Society & CultureDocumentaryEducationGovernment

The Jeff-alytics Podcast

AH Datalytics

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 drop every other week! Visit ahdatalytics.com to learn more.

Play

Open in

27 episodes
weekly
Avg 36 min
English

Episodes 27

Newest Oldest Longest

All20 Unplayed20 In progress0 Played0

Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.

October 14 · 31 min
Smarter Ways To Think About Reducing Gun Violence with Shani Buggs
Most of what we think we know about gun violence comes from policing data. Dr. Shani Buggs thinks that’s part of the problem. An associate professor at UC Davis’s Violence Prevention Research Program, Dr Buggs came to this work through public health — studying gun violence the way epidemiologists study disease, tracing risk factors, mapping patterns, and asking what conditions make communities more or less vulnerable. She’s spent the last fifteen years trying to build the evidence base for what actually works. In this episode, we get into what a public health approach to gun violence actually means in practice, why community violence intervention has been so hard to study rigorously, and what the data does and doesn’t tell us about the historic crime drop of the last few years. The current moment may be making the research harder just as the field was starting to hit its stride, but there is still a ton to learn and do to reduce gun violence. Dr. Shani Buggs, PhD, MPH, is an Associate Professor with the Centers for Violence Prevention at the University of California, Davis. Her public health and health policy expertise includes structural and social drivers of violence and safety, firearm violence prevention, community-level violence intervention and prevention, transformative first response strategies, and comprehensive community safety. Dr. Buggs is also the co-founder and Advisory Committee Chair of The Black & Brown Collective for Community Solutions to Gun Violence, a multidisciplinary network organization committed to rigorous and equitable research in service of the prosperity of communities disproportionately harmed by violence.
- Transcript
October 7 · 33 min
Fiction as a Data Communication Tool with David Heska Wanbli Weiden
Most Americans have never heard of the Major Crimes Act. Passed in 1885, it stripped Native American nations of the right to prosecute felony crimes on their own land and handed that authority to the federal government where it has stayed ever since. David Heska Wanbli Weiden has spent his career trying to address that. An enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation, David was raised in a working-class Denver neighborhood, became the first in his family to earn a college degree and then a PhD, spent decades as a professor, and eventually began writing novels to put these issues in front of millions of people who would never read a law review article. His debut novel, Winter Counts, became a national bestseller and his newest novel, Wisdom Corner, is out now. In this episode, we get into how a 140-year-old law shapes criminal justice on reservations today, why private vigilante justice exists where the formal system falls short, and how fiction can be a powerful data communication tool.
- Transcript
September 29 · 37 min
Deciphering The American Way Of Killing with Malcolm Gladwell
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 masking the true scale of gun violence, the Second Amendment's actual origins, and why work done in Boston thirty years ago should speak to us about how to reduce gun violence today. This was a terrific, engaging conversation on what we know and don't know about gun violence in the United States. Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist, a speaker, host of the hit podcast Revisionist History, and the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Tipping Point, Outliers, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers, and The Bomber Mafia. His forthcoming book, The American Way of Killing (out September 29, 2026), is an incisive investigation into gun violence, America’s deadliest and most polarizing crisis.
- Transcript
September 23 · 33 min
Reducing Crime Through Environmental Design with Megan Grable
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 CPTED actually is, how Fort Wayne's High Street went from one of the city's highest-crime corridors to an award-winning case study in evidence-based urban design, and how to achieve an enormous drop in crime by layering street trees, murals, crosswalks, and pedestrian lighting on top of each other. Megan Grable is an Urban Planner with Fort Wayne’s Department of Neighborhoods, using data-driven strategies and deep community relationships to deliver transformative urban solutions. She leads the award-winning CPTED Pilot, revitalizes neighborhood associations, and applies global perspectives to advance evidence-based approaches that reshape how cities design for safety and impact.
- Transcript
September 16 · 41 min
What Good Policing Should Look Like with Mo McGough
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 episode, we get into what it actually takes to move a profession that’s slow to change and the enormous untapped opportunity in better understanding how police departments hire and promote. Few people that I’ve talked to have moved policing along as a profession more than Mo and her insights into what the future of policing might look like are invaluable.
- Transcript
September 9 · 36 min
Running DOJ's Criminal Division with Kenneth Polite
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 New Orleans to assistant attorney general heading the entire criminal division, overseeing 1,400 people across 17 sections and operations in over 70 countries. In this episode, he talks about what that vantage point actually reveals: how data moves through the department, where it breaks down, and why prosecutors so rarely communicate the full scope of what they do. We also get into consent decrees, the politics of DOJ independence, and why restoring the department’s credibility is going to require more than just a change in administration. Kenneth Polite is a global co-leader of Sidley’s White Collar Defense and Investigations practice. He previously served as the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), where he led over 1,400 attorneys and staff in handling criminal cases, including securities fraud, healthcare fraud, and cybercrime. Kenneth also served as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. Kenneth has extensive experience in government service and compliance, having been the chief compliance officer at a Fortune 500 company. At the DOJ, he oversaw significant changes to corporate compliance policies and enforcement guidelines. In private practice, Kenneth represents corporations in government enforcement matters and conducts internal investigations, particularly in the energy, financial, healthcare, life sciences, and technology sectors.
- Transcript
September 2 · 39 min
Rebuilding a Police Department in Free Fall with Brian O'Hara
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 may have been the hardest job in American policing: rebuilding the Minneapolis Police Department from near-collapse while simultaneously trying to win back a traumatized community. Brian O’Hara was the 54th Chief of the Minneapolis Police Department, taking over in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. He previously served as Deputy Mayor and Public Safety Director in Newark, New Jersey, and is the founder of the O’Hara Leadership Group, LLC.
- Transcript
August 26 · 41 min
How The Federal Data Landscape Is Changing With Denice Ross
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 for police departments to voluntarily publish data – under the Obama Administration, and now runs the Data Policy Institute at the Federation of American Scientists. In this conversation, we get into what data has actually changed under the current administration. We also talk about the Census as the denominator for everything, declining survey response rates, and how Denice got a group of police chiefs to open up their records over cupcakes at the White House. Denice Ross is the Director of the new Data Policy Institute at the Federation of American Scientists, and the former Chief Data Scientist of the United States. In the Obama Administration, she co-led the Police Data Initiative which catalyzed law enforcement agencies to be more accountable by opening data about things like police use of force and citizen complaints. Denice worked in New Orleans (where we first met) for many years, before and after Katrina, first for a nonprofit data intermediary and then serving in the Landrieu administration, where she established the city's open data initiative. For more of Denice's work, check out http://dataindex.us/ and http://essentialdata.us/
- Transcript
August 19 · 34 min
Stitching Together America’s Criminal Justice Data with Mike Mueller-Smith
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 criminal justice data is so fragmented, what it takes to stitch it together, and what researchers keep finding once they can actually see the full picture. We also talk about Mike’s Justice Outcome Explorer, one of my favorite criminal justice data sites out there – a public dashboard built to help average Joes make sense of complex and sensitive criminal justice data. Mike Mueller-Smith is the Co-Founder and Director of the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS for short), a data infrastructure platform that is modernizing American research and statistical reporting capacity. He also is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan and does research on the multi-faceted determinants of crime in the U.S. and the broad-ranging consequences of our criminal justice policy.
- Transcript
August 12 · 44 min
Guns, Data, and the Law with Thomas Chittum
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 to connect guns to crimes. In this episode, we get into how the legal landscape around gun ownership is shifting in ways most people haven't followed. We talk about how firearms tracing actually works, why the data is so hard to get and even harder to interpret, and what the future of the law surrounding firearms might look like. Tom Chittum was a career federal agent and retired from ATF as Associate Deputy Director. After leaving government service, he was Senior Vice President of Forensic Services at SoundThinking, the maker of the gunshot detection system, ShotSpotter. He is an adjunct law professor at UNLV’s Boyd School of Law, where he teaches ‘Firearms Law and the Second Amendment.’ He also works as a private attorney, representing federal law enforcement officers and advising on matters of firearms and explosives law.
- Transcript
August 5 · 47 min
Using Social Networks To Reduce Gun Violence With Andrew Papachristos
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 is, how cities are using it to reach people at the highest risk, and why the same principles hold whether you're looking at Boston, New Haven, Newark, or Chicago. We also talk about what it actually looks like when violence intervention workers use this research well and what the current historic crime decline might be obscuring. Andrew Papachristos is the John G. Searle Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, where he directs the Institute for Policy Research and CORNERS—the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research & Science. His (insert adjective :P ) research uses network science and multi-method approaches to understand gun violence, gun markets, street gangs, and policing. He is one of the country's leading experts on how network dynamics shape gun violence and public safety.
- Transcript
July 29 · 37 min
Crime Is Falling. Can Public Perception Catch Up? with Insha Rahman
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 data behind reforms like bail reform rarely matches the political story told about them, what cities like Camden, NJ got right during their first homicide-free summer in fifty years, and why Insha thinks the gap between crime perception and crime reality might finally be starting to close. Insha Rahman is the president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice, the oldest and largest criminal justice reform organization in the country. Insha is also the president and director of Vera Action, an independent 501(c)(4) organization. Insha is the first woman, immigrant, and Muslim to lead both organizations. Insha previously served as Vera’s vice president for Advocacy and Partnerships and the director of Vera Action since 2020. Insha got her start in this work as a public defender in the Bronx.
- Transcript
July 22 · 36 min
A Deep Dive into Why Crime is Falling with John Roman
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 do with new policing tactics and a lot more to do with $300 billion in pandemic relief money that quietly rebuilt the social infrastructure we lost. In this episode, we talk about why the usual explanations for crime trends – more cops, more task forces, more local initiatives, don’t hold up against the data. We get into the role police legitimacy potentially played after George Floyd, why the decline has lasted so long, and what the future might look like. John K. Roman, Ph.D. is a senior fellow in the Economics, Justice, and Society Department and directs the Center for Public Safety and Justice at NORC at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the economics of innovative crime and justice policies and programs, cost-benefit methodology, and systems reforms, including justice system interactions with substance abuse, public health, adolescent development, housing, workforce development, and education. Dr. Roman has conducted research on behalf of numerous state and local governments, foundations, and federal agencies.
- Transcript
July 15 · 41 min
Using Technology to Improve Crime Analysis with Andy Wheeler
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. Rather than focusing on the hype around AI replacing workers or transforming society overnight, Andy walks through how these tools are actually being used today: helping analysts write code, automate repetitive work, build dashboards, and make better use of messy public safety data. This is a great conversation about how the future of criminal justice analysis is already here. Andrew P. Wheeler, PhD and founder of CRIME De-Coder, collaborates with police departments across the United States on custom software and data analytics. His work focuses on predictive analytics, operations research, and policy analysis. See his firm and other resources at https://crimede-coder.com/. Andy also has a recent book, *Large Language Models for Mortals: A Practical Guide for Analysts with Python*, https://crimede-coder.com/blogposts/2026/LLMsForMortals
- Transcript
July 8 · 41 min
Documenting the History of Crime & Punishment in America with Lynn Novick
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 cover such an expansive subject came from to what it's like working with such tremendous talent to make history come to life. This conversation is a great look into documenting the complexities of the American criminal justice system. Give it a listen and be sure to catch the new film when it comes out in a few months! Lynn Novick has been making landmark documentary films about American life and culture, history, politics, sports, art, architecture, literature, and music for more than 30 years. As director and producer, she has created more than 100 hours of acclaimed programming for PBS in collaboration with Ken Burns, including most recently their six-hour series, The U.S. and The Holocaust, (co-directed and produced by Sarah Botstein) which received the Alfred I. DuPont Columbia Award and the Television Academy Honors award. Novick’s films include The Vietnam War, Ernest Hemingway, Prohibition, Baseball, Jazz, Frank Lloyd Wright, and The War -- these landmark series have garnered 19 Emmy nominations. Novick herself has received DuPont, Emmy and Peabody Awards.
- Transcript
July 1 · 34 min
Improving Policing Through Effective Reform With Christy Lopez
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 reform and alternative public safety responses. In this episode, we talk about the limits of traditional police reform, why consent decrees have struggled to produce lasting change, and what it would look like to build a more diversified public safety ecosystem instead of relying almost entirely on law enforcement. Christy Lopez is a Professor at Georgetown Law, where she teaches courses on policing, criminal procedure, and civil rights, and is the Faculty Director of Georgetown's Center for Innovations in Community Safety. Prior to going to Georgetown in 2017, she was at the U.S. Department of Justice where she led the Division's group conducting pattern-or-practice investigations of law enforcement agencies.
- Transcript
June 24 · 25 min
Behind Kansas City's Crime Drop With Mayor Quinton Lucas
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 recently, significant declines in homicides and shootings across the city . In this episode, we talk about how Kansas City approached violence reduction and how to communicate complex solutions to an intractable problem. Born and raised in Kansas City's inner city, Quinton Lucas serves as the 55th mayor of Kansas City, the youngest person elected to the role since 1855. Recognizing the importance of safety in our communities, Mayor Lucas serves as national chair for criminal justice efforts in the United States Conference of Mayors and as an advocate to reduce gun violence on America's streets as co-chair of Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
- Transcript
June 17 · 39 min
The Public Health Approach To Reducing Shootings With Dr. Megan Ranney
“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, we talk about what a public health approach to firearm injury actually means, why that framework is often misunderstood, and how public health researchers think about prevention differently from the way these conversations usually happen in politics or media. Dr. Megan Ranney is Dean of the Yale School of Public Health, a practicing emergency physician, and leading voice for innovative approaches to public health. For more than two decades, she has worked on the frontlines of emergency medicine, caring for patients impacted by firearm injuries, overdoses, and other preventable crises while advocating for solutions that bridge science, policy, and public trust. Her work focuses on rebuilding the connection between science and society and advancing evidence-based solutions that help people live longer, healthier lives.
- Transcript
June 10 · 28 min
1,000 Levers For Reducing Gun Violence With Rob Wilcox
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 episode, we talk about what it was like helping build such a critical office from the ground up, how he tried to approach gun violence as more than just a legislative issue, what happens when the federal government starts thinking about violence reduction as an operational challenge instead of simply a political one, and what the future of gun violence prevention should look like. Rob Wilcox joined the Fund for a Safer Future in 2026 as its first President & CEO. He previously served as co-deputy director of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention in the Biden-Harris Administration, where he built a track record of turning evidence-informed strategies into real-world results. In that role, he led the implementation of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and helped to shape over 50 executive actions. Prior to his White House service, Wilcox served in a senior role at Everytown for Gun Safety, where he worked on state and federal legislative efforts. His personal connection to the issue—his cousin Laura was killed in a workplace shooting in 2001—has driven his commitment to evidence-informed solutions for more than two decades. Fund for a Safer Future is a national network of over 30 funders pooling expertise and resources to help end gun violence. FSF is making grants to support policy, research, communications, and community-led efforts that save lives. The collaborative model brings more funders into the movement, lifts evidence-informed solutions, and backs the organizations working every day to keep communities safe.
- Transcript
June 3 · 36 min
Building Towards Certainty Rather Than Severity With Greg Newburn
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 certainty matters more than severity, and what it would look like to design a system focused less on increasing punishment and more on increasing the likelihood that crimes are actually solved. Greg Newburn is director of criminal justice at the Niskanen Center. His previous positions include state policy director and Florida director for FAMM and chair of the Florida-based 'Yes on 11' political committee. He is a graduate of the University of Florida and the University of Florida Levin College of Law.
- Transcript

Showing 1–20 of 27 episodes