Finding Common Ground To Advance Criminal Justice Policy With Adam Gelb

Today I'm talking with Adam Gelb, President and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice. Adam started CCJ in 2019 with a vision of bringing together as many different viewpoints as possible from across the political aisle to find common ground and make smart, evidence-backed policy recommendations.

For this conversation, we talk about why murder has fallen so dramatically over the last few years, how you build a sustainable organization that spans the political spectrum, and how CCJ brings together experts on such a wide range of topics covering everything from crime trends to the future of AI in criminal justice. 

Adam Gelb has been working for a more just and effective criminal justice system throughout a varied 40-year career. Before founding the Council on Criminal Justice in 2019, Gelb was an award-winning crime reporter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, staff to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, crime policy director for the lieutenant governor of Maryland, director of the Georgia Sentencing Commission, and led public safety initiatives at the Pew Charitable Trusts. Gelb speaks frequently with the media about national trends and state innovations and advises policy makers on strategies that are grounded in facts, evidence, and fundamental principles of justice.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

My name is Jeff Asher, and this is the Jeff Analytics Podcast. Criminal justice doesn't have a natural center. It has advocates, agencies, researchers, activists, and politicians all pulling in different directions. So what happens when you try to actually build one? In this episode, I'm joined by Adam Gill, president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice. Adam didn't just launch another think tank. He built an organization designed to convene people who disagree, narrow hundreds of competing ideas into a handful of policy priorities, and produce research that both the Republican and Democratic administrations are willing to cite. We talked about how CCJA was intentionally structured, how its work on crime trends emerged during the uncertainty of 2020, and the limits of the why question on crime. This episode is about what it looks like to try and build durable infrastructure in a fragmented system, and how to get the right experts in the room to make that happen. Let's dive in. Adam, thanks for joining me.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Great to be with you, Jeff.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

So, Adam, you're coming here from the Council on Criminal Justice. I'm very excited to talk to you. Certainly a fellow traveler in the world of crime and crime data and criminal justice policy. So, can you walk us through what's your background? How did you get here?

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Yeah, thanks. It's great to have a chance to talk with you about this. And before I uh start talking about myself at all, I do want to just uh uh give you appreciation for what you're contributing to this field. Uh it's really, it's really fantastic. You're doing a tremendous public service and uh not just in the criminal justice world, but you are helping people in the criminal justice world and beyond understand just how important facts and data are. And maybe that's a segue into my story a little bit. I did not set out to become a journalist, but that's where my career uh took me. Uh, when I was uh at undergrad, I started working on the school newspaper at UVA. And the thing I actually really hated doing that the editors would make me do is call the police department and and see if there was any crime to report worth uh putting in the Cavalier Daily. Really hated doing it, but over time I started making more sense to me and started becoming more interest. And when I graduated, I got a job uh here in Atlanta at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and there was a note on my desk at my first day at work from my editor saying, sorry, I can't be with you, but welcome, and you're on the night cops beat. And so from 1987 to 1991, I was chasing the Atlanta Police Department around. And you recall that that's the height of the drug war. So things were things were uh were just crazy uh here. And I had a chance to uh sit down in the basement at the Atlanta Police Department with the the crime data uh reporters. All those police reports would come in, and they're all these people on these terminals uh inputting the crime data and and supposedly doing it in a way that conformed with the uniform crime reporting rules for defining offenses and so on. And I just took to it. You know, most reporters who get stuck on the police beat as their first job. They want to get off it as soon as possible and move on to city hall or recover education or whatever it is, uh, because that's just generally seen as the low, low job on the totem pole. But I really did gravitate to it. And here I am almost 40 years later, having worked on Capitol Hill twice, uh, worked in state government in Maryland and Georgia, worked at a small nonprofit uh here in Georgia, the Georgia Council on Substance Abuse, doing youth uh meth prevention and other kinds of uh local programs. And then 12 years at the Pew Charitable Trusts running the public safety work there, working with uh governors' legislatures all over the country, helping them figure out how they could safely bend their incarceration rates down. And all of that sort of accumulated uh experience in press politics, public policy, uh research kind of led me to this notion of a council on criminal justice.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

Well, that yeah, that is the mouthful of a background. That's incredible. The the breadth of experience. And again, I just want to say I appreciate the kind words very much. Maybe we'll have a start a segment where every guest has to say something nice about me at the start of the show because that's a great way to kick things off. Well, I actually expected that that was mandatory, so I just went ahead and it is from here on out. So thank you. So you you mentioned CCJ, what is the Council on Criminal Justice for those that don't know?

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Yeah. Uh a Council on Criminal Justice is uh a two-part organization. We're an invitational membership organization and a nonpartisan think tank. So think about those two different components. On the invitational membership side, we are electing two council membership, people who are considered top thinkers and doers in the field, really creating a network and a forum among people across all different sectors of the field: police, courts, directions, communities, researchers, activists, advocates, and creating a forum for people to share knowledge and information and ideas amongst each other. We are also, in terms of a nonpartisan think tank, an organization that calls balls and strikes. I think you could tell from my my background on the jobs I've had. I've had some that are more advocacy-related. I've worked for a number of elected officials, but my grounding is really in journalism. And I'm still these days more comfortable asking questions often than I am giving answers. And that's a lot what we do here. We we call balls and strikes, and we wrestle honestly with the pros and cons and trade-offs of policy choices facing the nation. So that's our mission is to advance the understanding of policy choices facing the country on criminal justice issues and to build consensus for solutions that enhance safety and justice for all. So we we help establish facts and we uh and we build consensus. Let me say that the core of what we do is to pull those two pieces together, the membership and the think tank, and form subgroups, task forces or commissions, and ask them to make findings and recommendations on particular issues. And we bring all kinds of diverse perspectives to the table for those conversations. Former attorneys general, former defense secretaries, along with formerly incarcerated people and uh police chiefs and corrections directors, program providers, and uh ask them to create strategic policy roadmaps. Uh, where should where should energy flow and focus? We know in each of these areas that we have tackled from police reform to veterans justice, that there are 932 things that need to be done. And what we ask these groups to do is focus in on what are the five, the seven, the ten most important things that need to be done? What would make the biggest difference in terms of improving safety and enhancing justice?

SPEAKER_00 6:59

And do you have either when you started this project or now sort of an ideal outcome of what is the criminal justice world you want to create? Or is it we're just going to get a bunch of smart people together in a room and push towards better outcomes?

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Yeah. I don't know if that's not a little bit of a false choice in that you you know very well, certainly having served on one of these groups, our crime trans uh crime trans working group, uh, that we call it a criminal justice system, but it's not really a system. It is a fragmented, disjointed set of processes. And not not only that, in terms of different locuses of control, in terms of local, state, and federal government, in terms of the executive branch and judicial, often it's it's designed to be adversarial and not work together, but actually work against each other, uh, uh, particularly, of course, prosecution and defense. And so when you think about it that way, and you recognize how interconnected things are, but how they don't control uh uh one thing doesn't control another, that it's very much like squeezing a balloon. You can you can push down one part of the system, for instance, reduce the number of people who are going into prison, spanning drug courts and other front-end alternatives to incarceration. But then the parole board, back end, is gonna see more prison beds available and is likely to then say, oh, we've got more beds available, so we're gonna keep these robbers in for maybe eight years instead of seven years on average now. So uh what we've done is to be try to try to be very strategic about the pieces of this process or system that we've bitten off and tried to improve. When we first got off the ground, uh which was in 2019, the First Step Act had just been passed into law. And the question on everybody's minds was okay, the federal government has uh taken taken these steps around sentencing and corrections. What would the next steps be? And so we formed a task force that was chaired by Governor Nathan Deal, who just left the governor's mansion here in Georgia, and included Sally uh Yates, the former Deputy Attorney General, included Mark Holden of the Koch uh World and Stand Together, and other terrific people to come up with a list of their uh strategic priorities for what should be next. Uh then COVID hit and we formed a National Commission on COVID and criminal justice that was co-chaired by former attorneys general Loretta Lynch and Alberto Gonzalez. And that, Jeff, I think as you well know, was where our crime trends work got started. You know, when I got CJ uh CCJ off the ground, uh, tracking crime trends was not on the agenda, not something that uh we thought we would be doing as an organization. But when things started to go haywire in the summer of 2020, Lynch and Gonzalez, the other terrific people we had on our COVID commission, and of course our team wanted to know in real time what the heck was actually happening with crime. We had uh some sense that it was going through the roof. Uh, they're saying, well, it's it's not that bad. And so that's when we started with the late great Richard Rosenfeld and my colleague Ernesto Lopez to start pulling data from the city and police department data uh portals that has now turned into, I believe, this most recent year-end release we had was our 16th in our in our crime trends uh series now. I'll just run through the others quickly. Then so we started to see that violence wasn't in fact spiking. So we we had a task force on violence. We had the George Floyd killing and and the others, and we formed a task force on policing reform. So, in terms of how we've tackled this, most of the issues that we have uh focused our attention on are those the world has presented to us. Like the national agenda was set in such a way that it suggested a thoughtful analysis by a diverse group of well-respected people saying where they think the priority uh initiatives ought to be could really help move the needle. And that's what we've uh that's what we mostly done recently with the task force on AI and a group that we have together chaired by the uh former Supreme Court uh Chief Justice in Texas. How do we uh most effectively strike a balance between the uh dramatic benefits that AI can bring along with the substantial risks and harms as well?

SPEAKER_00 11:32

You mentioned Crime Trends Working Group that I was on was chaired by Rick Rosenfeld and then John Roman after after his his passing. And you know, we put out a report, and then the Biden administration did an executive order that in part took some of those ideas, and then the Trump administration later had, I think, an executive order that took some of those ideas. So it it feels like at least it's pushing the ball forward. Are there other areas, at least that's the one I've been on? Are there other areas that you feel like have been really impactful that you guys have put out reports and really seen a serious policy change related to those?

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Sure. Yeah, and I'll give you two levels. In this business, we are always looking for, and that is that the people, people in the criminal justice policy arena are always looking for okay, what bills did you pass? What what uh specific concrete legislative action was there? But there there are so many effects. So I want to talk about our impact on a couple different levels. One, on that that key level of legislative impact, I think there are two things that really stand out amongst all others. And it it would be the adoption by the Justice Department of the 10 Essential Actions Roadmap that our violent crime working group produced. It was uh 10 steps that uh cities should take to reduce uh violent crime, not necessarily specific programs, but a framework for how a city needs to organize itself in order to uh to maximize violence reduction. Things like there has to be someone in charge, and that person has to be the mayor. Um, there has to be a citywide plan that is a whole of government plan. There has to be a specific percentage reduction target for the year, and so on. And so it was a it was really wonderful to see the Justice Department say, we want to give guidance to uh state and local governments about how to reduce violence. This was in in 22, and the CCJ violent crime working group has done the work. This is the plan. We don't need to recreate the wheel here. They actually adopted uh that that plan's official DOJ policy and in addition, created a line of technical assistance that the police executive research forum was funded to deliver to provide assistance to jurisdictions that were looking to implement the 10 essential actions or parts of that, uh, and then did a whole crosswalk of all of DOJ's resources, training, technical assistance, uh, uh grants, and others by the different divisions of OJP would support action step one, action step two, and so on. So that's one. And then then uh uh the other one I think to mention is one that just happened. You know, Congress just passed a uh a budget for the first time in quite some time, and a new budget for the Department of Justice that was not a continuing resolution. And it included$4 million for the establishment of a National Center for Veterans Justice, which was a key recommendation of our Veterans Justice Commission. And we're extremely excited about that. Obviously, it needs it needs to actually happen by this Justice Department. Congress clearly understood the need for a clearinghouse for identification and dissemination of best practices around how do we improve outcomes for veterans who have become involved in the justice system. So those two things are those big picture outcomes. But I just I just want to note as well that similar to what you're doing with real-time crime index, Jeff, is that overall we're we are supplying the field with facts and data and information. And one of the things that I'm most proud of as the uh as the founder and leader of the organization is that our stuff, like yours, is seen as credible across the political spectrum. And it's very rare and it's very special, and these days it's very, very, very important for elected officials across the aisle, for media outlets, from the New York Times, the Fox News, the Daily Caller, and others to treat the information and the ideas that come out of an organization as credible and as authoritative. And that that function is in and of itself, I think, terribly important, separate and apart from any particular policy wins.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Yeah, I I noted in my year wrap-up that how many other people had been quoted or cited by the Trump White House in December and the Biden White House in January of the same year. And I think that it's probably just the two our two of our organizations together are the only two that have sort of hit that.

SPEAKER_01 16:21

I think that may be right. I mean both of us are probably pretty avid consumers of news and not just crime and criminal justice news, but because uh I think we understand the the the implications of of what we're doing, or we have an eye out for other examples of of this kind of credibility, and it is it is rare indeed.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

So turning turning to kind of the the current moment and crime, and I had a a CNN had a is working on some piece and they were interviewing me today, and it's all about the why question. Why does this happen? And as I'm sure you know, you get asked this question all of the time, not necessarily getting into like why do you think murder is falling, but how do you approach that question and the question in general when whenever you're asked something about the criminal justice system, where it's a big question, and as you mentioned, it's a dysfunctional system, and we don't often have the answers.

SPEAKER_01 17:22

Yeah. I love having this conversation with you. And um so I will I will say that very much like you, I feel like the more confident somebody is in their answer to this question, the more skeptical I am of it. And and that's despite having a tremendous amount of respect for people out there who are offering uh very confident uh uh uh answers right now. Let me let me try to tackle it this way. You could, in uh in analyzing something like this, you could look at motive, means, and opportunity and how they change, right? Those are the three fundamental elements of a crime. You need motive, you need means, you need opportunity. I really think the pandemic gave us a masterclass in criminology. There were changes in in motives, there were changes in means, and particularly during the uh the pandemic and the height of the pandemic, there were changes in opportunity, right? Businesses were closed, and so shoplifting, for instance, go down at the start of the pandemic, and people, everybody was at home. So you saw burglaries go way down because it was uh uh right much harder to break into somebody's home when it was assumed everybody was there. You could also look at this by breaking down the elements of deterrence. There's certainty, swiftness, and severity, right, are the three fundamental elements of deterrence. And you could analyze it by well, what was happening in the system over these past five years or so that uh either reduced the certainty that you'd be detected for committing a crime and the swiftness with which you would be brought to justice, and so on. You can look at this from sort of short-term things and longer-term things. The way that I've tried to get my hands and my head around all these different things is to put them in three buckets, and I'll go through them real quickly here. The first is what's actually happening in the criminal justice system with criminal justice policies, programs, and operations. The second is what's happening with technology. And the third bucket is what's happening with broader society and culture. And I think if this was a movie, we would be, we'd be calling it sort of everything, everywhere, all at once, uh, like the movie title, because there's just so much going on. We had a webinar about this a couple of weeks ago and actually put up on the screen 41 different potential contributors about evenly distributed between those three buckets. So, you know, in those three, you have things like more aggressive and targeted and precision policing. Police are talking a lot about enhanced gun enforcement and taking more guns off the street, particularly ghost guns. You have shutdown and then the reboot of the court system that occurred over the past five years, uh, where it seems to be in most places back up and running at sort of pre-pandemic uh throughput levels. Of course, you have everything that's going on with immigration, enforcement and deployment of the National Guard, which some folks think are uh deterring would be offenders, and then community violence intervention scaling up. There's so much more that's uh happening in the criminal justice bucket, but you can see there's a lot there. Then with technology, there is this profusion and proliferation of surveillance cameras, people's personal cameras, their ring doorbell cameras, police cameras, uh, and and businesses. And law enforcement is increasingly networking those uh cameras together in real-time crime centers. And, you know, there's some, I think there's some reason to believe uh that between that and license plate readers, that that may be making it more likely, including with homicide, that people are are being caught. Their third bucket is is humongous and there's overlap here. There's certainly the argument that our friend and colleague John Roman makes about the massive investments in in social programs and not just uh criminal justice programs, but education and other public services. There's certainly the easing of the pandemic stresses, economic and emotional, and the disruptions and the return of people to more normal routines and lifestyles, the cresting of the opioid epidemic, what appears to have crested, and probably the stabilization of drug markets, like everything else that illicit drug markets went haywire uh during the pandemic and probably have seemed to have settled down. And then let me just close, Jeff, with something that that uh I'm eager to talk with you about when we get a chance, which is this movement toward what some research. Are calling youth independence. And that is basically kids are spending a lot more time at home alone scrolling their phones. And what may be over time very clearly bad for mental health and isolation and have some real downsides across a number of outcomes, not the least of which is suicide, may turn out to be good for crime in that in that youth are uh if they're home uh alone uh and not out carousing with their friends and getting in trouble and doing uh silly things that that young people do, uh that could be a sort of a broad social, cultural, technological thing happening here too. So boy, when you spin up all that together, um it is.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

I'm sorry, I stopped paying attention. Could you go through that list one more time?

SPEAKER_01 22:52

My goodness.

SPEAKER_00 22:54

The youth thing, I think the youth thing is really interesting because you look at something that should be totally unrelated, a crime, the carjackings, which I know you guys measure in your your semi-annual reports, and you've seen carjackings. I mean, you guys have covered from carjackings being at sort of their base level, skyrocketing in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, and then fallen like a rock in the last year or two, and or three years even. And that that is something that relates to youth culture because it's when you track who gets arrested, it's almost always significantly younger. And we don't, in the places that we have it, we don't see a real change in the adults getting arrested for carjackings, but we see teenagers, people in their early 20s getting arrested far less frequently. I I don't have an answer for that, but I think it points to just something in youth culture has changed, and it this is an extreme output of that change.

SPEAKER_01 23:52

It's hard to escape that conclusion. Uh I there is some data out there. I don't want to say that it's definitive, but and and let me uh let me nod to my colleague Ernesto Lopez on on the observation that perhaps what we're seeing is a collision of these long-term and short-term uh forces happening at the same time. Let me try to explain. If you crime really peaked in the early 1990s, and you could look, it's not a straight line, but you could look at what's been happening since then as a prolonged decline, marked at times by uh uh by some spikes in 05, 06, and then again in 15, 16, and 17, and then of course in 2021 and 22 with the pandemic. But if you if you drew a line all the way across the past three decades, you you could see, particularly with murder, um uh a long-term downward trend. And and that it's very likely that some of these cultural and social things that we're talking about undergird that that longer trend. And then things, certain things happen at certain points in time that will cause spikes and and uh diversion from that long-term trend. Um, certainly there are theories about why that happened in uh in the aftermath of Michael Brown, Michael Brown and uh Freddie Gray killings in Ferguson and Baltimore in in 2015, and the loss of legitimacy and trust in police and and the effects that that can have in communities. And then again, of course, uh the pandemic disruptions that we've described. So it just definitely seems to be some interaction between the long-term trends in society and shorter-term shocks of the system. You mentioned carjacking, so I'll just uh just jump in there again, both with carjacking and motor vehicle, and you did a terrific job uh uh as well in terms of highlighting the the Kia Challenge TikTok video that went viral that that all this that contributed substantially to this massive spike in motor vehicle theft. So you can say that also involved a lot of kids. So you can also say that that there is this long-term decline in juvenile crime, and there is. I think it's down about 76% from peak overall, then you see these spikes that that that may be provoked by uh by things that are not so structural but are more situational.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

And I want to sort of change gears just a little bit and talk about sort of the communication element of all of this. And I'll I guess I'll just dive right into sort of the most pressing question that I have is how do you handle communicating your very neutral middle, we're gonna just report the facts, call balls and strikes uh findings when they're skewed on either the left or right by political actors.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

I didn't expect you to I didn't expect you to frame that question quite that way.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

I could frame it differently.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

No, I I'm just trying to just give me a just give me a minute to like I didn't know how do we I'm just trying to figure out how to give you an answer that's not just sort of the obvious answer, but but maybe that's the only way to answer it is we call balls and strikes. That's what we do. And and we've made it very clear since day one that that's what we're doing. And I think the reputation that I have, the grounding I have in in journalism and across the field, I I think helps that. The reputation of our staff, our board members being as diverse as they are. If you were to come to our website and poke around, I think you would very quickly see that we are a very nonpartisan organization that is trying to be a proper think tank and not an ideological think tank. We are we're an advocacy organization. We don't cherry pick the data. I'm pretty good at cherry picking the data, just to be clear. I've had a lot of jobs over time as we started out uh uh talking about in how to frame an argument and and manipulate numbers to show the or make the case for the argument uh and the policy that that you're advancing. That's not what we're doing here. It's just not. And we are relentless about it and uh and are very uh careful and clear in the way that we we choose what topics we're we're gonna focus on, the people we bring to the table to discuss them, and then the way that we package and frame them uh at the end of the day is is very clear and should be, and I think it is to people that we're not pushing a preset agenda. Uh we are bringing together uh groups and researchers uh and having honest conversations where we wrestle uh genuinely and authentically with the pros and cons of uh the myriad trade-offs.

SPEAKER_00 28:50

And how do you guys bring together this sort of bipartisan group? Is there a uh magic to doing that?

SPEAKER_01 28:57

I don't know if it's magic, it's a lot of work, and we do call it a Ruby's Cube exercise because uh each of the groups we formed, and I named some of them before, but between COVID and policing and violence and health and re-entry and the Women's Justice Commission and the AI and the Veterans Justice Commission, we've done 10 groups now, and each of them uh is about 15 plus or minus people from different sectors of the field. And we think very carefully about who are the uh who are the right voices to represent the critical perspectives part of those uh as part of those groups. And we've often found ourselves digging in deeper into particular areas and having to broaden that out because we don't have the necessary expertise uh amongst that 15 or so people and in and involve a much broader group. Our Veterans Justice Commission had somewhere between 70 and 80 people involved in uh in coming up with those findings and recommendations because we focused deeply on uh the front-end police diversion as well as re-entry on the back end and the whole separate issue of how do you help DOD be more effective at helping service members transition from active military duty to civilian life.

SPEAKER_00 30:12

Can we can we talk about AI for a second? Because I was you brought that up. I hadn't I hadn't initially intended to, but I'm really curious because I've been spending the last couple of weeks just sort of playing with claud and cloud code and wanted to get your thoughts. One, I was curious what your commission has found. And two, how do you see the future of AI in criminal justice? Do you see, I mean, I we can certainly see the negatives. I know that ring ad has gotten a lot of people talking about this issue. Is there a positive way that this technology can be implemented that doesn't also scare the bejesus out of everybody from a surveillance perspective?

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Yeah, that's the primary mission of the task force is how to how does the system maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of what AI can bring to criminal justice. And I think there are a couple examples of things that hopefully your listeners will have heard of before, but if they haven't, might help them think differently about this and realize that uh there are some there's some really significant potential upsides. If you're interested in in police reform and police treating people with dignity and respect, um uh what about an AI application which uh processes the audio from body body cams and captures it all and then analyzes it with respect to the tone and the word choice and provides an overall score as to whether the officer uh escalated the situation unnecessarily or handled it in uh a way befitting the uniform and a way that would build trust between the uh citizens and and police. Um if you if you wanted to do that kind of uh performance management and review police officer interactions with citizens and ask your supervisors to review body cam audio, they could only handle the tiniest fraction of that and take the smallest sample and and and miss right uh practically almost everything else that happened. There's just not enough, there's just not enough time to do it. If you roll that through AI, you can get 100% of it and get almost complete coverage of what your officers are doing out in the field and and whether they are in conformance with policies. And so that's just that that's one example. Another one I've heard of recently that's come up through our our task force is in courts, sometimes you have huge prosecution files and complex cases with all sorts of different players and actors and timelines that need to be constructed. Would you would you rather have a low-level lawyer that you're paying for weeks and maybe months to put all this together in terms of a coherent picture of that case, or run it through AI and have it uh generate a list of characters and a timeline and how everything fits together? So those are just a couple of examples that come quickly to mind of ways that that people should be seeing potential opportunities. And the task force, uh to your question, has issued a set of principles for what they would consider to be uh responsible and ethical implementation of AI and criminal justice settings. And we are just a couple weeks out from releasing the next piece that will operationalize those principles and actually provide police departments, corrections departments, court agencies, and community organizations with some very criminal justice-specific advice about what steps they should take to assess whether or not a particular AI application has implications for rights and liberties and should be uh therefore treated and to certain guardrails and so on. So we're really excited about uh about that uh that piece of work and think agencies across the country are gonna now have for the first time a criminal justice specific framework to guide their decision making about how they weigh these pros and cons and the risks and the potential benefits.

SPEAKER_00 34:27

Do you have a sense from sort of obviously you don't have to go through every piece of feedback you've gotten, but do you generally feel like agencies are gun ho, we want to do as much as we can, or are they sort of you know appropriate, cautious optimism, or you know, they've seen the AI slop and they don't want to do it? Do you have a sense of where sort of the organizations you've worked with fit on that spectrum?

SPEAKER_01 34:50

Yeah, I think it's actually different for the for the different sectors. I think the police are way out front in terms of their enthusiasm and how quickly they have started to adopt various applications. Uh corrections is probably uh uh next behind and and and courts not far behind them and community organizations uh uh lagging further. But I I think as this stuff continues to bubble uh and people play around with it, there are going to be uh much more rapid adoption of things that relate to operations and administrative tasks like the case file piece that we were talking about before and police audio reviews, which exists, by the way. Both of those, both of those applications exist. They're not just ideas.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

We had Ian Adams on a couple of weeks ago, who does a lot of AI from University of South Carolina. He talked through the body camera and that one sort of famous incident where the frog, the princess and the frog, was playing in the background, and the body camera app picked up that and thought that the person had like transitioned into a frog. And so it's completely technology. It's not foolproof. No, it's certainly not. That's and that's that's obviously an extreme example. Um You know, Ian is on our dashboard already on Tiscord. Oh, is he? Yeah. That's that's great, and and certainly a smart person. So you know, you might think alike as far as involving him. So what is taking stock of everything, like befitting your background? We've talked about a ton of topics. What is your biggest challenge moving forward?

SPEAKER_01 36:22

I think, Jeff, the challenge for us, particular uh uh your organization and and the council on criminal justice, but for everybody in the field is to try to get smarter about perception versus reality. We are we're in an era right now where uh people don't trust information very very well. As we as we discussed earlier, we're we're we're in the lucky place where people are trusting our organizations to to be straightforward uh about what these data show. But uh in the political environment, things are obviously being spun as they have been and always always will be. But uh I would say this, that there seems to be a notion that people's perception of crime should track in an exact mirror image kind of way the trends that we are reporting. And that's just not right or realistic. People do not determine their levels of fear about crime or almost anything else by looking at charts or graphs and spreadsheets and saying, oh, if something went up by 10%, I'm gonna be 10% more concerned about it. Or if it went down by 10%, I'm now 10% less afraid to walk alone at night. That's not how it works. People's people's are uh concerns and levels of fear are driven by other things. And that includes not just the the quantity of crime and the level of crime that we are tracking, but importantly the quality of crime, right? That is uh the the nature of it, not just the number here. When you have crimes that are particularly brazen, uh when you have crimes that are particularly brutal, that are particularly random, these are these are the things that uh that happen that that that shape whether or not somebody is is particularly concerned about it. A crime that's committed by a 14-year-old is the same in our statistics as one that's committed by a 34-year-old. But if it's a brutal murder that is committed by a 14-year-old, that lands very differently with people and and suggests you know something is more wrong with society. And we process it just very, very differently. And so I think a main challenge for for all of us is to help people better understand that when people are concerned about crime, even if crime is going down, they're not dem just demagoguing. They're not just necessarily panicking, they have their own set of uh own set of inputs and and sources of information and their own tolerance for for what's an appropriate or or at least an acceptable level of crime in our society.

SPEAKER_00 39:12

Absolutely. And you know, I think that the work that I've done and the work that you guys have done making the perceptions it's never gonna perfectly match, but if you can put the data out there in a way that we couldn't five years ago, even when murder was spiking, you can closer conform the conversation around what's actually happening. And, you know, people are gonna have their fears of crime, but most people you can at least hopefully match that too. So I agree that that's such an important conversation. And and so, you know, that's the point of the podcast and everything that we're doing. So glad that you guys are on board with that challenge as well. My last question is what policy conversation do you think is just either missing or not covered in the national debate that probably should be getting some visibility?

SPEAKER_01 40:01

I think states are getting off scot-free in the discussion about violence. Most of the conversations about what's happening with murder and violence in cities focuses on the cities as it properly should, but then it leapfrogs over the governors, state government, and to Washington. And uh what Washington is or isn't doing with respect to gun safety and gun control, how much money Washington is or isn't sending for uh for various programs. State governments have enormous machinery to bring to bear on these issues, and too often they're left out of the conversation. They have parole and probation is almost almost always, certainly parole is probation, is often a state function. They have the Rolodex of people who are, or more likely offenders, and are very seldom brought into the conversation. Sometimes they're they're working operationally at the local level, but there's no heat on the state uh practically for doing a better job with the people they are supervising are in the community. A little bit on on corrections and re-entry, but but not much past that. Uh states have education departments, health departments that can prioritize and focus their resources on uh the neighborhoods that uh where the line share of violence occurs. There's no reason why uh we continue to hear about this mismatch, uh spatial mismatch, as often called, between where the problems are and where the services are. States run transportation departments that uh often have lighting funds. And we talk a lot in the in the violence reduction business about cleaning and greening and making sure that spaces are welcome and are well lit and well tended. And there is a comprehensive whole of government response that states should be bringing to bear. And that's I think one of the biggest missing parts of the conversation about what can be happening to keep these historic reductions in murder that we're seeing uh headed even lower.

SPEAKER_00 42:09

Absolutely very interesting. So, last last question. What's next for you and CCJ?

SPEAKER_01 42:17

What's next? What's next for us?

SPEAKER_00 42:19

Any this is your space for any newsbreaking announcements you'd like to make or or just what what's in the store?

SPEAKER_01 42:25

Be on the lookout for the framework for implementing AI in criminal justice agencies. That's coming up soon. Be on the lookout uh a little bit later this year for recommendations uh from our Women's Justice Commission. Be on the lookout, as I know you will, Jeff, for our mid-year crime trends report, which will uh be in July. Uh just overall for us to continue to try to be a center of gravity for the field, that place that people from all different sectors of the field, different uh ideologies, different disciplines can trust to convene thoughtful, serious conversations about what's happening with crime and criminal justice in this country.

SPEAKER_00 43:09

That's great. The Adam Gelb, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it and all the great work you guys do. You too, Jeff. Thanks so much. Thanks for listening to the Jeffalytics Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and to learn more, head on over to a datalytics.com for more information and previous episodes. If you like what you heard, please leave a glowing review, which will help others to discover the show. Until next time, I'm Jeff Asher.