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PODCAST

The Jeff-alytics Podcast

Can data uncover the real story of crime and justice in America?Jeff Asher—nationally recognized crime data analyst, co-founder of AH Datalytics, co-creator of the Real Time Crime Index, and author of the Jeff-alytics Substack—sits down with policymakers, academics, journalists, and everyday people to reveal what the numbers actually show. Each episode challenges the myths we believe, exposes the gap between headlines and reality, and asks: what happens when we finally see crime clearly?New episodes

society & culture documentary

All Episodes

37:25

Deciphering The American Way Of Killing with Malcolm...

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/09/29

The 50th episode of the Jeff-alytics podcast called for a special guest and this episode delivers. Today's guest, Malcolm Gladwell, has a new book out today titled The American Way Of Killing and he was kind enough to come on the show to talk about it. The American Way Of Killing is an attempt to diagnose why America can't have an honest conversation about gun violence and what we're missing because of it. In this episode, we get into why improvements in trauma medicine may be quietly ...

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33:55

Reducing Crime Through Environmental Design with...

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/09/23

Most efforts to reduce crime focus on who is committing it. Megan Grable's work focuses on where. She's a neighborhood planner with the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the unlikely champion of something called CPTED or Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. CPTED is a field based around the idea that the built environment shapes behavior, and that better streetlights, smarter landscaping, and stronger social ties can meaningfully reduce crime. In this episode, we get into what ...

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41:15

What Good Policing Should Look Like with Mo McGough

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/09/16

Mo McGough is a former DOJ attorney and self-described cop’s kid who has spent her career trying to improve how police operate. Mo helped build an NIJ program called Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science (LEADS), which identifies and develops law enforcement officers committed to evidence-based practice. She also co-founded 30 by 30, a national movement to improve the representation and experiences of women in policing, which is now active in over 400 agencies across the country. In this...

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36:53

Running DOJ's Criminal Division with Kenneth Polite

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/09/09

The Department of Justice encompasses nearly a hundred U.S. attorney’s offices, employs thousands of prosecutors, and touches basically every dimension of public safety in America, but most people have no idea how any of it actually works. Today’s guest, Kenneth Polite, does. A native New Orleanian who lost his brother to gun violence on the city’s streets in 2004, Ken spent the next two decades inside DOJ — from assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York to U.S. attorney in...

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39:54

Rebuilding a Police Department in Free Fall with...

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/09/02

Minneapolis recorded more shooting victims than it had sworn police officers in 2021. At that time, a huge chunk of the department had walked out the door just as gun violence had surged and the city council was publicly vowing to reorganize what remained. Someone still had to show up and run the thing. That someone was Chief Brian O’Hara. A career law enforcement officer who started as a beat cop in Newark in 2001, Brian rose to become that city’s public safety director before taking on what...

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41:00

How The Federal Data Landscape Is Changing With...

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/08/26

Every crime rate, every per capita statistic, every trend line in American public safety depends on something most people have never thought about: the data infrastructure underneath it. You only notice it when it starts to break down. Today’s guest, Denice Ross, has seen this breakdown firsthand and it has informed her career ever since. Denice has served as the Chief Data Scientist of the United States under the Biden Administration, built the Police Data Initiative – an open data effort fo...

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34:41

Stitching Together America’s Criminal Justice Data...

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/08/19

The criminal justice system is big, it is complicated, and it is expensive. But how do we know what parts of it, if any, are working? Enter Mike Mueller-Smith. A decade ago, Mike started building the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS) a data infrastructure project that links criminal justice records across 40 states to employment outcomes, health data, and more. It is the kind of tool that makes you wonder why it didn’t exist sooner. In this episode, we get into why ...

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44:36

Guns, Data, and the Law with Thomas Chittum

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/08/12

Every time a gun is recovered at a crime scene in America, a quiet process begins. The gun is traced backward through manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers to find out where it came from and how it got to the scene. Most people have no idea this system exists, let alone what it entails. Tom Chittum has spent 25 years inside it. He's a former associate deputy director of the ATF and has spent his career at the intersection of federal law enforcement, firearms law, and the technology used t...

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47:24

Using Social Networks To Reduce Gun Violence With...

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/08/05

My guest today is Andrew Papachristos, one of the smartest people (though he is a Bears fan) thinking through how to use data to reduce gun violence. Andy has spent his career trying to read networks more systematically. He’s a professor at Northwestern University who studies how social ties and relationships shape who becomes a victim and who doesn’t and how that knowledge can be put to use before the next shooting, not just after. In this episode, we get into what network science actually i...

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37:27

Crime Is Falling. Can Public Perception Catch Up?...

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/07/29

My guest today is Insha Rahman, the president of the Vera Institute of Justice, the oldest and largest justice reform organization in the country. Insha has spent the past ten years building out everything from bail reform research to a 501c4 focused squarely on the politics of public safety and brings a fascinating perspective to the conversation around making perceptions of crime and safety more responsive to what the data says is actually happening. In this episode, we get into why the dat...

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36:50

A Deep Dive into Why Crime is Falling with John Roman

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/07/22

Crime is falling fast in America , and, as the many different opinions on the podcast can attest, almost nobody can agree on why. My guest today has spent thirty years inside the question of America’s changing crime trends, first as a researcher at the Urban Institute, now as director of the Center on Public Safety at NORC. John Roman has a theory about what actually drove the violence spike of 2020, and an even more specific theory about what’s driving the decline now, one that has less to d...

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41:39

Using Technology to Improve Crime Analysis with Andy...

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/07/15

Today's guest is Andy Wheeler, a renowned criminologist, data scientist, and founder of Crime Decoder. Andy is a terrific voice for understanding the role of technology in analyzing and decreasing crime. We talk through Andy’s work with police departments, including crime trend monitoring, predictive analytics, focused deterrence, and the challenge of turning data into useful operational decisions. We also discuss the practical realities of artificial intelligence in criminal justice. R...

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41:28

Documenting the History of Crime & Punishment in...

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/07/08

My guest today has an incredible new documentary coming out this November called Crime and Punishment in America. It's a four-part, 8 hour review of the history of crime and incarceration dating back hundreds of years all the way to today (I was fortunate enough to get a preview). Lynn Novick (The Vietnam War, College Behind Bars, The Us and the Holocaust) is the writer and director of this terrific new documentary and she sat down with me to talk about everything from where the idea to...

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34:04

Improving Policing Through Effective Reform With...

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/07/01

When crime rises, the instinct is usually to hire more officers, increase enforcement, and ask police departments to do even more. But after spending years investigating police departments and working on reform efforts across the country, my guest today has started asking a different question… What if we’re asking policing to do too much in the first place? Christy Lopez is a professor at Georgetown Law, former DOJ Civil Rights Division attorney, and one of the leading voices on policing refo...

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25:06

Behind Kansas City's Crime Drop With Mayor Quinton Lucas

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/06/24

One of the hardest things for any mayor to do is convince people that a problem can actually be solved. That may sound obvious, but when a city has struggled with violence for decades, cynicism starts to set in. Residents get frustrated. Headlines get harsher. And people assume that high levels of violence are simply part of life. My guest today rejects that idea. Quinton Lucas has served as mayor of Kansas City since 2019, a period that included both record levels of violence and, more recen...

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39:07

The Public Health Approach To Reducing Shootings With...

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/06/17

“We should treat gun violence like a public health problem” is a phrase that is often used but rarely defined. My guest today is Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician, injury prevention researcher, and the Dean of the Yale School of Public Health . She sees firearm injury as part of a much broader health issue, one that affects not just the person who was shot, but families, communities, health care providers, and the systems that are supposed to respond afterward. In this episode, w...

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28:36

1,000 Levers For Reducing Gun Violence With Rob Wilcox

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/06/10

The national conversation around gun violence tends to revolve around what laws should be passed next. But a lot of the work of reducing violence doesn’t happen in Congress. It happens in cities, hospitals, community organizations, police departments, schools, and increasingly through coordination between all of them. My guest today is Rob Wilcox, the president and CEO of the Fund for a Safer Future and the former deputy director of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. In this e...

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36:04

Building Towards Certainty Rather Than Severity With...

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/06/03

For decades, the response to rising crime has been fairly predictable: increase penalties, increase sentences, and hope it works. My guest today says that framework misses the point. Greg Newburn is the Director of Criminal Justice at the Niskanen Center, where his work focuses on reducing both crime and punishment at the same time through evidence-based policy . In this episode, we talk about why the criminal justice system may have been built around the wrong theory of deterrence, why certa...

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35:58

Why Accountability and Prevention Don't Have to Be in...

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/05/27

Most debates about crime policy are framed as a choice. You’re either tough on crime or you’re not. You focus on enforcement or prevention. And the answers tend to sound simple. But once you move from talking about crime to actually trying to reduce it, things get more complicated, requiring nuanced solutions to complex problems. My guest today is Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and a longtime policy advisor who has worked across multiple administrations, i...

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17:40

The Past, Present, and Future of Gun Violence...

The Jeff-alytics Podcast ·

2026/05/20

What actually drives change on an issue like gun violence? Is it policy? Culture? Policing? Or something harder to measure? To help answer that question I’m turning to Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. Senator Murphy has been one of Washington’s leading voices on gun violence reduction, a passion that was shaped by his experience in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, where he spent time with families and saw firsthand the impact of that tragedy . In this episode, we talk about the recent decline...

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51 results

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