Who commits most crimes?
If we want safe cities, we must focus on the people committing most of the crimes.
Mike McDaniel | March 25, 2026
Among the things people don’t know about crime is a relatively small number of criminals commit most crimes. Related is how to interpret crime statistics. If we include the statistics for murder, for example, from every big city in America, we might conclude America is a third world war zone. But if we exclude the statistics from places like Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago and other cities, America suddenly is a very non-violent nation. That of course assumes you can trust statistics from blue cities that don’t want to tell the truth about how badly their Democrat crime-coddling policies are failing.
My last police assignment was as a detective investigating vehicle burglaries--thefts from the interior of vehicles. I also handled thefts of parts from vehicles and ended up also investigating all manner of insurance fraud relating to those crimes. Our town was about 50,000 in those days, but because it had a military base and was a regional shopping center, we had a crime rate closer to a city twice that size.
We were suffering from a plague of car burglaries--mostly car stereo gear and anything else of opportunity. On virtually my first day on the job, a burglar in jail for other crimes got panicky and wanted to talk to a detective, which ended up being me. He wanted to make a deal to lighten his upcoming sentence for several felonies and I was in a deal making mood.
So, I flipped him and further flipped his burglarizing friends. They would venture out into the night in groups of 3-6 and hit as many vehicles as they possibly could, heading home as dawn beckoned with as many as 10 stereos, matching speakers, amplifiers and anything else of value they could steal.
I worked steadily for about a month, retrieving stolen property, getting confessions, serving the occasional search warrant when someone didn’t want to consent to a search, and ended up making 25 arrests and charging 350 counts among them, mostly felonies. I was even able to find people who lost property but never reported it to the police, figuring we wouldn’t do anything about it. Their surprise when I knocked on their doors and told them I’d recovered their gear was delightful to behold.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/03/who_commits_most_crimes.html
