Over the last month, Americans across the political spectrum have talked about violent crime. Several high-profile news stories pushed this national conversation, including President Trump's efforts to clean up the streets of Washington, D.C. (and crime in major cities across the country), as well as the horrific shooting in Minneapolis on August 27. Over this past weekend, outrage has centered on the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, who was stabbed in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Her murderer, Decarlos Brown, Jr., had at least 14 prior arrests before his fatal attack on Zarutska. Brown now faces federal charges in conjunction with that crime, with Attorney General Pam Bondi vowing that Brown will "never again see the light of day as a free man."
Throughout the crime debate, Democrats have insisted that crime is just part of city life, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson called arresting and jailing criminals "unholy" and "racist." The Democratic Party also insists the solution to crime is to spend more federal dollars on things like housing. Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said such spending would help reduce violent crime and the rampant street takeovers plaguing his city.
Vice President JD Vance offers a much simpler solution: jailing the small percentage of criminals responsible for the majority of violent crime.
The big lie the Democrats told about violent crime is that it's "systemic" and therefore no one's really responsible. If the "system" is to blame then you fund a bunch of nonprofits that don't do anything besides give jobs to underqualified radicals.
— JD Vance (@JDVance) September 9, 2025
The reality is that the…
Vice President Vance says, "The reality is that the gross majority of violent crime is committed by a very small group of people and we should be throwing them in prison."
According to City Journal, the Vice President is correct:
First, crime is heavily concentrated by place. As a general matter, 5 percent of the locations in a given city account for 50 percent of that city’s crime. This finding has been replicated so often that it is sometimes referred to as “the law of crime concentration.” As David Weisburd and Taryn Zastrow note in a recent Manhattan Institute report, “there is tremendous consistency in the degree to which crime is concentrated at hot spots across cities.” This is not just a matter of neighborhoods: between 3 percent and 5 percent of specific addresses on city blocks generate 50 percent or more of reported crimes. And if the focus is strictly on violent crime, such as shootings, then even fewer locations—perhaps a drug house or a liquor-store check-cashing operation—are magnets for an even greater percentage of violent crime.
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Second, violent crime is heavily concentrated in a relatively few individuals. In general, 5 percent of the criminal offenders (not 5 percent of the general population) in a given city commit about 50 percent of that city’s violent crime. One study found that just 1 percent of offenders were responsible for over 60 percent of violent crime.
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The FBI Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) recorded that between 500,000 and 600,000 people are arrested for violent crime annually (those crimes include murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault). That represents roughly 0.15-0.18% of the population.
In 2014, criminals with three or more arrests were responsible for the majority of violent crime.
Most crime is committed by people with 3+ prior arrests. It’s a relatively small handful of criminals causing a lot of the problems we see. pic.twitter.com/YPxivIocpY
— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) September 9, 2025
A years-long study published in the October 2013 edition of Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology looked at almost 2.4 million people born between 1958 and 1980 and tracked violent crimes between 1973 and 2004. Of those people, almost 94,000 (3.9%) had at least one violent crime conviction, with just over 24,000 (1.0%) accounting for 63% of all convictions.
The study also noted the "majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality."
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