During last week’s presidential debate, ABC News moderator David Muir echoed a recurrent claim by the Biden-Harris administration, stating, “The FBI says overall, violent crime is actually coming down in this country.” In fact, the latest data shows that levels of crime in the U.S. have risen dramatically over the last four years.

During President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in March, he asserted, “Last year, the murder rate saw the sharpest decrease in history, and violent crime fell to one of the lowest levels in more than 50 years.” Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is repeating the claim on her campaign website, which states, “violent crime is at a 50-year low, with the largest single-year drop in murders ever.”

But experts say that both Harris and Biden are cherry-picking and distorting crime statistics in order to fit their preferred narrative. Last week, John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, joined “Washington Watch” to give a rundown of the most recent data.

“There are two different measures that the Department of Justice has of crime,” he explained. “There’s the FBI data on crimes reported to police. But we know most crimes aren’t reported to police. So about 50 years ago, they set up something called the National Crime Victimization Survey done by the Bureau of Justice Statistics to try to get a measure of total crime, both reported and unreported. So we know about 40% of violent crimes are reported to police and about 30% of property crimes are reported to police.”

“And what you find,” Lott continued, “is that over the last few years, while the number of crimes that the FBI has that are reported to police has gone down, the total crimes, both reported and unreported, has soared during the Biden administration. Total violent crimes — rape, robbery, aggravated assaults — have gone up by 55%. That’s compared to a 15% drop that occurred during the Trump administration. Rapes have gone up 42%. Robberies have gone up 63%. Aggravated assaults have gone up 55%. Those are huge increases that have occurred.”

The data also shows that stranger violence is up 61%, and the rate of carjackings in cities like Washington, D.C. has doubled.

Lott further argued that soft-on-crime law enforcement policies that have been put in place in recent years by left-wing governments in large cities are likely contributing to spiking criminality.

“We know that the rate that crimes are reported to police has fallen, at least according to the FBI data,” he noted. “And if you look at the FBI data alone, there’s a good reason for that. And that is, law enforcement in this country, particularly in large cities, has collapsed. You look at cities over a million, for example. In the five years before COVID, 44% of reported violent crimes resulted in arrests. By 2022, that had fallen to 20% of reported violent crimes — that’s over a 50% drop. You had an even larger drop in arrests for property crimes in those cities [which have] fallen to 4.5% of reported property crimes. We’ve never seen such low arrest rates since they’ve been collecting the FBI data for 70 years. What you find is that if you look at arrests for total crimes, not just reported crimes, only 8% of total violent crimes resulted in arrest, and only 1% of total property crimes in those cities resulted in arrest.”

Lott continued, “And as many people know, just because somebody is arrested doesn’t mean that they’re going to be charged, let alone prosecuted or convicted. And so for many crimes in large cities — it’s true across the country though, too — these criminals have little reason to fear being caught and punished. And the problem is that when people don’t think criminals are going to be caught and punished, they’re less likely to report crimes to the police, and so you’ve seen a drop in the rate that people have reported crimes to the police.”

“And when they’re not punished, the criminals just accelerate their violent behavior,” former congressman and guest host Jody Hice pointed out.

Lott went on to observe that anyone who lives in large American cities in recent years can’t help but notice increased measures that have been taken to mitigate shoplifting, which is currently up 24% under the Biden-Harris administration.

“[I]f you live in many major cities in the United States, and you try to go to a CVS or Walgreens or Walmart, in many cases, you’re going to see many things behind Plexiglas,” he highlighted. “They know that wasn’t the case a few years ago. If they want to go and buy something, they have to wait for a sales clerk to come out and open the Plexiglas and then stand next to them while they go and read the packages to try to determine what it is that they’re going to go and buy. … [I]t’s very costly for them to do that. … [T]hey lose sales from having to go and do that.”

Lott concluded by highlighting the far-left origins of Harris’s law enforcement background.

“Biden and Harris refused to criticize these Soros prosecutors in many places,” he noted. “They’re refusing to prosecute violent criminals. Harris herself many times has come out in favor of taking funds away from the police. She was a George Soros prosecutor before there were George Soros prosecutors. People have a good idea of where her values are. She doesn’t believe that punishing criminals is the way to go and reduce crime.”