The Jeff-alytics Podcast

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 mor...

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 worki...

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'...

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 la...

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 exper...

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 i...

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...

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...

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...

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 sp...

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 befor...

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...

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 20...

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 de...

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...

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 Georgeto...

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...

“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, healt...

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 Futu...

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...

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...

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...

Answering the why of crime trends is frequently much harder than answering the what. The same data inevitably leads to very different explanations depending on how you interpret them and what you think is driving them, and there are rarely “right” answers. The numbers are fairly clear, the reasons behind that are not. To get at some of the reasons why crime has trended as it as I’m turning to Char...

Sometimes the hardest part about a crime isn't figuring out what happened — it's revisiting what's already been decided. Once a case is closed and a conclusion settles in, changing that can be just as difficult as investigating it was in the first place. My guest today is Jill Collin Jefferson, a civil and human rights attorney and the founder of JULIAN, an organization focused on i...

What happens when the people shaping national crime policy don’t actually have the data they need? In this episode, I sit down with Rachel Harmon, law professor at the University of Virginia who previously served as a senior policy adviser for criminal justice for the White House Domestic Policy Council.  Rachel provides a rare inside look at how crime policy really gets made, breaking down  what...