the largest one year drop in homicides ever recorded.
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B
Right.
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A
Do you believe that or is that.
- [11:29]
B
Yeah, I think it's believable. Okay, but, but it, it's more, it's More than just the largest percentage drop. If that percentage drop, which is just the data up till October, it turns out to be correct, we will have the lowest recorded murder rate ever in US history. In 2024, the murder rate in the United States was about 5 per 100,000, was slightly less than 4.96 or something per 100,000 people. The lowest previous murder rate that we ever had in the United States was 4.5 per 100,000. Up until October, it looked like we were on track for almost a 20% drop in murders. So that would bring us down to 4 or maybe even 3.9 something murders per 100,000 people. That's an incredible. Not just drop, but it would be incredibly low rate. And it's not. It's not surprising to me. I think we'll also see a reversal of the trend in violent crime. You know, as we just mentioned, we saw this record percentage increase under Biden. I think when the data comes out next this coming September for this last year, we're going to see a drop in violent crime. And there are multiple reasons for that. One is, you know, the FBI has doubled its arrest rates from 2024. You know, make it more costly. You arrest more criminals, you punish them. You have US Attorneys around the country who are going after criminals. You're going to have less crime. But beyond that, just what's happening with illegal aliens? They've concentrated on deporting criminal illegal aliens. The latest data that I've seen indicates that 70% of those that they have deported have either a conviction or a charge for a criminal activity in the United States. You know, so you've removed them. So they're not committing crime. But even more than that, something that I think people are missing, and that is even the criminals that you haven't caught are worried about getting deported. And how do they avoid being deported? Well, the way that they avoid being deported is to keep off a police radar. Well, how do you keep off a police radar? You don't commit crimes. And so I think even the normal criminals are either not committing crimes or at least cutting back on the rate that they're committing crimes. So all those things matter. And, you know, we've had other things like the district attorney in Los Angeles and in San Francisco, people who had been Soros prosecutors were replaced by people who were tough on crime, individuals that were there. All those things matter in terms of reducing crime. It's not rocket science on how to reduce the crime rates.
- [14:33]
A
You know, I originally wanted to start off talking about your op Ed in the New York Post. But then I got sidetracked by my interest and hope.
- [14:43]
B
You have broad interest.
- [14:44]
A
I have broad interest. And so, you know, that kind of leads us to your bed about, you know, looking at illegal aliens in crime in New York. You looked at your op ed cites DHS data showing that illegal immigrants convicted of 148 homicides and 260 sexual predatory offenses in New York prisons and jails. You know, walk us through some of these numbers that you found and talk about, like, I mean, we're talking about real human cost to American families and these victims at the hands of illegal aliens and what, what's been allowed to take place in the states for, for quite some time now.
- [15:25]
B
You know, it's pretty clear that illegal aliens are committing crimes at very high rates compared to their share of the population. And New York, some recent data from there kind of provides a window into how bad this is. So ICE has detainers on or in December had detainers on 7113 illegal aliens in the jail and prison system in New York State. And as you say, these are people there who were there for murder or for sexual assaults or child rape or all sorts of other heinous crimes that were there. And so what I decided to do was just to say, well, what percent of the incarcerated population is that? And there is about 50,000, slightly over 50,000 total people incarcerated in New York in the prisons and jails. And so that's 1,113 is 14% of that. And that's an underestimate, a clear underestimate of the problem for multiple reasons. One reason is New York is not assisting ICE in any way in identifying whether the people that they have incarcerated are illegal aliens to ice. As you, I'm sure, have heard stories will camp out at when illegal aliens come in and are arrested or are charged or convicted and will take custody of them at that point and deport them. In New York, that's been difficult. They have a law there that makes it a crime for ICE officials, federal officials, to be in courthouses that was recently upheld by a Democrat judge as being binding. My guess is eventually it'll be overturned. But for part of the year, they were able to go and be in those types of courthouses. And CBS News reported that in for two months this summer, just in New York City alone, 460 illegal aliens had been apprehended while they were being arraigned in courthouses in New York city. So that's 460 for just two months. That's a significant increase in the 7,000, one can only imagine for the whole state of New York before this federal judges rule there, you may be talking about a couple more thousand at least for the year. And then there's a third reason, and that is we're almost always just talking about. Well, the thing to recognize, and I mentioned this before, is that criminals tend to commit crimes against people who are similar to them. That's true by race, it's true by socioeconomic status. It's also true by whether they're in the country illegally or not. So these illegal criminals will commit crimes against everybody, but they'll disproportionately commit crimes against other illegals. And those illegals may be somewhat reticent when they're victims of crime to go to the police. But the thing to do is to compare this 14% with the estimated percent of the general population that are illegals. And the highest estimate comes from Pew, which says that about 4.1% of the population in New York state are illegals.
- [18:58]
A
14 significant there. Yeah, because your point, 14%, if they're only, you said 3 to 4% of the population, that's significant.
- [19:07]
B
Yeah. Hugely disproportionate. And look, I'm more than likely to believe that these different groups that have estimated, including the federal government, the share of the population that's illegal underestimates those. But even if they've underestimated by a factor of two or three, this 14% is still greater than anything you could possibly guess in terms of their share of the population. So their illegals are disproportionately committing crimes there. And you know, it's, you know, it's really. And there are other costs to the state, not just the victims of crime, but you have the costs of incarceration. They're different. The ICE numbers don't break it down by whether the people are in prison or in jail. And there are different costs of incarcerating them based on what facilities they're in. But even if you assume that all of them are in prison, which has a lower per prisoner cost of keeping there, that's still a billion dollars a year that it's costing the state of New York. Most likely it's almost certainly it's higher than that. My guess is probably the most realistic estimate is probably about $1.4 billion a year. But that's, that's a non trivial amount of money. And the question you have to ask is why won't the state agree to let ICE Remove convicted murderers and rapists. Why, why do they insist? And in fact, this is only part of the story. Over this year, ICE has released 6900 and some people from prison and jails who had been convicted of crimes, again murders and rapes and other things like that, but didn't inform ICE that they were releasing them. And so they've put those individuals back into the general population where they're presumably going out and committing more crimes. At least significant portion of them.
- [21:14]
A
Sir, do these sanctuary policies, I assume they impact like the data, right?
- [21:20]
B
Oh yeah, no, I try to give examples. So like the fact that New York won't assist in, in identifying whether these individuals are illegal or not. Presumably that 7113 is an underestimate of that. You know, we have no idea how much of an underestimate. You know, we have a so many problems in terms of whether people give their accurate names there. You know, you've surely heard all sorts of stories where legals, when they were coming into the country would dump their passports and other IDs right before they came into the United States. You know, when, during the Biden administration when border Patrol was processing people, there are good portions of the time where they would spend a maximum of two minutes processing somebody. You know, they just ask them what your name is. They'd assume that they're being accurate on those things. So being able to go and identify whether somebody's illegal in the United States and their criminal background has been a real problem. But you know, there's other data that indicates how bad of a problem this is. So a couple months before the election in 2024, Biden administration itself put out a report that indicated that of the 7.4 million so called non detained individuals, individuals that had been released into the country, 9% of those or like 670,000 of them had criminal records in their home countries. Now there are lots of problems with that. One is virtually all of these non detained individuals were ones who voluntarily turned themselves in at the border. You know, these are probably the ones that you should be least concerned about. And yet it's 9%. And on top of that, you know, as we said, they may not have given accurate names. The countries that they were coming from, many countries like Venezuela for example, were not working with our government to go and identify whether the people had criminal records in their home countries. They hid that. So even that 9% is a huge underestimate. But it's not including things like the 2.1 million so called gotaways, people that we saw coming across the border but didn't turn themselves in. There are big benefits for turning themselves in. You know, get this prepaid credit card, you'd get housing, you'd get, you know, a plane ride to what part of the country you want to be in. You'd get working papers, you would go and get, you know, they gave it like 7 million Social Security numbers to people. You get all sorts of benefits from voluntarily turning yourself at the border. So the ones that weren't, you figure, had a real reason for avoiding it. Plus, we don't even know how many we didn't observe coming across because 76% of the border agents were pulled off of guarding the border and instead were involved in processing the illegals that were coming across. We had about 30% of the passive monitoring equipment, the cameras and whatever across the border were broken during the Biden administration and were not being fixed. So we had huge portions of the border where we had neither agents nor equipment to go and monitor whether people were coming across areas that, you know, it seems very likely from what we can tell that the, you know, the drug cartels who were bringing in people in knew weren't being guarded. And so we have no idea how many more millions of people beyond the 2.1 million gotaways came in. And those presumably were the ones that were most problematic. So, you know, the 9%, which is a high enough number to begin with, is. And a dramatic underestimate, doesn't even include all these other groups.
- [25:14]
A
Quick break. Stay with us. If you like what you're hearing, please share on social media or send it to your family and friends. I seen a bunch of different numbers. In terms of how many illegal aliens came here, you said 7 million. In terms of people that were given, you know, like information or housing or whatever, is there a way to figure, like, what would you put the number at in terms of how many illegal aliens came here during the Biden administration?
- [25:44]
B
Well, if you add up the people that voluntarily turned themselves in, the ones that were caught in the so called gotaways, you're talking about 12 million, a little bit over 12 million people. What that doesn't include, and we can only guess, are the ones that we never saw coming across the border because of these problems with the agents being pulled off of doing it, and also the broken equipment that was there that the Biden administration didn't want to fix. So that's just. Nobody knows. That's just a guess. I mean, I assume it's in the millions, but, you know, we have no clue what it is, but it's surely something that's concerning, and it makes it harder for the Trump administration to go and identify the illegals that are here and catch them and deport them. So, you know, it's. And even, you know, under law, the people that the Biden administration did release into the country, they're supposed to do things like take DNA, okay, and check to make sure who they are, they say they are, you know, but they didn't do any of that stuff. And. And so all those things make it much more difficult to go and identify these individuals and, you know, deport them.
- [27:04]
A
They wanted this to happen, which is sad, because you look at how easily President Trump was able to solve the border crisis, and obviously that could have been done in four years during the Biden administration.
- [27:15]
B
Yeah, they didn't want to. The thing is, the thing that's most amazing to me is, so I mentioned earlier, in New York, you have thousand 900 convicted criminals in New York that the state released without turning them over to ice. Look, I understand why these sanctuary cities fight so hard to keep illegals because it counts towards things like the census. They get congressional seats. California probably has at least five congressional seats that they otherwise wouldn't have as a result of illegals being in there. But, you know, the irony is, at the same time, these individuals who are fighting for these illegals will go and claim, well, illegals just don't commit crime at high rates. And if they really believe that, then if you have a child rapist, why wouldn't you want to. Who's been convicted? Why wouldn't you want to go and turn them over to ICE to get them deported? Why do you fight to keep even the violent, criminal illegal aliens in the country? And yet all these places across the country, whether it be Illinois or California or New York or Maryland or New Jersey or whatever, they will fight you tooth and nail against deporting the illegal aliens. Now, the criminal illegal aliens. And I. Massachusetts, I just don't understand. I just saw a little while ago in Boston, the city there had released three child rapists. One of them from Brazil, had a long history of child rapes in Brazil. He had escaped there when there were warrants out for his arrest to come to the United States. And, you know, I. Why. Why wouldn't you go and have ICE deport child rapists?
- [29:07]
A
Well, it's crazy. Oh, yeah. I mean, to the extent that they fight this, it's disturbing. You know, we talk about crime specifically in New York City. You know, I worry Obviously, as I'm sure you do, it's just gonna get so much worse under Mamdani as mayor. Now at least Eric Adams like kind of cared about crime, right? Like Mamdani is talking about actively undermining the police. How much worse do you think it's going to get in New York City? And sort of like, what are your biggest concerns in sort of observing the things that he has said about police and crime and everything in New York City?
- [29:41]
B
Right. Well, I mean, I guess I've. I've heard that there's like over 3,000 police who have just very recently resigned in New York City after the election results there. You know, he's kept on the police chief there. I don't know how long she's going to be there and how much autonomy she's going to have with regard to that. There are things that he's doing in terms of, you know, ending the cooperation that Mary Adams had with ice. You know, it's going to be a mecca for criminal illegal aliens, you know, to stay there. And of course, you know, with people like Alvin Bragg and the leftist judges that you have there, you have this incredible, just cycling through the legal system there where somebody gets arrested and gets released, they commit another crime, they're arrested and released and you know, so there's like really little consequences for criminals. And, and you know, I worry that the police are going to be demoralized even more, you know, if you arrest people and nothing happens to them. And one of the things, the first things that Mamdani announced was he's appointed these people to kind of oversee the judicial selection process there. He doesn't want, he's announced that he doesn't want any former prosecutors being judges anymore in New York City. He wants basically leftists there. And so the problems that you have in terms of the criminals not being punished is going to be exacerbated. You know, again, I know we say this all the time when we talk, but this isn't rocket science. You know, if you want to reduce crime, you have to make it risky for criminals to commit crime. Higher arrest rates, higher conviction rates, longer prison sentences, letting individuals go and defend themselves, all those things are going to be going the wrong way. They're going to make it even more difficult for law abiding citizens to be able to go and protect themselves. They're obviously losing police officers with a lot of experience and you know, they're putting in judges and who aren't going to want to prosecute people. And unfortunately, somebody like, you know, the district attorneys there got reelected. So I don't, I don't think it's going to be good. I mean, it's interesting that this is going kind of the opposite direction of the rest of the country that's there. You know, you would think people learn, you know, you had Dinkins as mayor of New York and the horrible crime rates that were there. Giuliani, when he went in there, increased the number of police, increased the standards for police being hired, adopted kind of the broken windows approach where he put the police in areas where the crimes were occurring, going after a wide range of crimes. And people saw the huge drop in violent crimes that occurred during, during the Giuliani administration. Bloomberg, for all of his other faults, at least, continued that policy. De Blasio reversed it. Mayor Adams, as you say, at least to some extent, kind of went back to the earlier policies, giving the police more free rein for doing it. And now Mandami is going to, you know, double down, maybe even worse than de Blasio.
- [33:08]
A
We'll keep an eye on it. These people are crazy, unfortunately.
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B
But the thing is, what we talked about before is they want to make it as the race of the criminal, okay? That's what they focus on. And the thing that they ignore are the race of the victims. They say they care about poor. They say they care about minorities, like blacks and Hispanics, who are overwhelmingly the victims of violent crime, the poor and blacks and Hispanics. So if you make it so that criminals don't have to worry about getting caught and punished, aren't going to be put in prison, you know, illegal alien criminals aren't going to be deported, who are the victims?
- [33:54]
A
Well, that was like the whole, like, you know, black lives matter stuff. Like, it was such a lie because it's like, you know, it's the black people who are getting gunned down in these inner cities because of their soft on crime policy. So clearly they don't believe black lives matter.
- [34:07]
B
Like, it's like, I saw a survey for Chicago a little while ago asking Chicago residents whether they wanted Trump to do for Chicago what he did for Washington, D.C. and blacks and Hispanics were in favor of Trump kind of federalizing law enforcement in Chicago. The people who were against it were wealthy white liberals. You know, the people who are most likely victims of violent crime supported it. Hispanics, by a huge majority, supported federalizing the law enforcement that were there. But the people who were not the victims of violent crime, wealthy individuals, you know, they didn't. They were against it. I recently was in Chicago and I was walking through downtown. I used to live in Chicago when I taught at the University of Chicago. And it was amazing I. How few people there were on a weekday, like a Wednesday in downtown. It was deserted. I mean, I. When I've been there in the past, sidewalks would be completely full. Instead, when you're walking down, it's like one restaurant after another was boarded up and closed. Few people were there. And it's. And I was talking to a lawyer friend of mine who was there, and he said, yeah, it's just, you know, given the crime that's been occurring in kind of Miracle Mile, there kind of what used to be the super nice area, you know, people have fled, they're not there, and businesses have closed as a result. It's just a real, real shame the damage that they've done to the city there.
- [35:48]
A
We'll keep following it. John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research center, always appreciate you coming on the show. Your wealth of knowledge. Thanks for breaking this all down for us. We appreciate you.
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B
Well, thanks for being there, Lisa. You make a difference.
- [36:01]
A
That was Dr. John Lott, President of the Crime Prevention Research Center. Appreciate him for coming on the show. Appreciate you guys at home for listening every Tuesday and Thursday, but you can listen throughout the week. I also want to thank John Cassio, my producer, for putting the show together. Until next time. Next time. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.