thedrifter
07-06-07, 07:02 AM
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ANGLE: And that was Fox News correspondent Caroline Shively. Thanks, Caroline. Coming up, what are your chances of becoming the victim of a crime? How about your chances of becoming the victim of a violent crime? We will find out right after a brake.
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ANGLE: Are you safer on the streets today than you were a decade ago? How about a generation ago? We have heard some scary-sounding statistics about the U.S. crime rates, but what are the real numbers? National correspondent Catherine Herridge spoke with one expert who has undertaken a close study of the subject.
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CATHERINE HERRIDGE, FOX NEWS NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: John, thank you for being our guest. Let's lay out a foundation for people. When we look at crime statistics over the last two or three decades, are we safer today than we were in the 1960's?
JOHN LOTT, AUTHOR, FREEDOMNOMICS: Well, early 1960's, murder rates were roughly similar to what they are now. Violent crime rates are still much higher now. But during the late 1960's they we want up and they pretty much stayed high during the 70's and 80's. And it was only in the beginning of the 90's that we began to see the drop.
Since the beginning of the 90's, murder rates are about half of what they were at that time. And finally, crime rates are down nearly a third. So we have seen big drops in crimes over the last decade and a half or so.
HERRIDGE: If that is the case, why is it, when we look at big newspapers, like the "New York Times" or "USA Today" and the headlines say that violent crime is up for the second or third year in a row, and they almost suggest that it is almost some sort of a spike in violent crime in this country?
LOTT: Right, well, there has basically been a couple waves of this publicity. We had some stories the very end of last year and the beginning of this year, and they were mainly motivated by studies that were put out by something called the Police Executive Research Foundation, which is kind of police chiefs mainly for large cities in the United States. And it was kind of picking data. So they would go and pick some cities to report. They would pick some crime numbers.
So, for example, they would exclude rape rates, because rapes were following. And they would look at the number of crimes, rather than the crime rate.
HERRIDGE: Let me jump inn. Let's explain that to people. When you say the number of crimes versus the rate of a crime. What does that mean?
LOTT: Well, it would be like comparing Washington, D.C. and New York City. New York has more murders, but yet the murder rate is much, much higher Washington, D.C. because it is a much smaller city. So, the question is where would you feel more at risk? The probability of getting murdered in Washington, D.C. is much higher than New York City. So, you don't just want to look at the total number of murders because there are a lot of people who live in New York City. There's like 500,000 people that live in Washington, D.C.
So you have to — if you care about the risk, then you have to take into account the number of people that live in the city.
HERRIDGE: So you have to look at the rate. What your investigation has shown is that they didn't produce these rates for these publications.
LOTT: Right, well, the number of murders or crimes, general - you don't want to compare the number of robberies today with the number of robberies 30 years ago, because the populations has gone up 100 million or so people during that period of time. I mean, if the absolute number of robberies went up, let's say, 20 percent, but the population went up 35 percent, the robbery rate, the risk that people would face —
HERRIDGE: Is actually much less.
LOTT: It has gone down.
HERRIDGE: So what was this police group doing exactly when they were sort of cherry picking these statistics, in your opinion?
LOTT: Well, for example, they would leave out the murder numbers for New York City. It's kind of hard, you got the biggest city in the country, crime is falling there, you know, to leave that out when you are talking about crime going up or any other big cities that they left out. And I think it was to scare people a little bit about claiming — you know, sure you can always pick some cities where murders are going up, but you don't want to go and claim murders are going up every place if murders are falling in other cities at the same time.
You want to look at everything that is there and it is hard to justify why you look at crimes from one city and not others.
HERRIDGE: Well, why, in your opinion, were they trying to scare people? I mean, what was the payoff for them?
LOTT: Well, I think they wanted more money from the government to help them out in hiring police and things like that. I mean, a lot of the money that went to police during the 90's really didn't go to police per se. You know, maybe they were going to hire 100 police officers anyway. So they just used the money they would have spent themselves on police to go and spend on some other part of city government. But a lot of cities valued that money from the federal government and I think there is an incentive to try and go get more money again.
HERRIDGE: So you are saying that they cherry picked these statistics to inflate them in some respect, to say violent crime is on the way up, therefore we need more federal money?
LOTT: Right, exactly and they wanted other types of laws too that they said would help them with crime. But it was pretty — I have rarely seen people pick apart data the way that they had in this case.
HERRIDGE: How long have you been studying this kind of data.
LOTT: I have been dealing with crime data for two and a half decades or so.
HERRIDGE: So you have never seen anything like this before?
LOTT: No, not something that the Police Executive Research Foundation had done, nothing similar to what they did.
HERRIDGE: Have you ever approached them about why they manipulated the figures in this way? Have they made a public statement about why they were put out in this fashion?
LOTT: I had phoned them and tried to ask some questions early on. I never got any responses back. So I wrote the piece that I was writing for Fox News at the time. But I haven't tried to get back to them. It is pretty obvious. You have the FBI uniform crime report data and you can compare it to theirs.
HERRIDGE: What is the bottom line for you when you look at the over all violent crime rates in this country? Should people be assured that they are in fact safer today than they were let's say 20 years ago or 15 years ago?
LOTT: Yes, I don't think there is any double that people are much safer now than they were 15 or 20 years ago. The murder rates have gone down by 50 percent. That doesn't mean you still wouldn't like them to go down even further and there are some dangerous parts of country. But if people were worried — or weren't that worried about murders five years ago, I wouldn't be much more worried about them now. It's not like all of a sudden we should be more afraid than we were five years ago.
HERRIDGE: John Lott, thank you for being my guest.
LOTT: Thank you very much.
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ANGLE: And that was Fox News national correspondent Catherine Herridge. Thanks, Catherine. The did the 2008 presidential campaign begin too early? Will voters burn out before they ever get to a ballot box? Or does the early campaigning say something positive about democracy American style? We will look into that in a moment.
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HARRIS FAULKNER, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: From America's news room, I'm Harris Faulkner.
President Bush meeting with members of the West Virginia Air National Guard on this July fourth. He told them victory in Iraq will require "more patience, more courage, and more sacrifice." The president saying this holiday the nation pauses to remember the fallen, and honoring their memory means finishing the work for which they have given their lives.
A British priest saying he received a cryptic warning two months before the failed car bombings in London and Glasgow. He says he was in Jordan for a meeting of religious leaders when a man described as an al- Quida chief told him, "those who cure you are going to kill you." Several doctors, in fact, were among the suspects arrested in the widening investigation.
The rain largely stopped in the plains states, but the flooding has not. The severe weather causing rivers to overrun their banks and streets to be submerged. Experts saying the flooding could last for several days.
Many people celebrating the nation's independence by becoming the newest American citizens. At Walt Disney World in Florida about 1,000 people from across the globe took the oath of citizenship. At this one event alone it took more than three minutes just to read the names of all their native countries aloud.
The markets are closed, of course, for the July Fourth holiday. They will reopen tomorrow on Thursday.
"The Fox Report" with Laurie Hew in tonight for Shepard Smith comes your way at the top of the hour. "Special Report" with Jim Angle in for Brit tonight continues right now. And for all the latest headlines, check out our website, foxnews.com. Keep it here on FOX.
ANGLE: As the year began there were a great many complaints that the 2008 presidential election season was already underway, and much too soon. Some critics complain that Americans would get sick of the candidates, sick of the campaigns, and become less and less interested even before the primary elections began.
For some perspective on this, FOX News contributor Jeff Birnbaum turned to political observer, and fellow FOX contributor, Michael Barron.
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JEFF BIRNBAUM, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Michael, welcome.
MICHAEL BARONE, U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT: Nice to be with you.
BIRNBAUM: We hear so many complaints, Michael, about the length of the presidential race. It goes on for months and months before a single vote is ever cast. But I'm wondering if that grousing really shouldn't be applause for the health of a democracy that could sustain such a long debate about what really is the chief executive of our government?
What do you think?
BARONE: Well, I don't think we have ever come up with an entirely satisfactory means of selecting a president of the United States. We have always got reason to complain about the process one way or the other.
I think there are advantages to having a long contest for the two parties' nominations. It gives a chance to see how these candidates bear up under pressure, what their organizational abilities are and managing and running a large campaign operation. It gives a chance for pretty robust debate. It gives a chance for unknown candidates to come forward in some of the smaller venues, like the first contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Our system certainly isn't perfect, but, you know, people who don't want to be exposed to presidential politics over a 24-month period can switch to another cable channel.
BIRNBAUM: The other objection that we hear a lot is that there are so many candidates—this year in particular, seems like dozens if you count in those who are so far undeclared, and some who may run as independents—but isn't that also an upside-down criticism, really, that democracy is a better off with lots of different voices? Isn't that also an indication of the health of a democracy?
BARONE: Well, you know, there is only four people alive in America, I believe, who have been president of the United States. There's probably only ten people alive who ever will be. But lots of people are competing for the office. I think, as a general proportion, competition is good. Let people advance their messages.
I think one observation potential presidential candidates and politicians have made over the years is it's hard to be elected president if you run, but it's impossible if you don't run. And many of them are acting on that assumption, and they have got a chance to reach people through many more media than they really did as recently as, say, 20 years ago.
BIRNBAUM: Another way that they are reaching those people, and we are hearing all of those different ideas being set out into the market, is through these debates, which we also hear lots of objections about. That is, there are so many of them, there is maybe one a month, or more, as we get closer, I guess, to the primary season.
Isn't it better that we get more rather than less of these candidates and hear their messages as an indication of the strength of our politics? What do could think? Is that a strength or a weakness this year?
BARONE: I think, generally speaking, having debates and having different formats is a strength rather than a weakness. There was nothing in the nature of presidential debates before the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960. We didn't see the general election nominees debate again until 1976.
Now it is pretty much unthinkable that a presidential nominee of a major party would decline to engage in a debate.
I'd like to see more formats in experimentation. I think that FOX News has done a god job in the past, and in the current cycle on setting up intelligent rules that allows candidates to put their views forward, see how they respond to different questions.
Generally speaking, I think more the information that is available, the better.
BIRNBAUM: Well, that leads to this question. We hear that Great Britain somehow has a better system than ours, and others overseas, that limit the length of the election seasons, keep it just a few weeks before election time, where ours goes on for months and months, even a perpetual campaign.
Which is actually better for democracy and for people expressing themselves?
BARONE: Well, I think different countries have different traditions and different rules. There is not just one way to have an elected representative government.
We have got the problem of how do you have an electoral representative government choose a president in a country with 50 states, each with their own voting system, each with their own traditions. And we have got this kind of ramshackle presidential nominee selection process.
But I think, you know, it certainly has the advantage of giving and opening to lots of different kinds of candidates. They will have a chance to get their message across. And one big change that I have seen from, say, 20 years ago, in the 1988 cycle, is there are many more sources of information. We have got cable news, much bigger factor than it was in 1988—
BIRNBAUM: Let's talk about this a little bit. I know this is a special interest of yours. That is, that there are a lot more ways that we get information. Cable is where most people, at least last polling I have seen, get most of their political news. There is the internet with all sorts of ways. We even hear there is going to be an entire satellite radio. XM will have an entire channel devoted justify to the 2008 campaign.
Isn't this something that really brings more people into the process and strengthens the democratic process that we have already?
BARONE: Well, I think that is right. You could add talk radio to that list, and, of course, internet communications.
I remember covering of 1988 elections 20 years ago, when I was an editorial writer for the Washington Post, I had these huge files with great masses of paper with all the candidates' positions. Now can I see it from the click of a mouse key.
That also means the candidates can link to the voters. We have seen some candidate, Howard Dean in the last cycle, but also George W. Bush, raise lots of money from ordinary people on the internet.
BIRNBAUM: And money is an indication of popular support, especially when given in small increments on the internet these days.
BARONE: That's right. I mean, Barack Obama in the first quart of this year raised more money than most insiders expected from a large number of contributors on the internet. So that's an available resource for both candidates and for voters and for people linking him in between.
You look back on the 2004 cycle. We complain a lot, but voter turnout was up 16 percent in 2004 as opposed to 2000. We complain a lot about our polarized politics, but the fact is that a lot more people were engaged, involved, and participating in that election than were in 2000. So the trend has been to more turnout.
BIRNBAUM: That's right. So, we have seen that in presidential election years, a lot more people show their interest by actually showing up at the polls.
And do you think that the increased media is a reason for that? Or is it increased interest?
BARONE: I think it is more increased interest. But it is also facilitated by the fact that you have different sources, greater sources of information.
I mean the ordinary person really had very little way to check on the platforms of the candidates, or their past statements, you know, sitting in their homes out there somewhere in America. Today, they have got an opportunity to click on to that, and they can find all that stuff out.
BIRNBAUM: Find it out for themselves.
Michael Barone, thank you thanks so much.
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