Crime, Policy, and What Has Changed with Charles Fain Lehman

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 Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who focuses on crime, disorder, and what he describes as the public policy of antisocial behavior.

In this episode, we talk through the differences in how we can explain what’s happening now, the role of policing and social factors, and how concepts like disorder shape how people experience safety in ways that don’t always show up in traditional metrics.

Charles Fain Lehman is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. He focuses primarily on the public policy of antisocial behavior, including issues of crime, drugs, and public disorder. His work has appeared in outlets including the New York Times, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, and National Review, and he has discussed policy issues before the Senate, House of Representatives, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm Jeff Asher, and this is the Jeffalytics Podcast. 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. This trend shows up clearly in conversations about what's happening over the last few years with crime. Crime went up sharply, then it came down. The numbers are fairly clear. The reasons behind that are not. My guest today is Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who focuses on crime, disorder, and what he describes as the public policy of antisocial behavior. In this episode, we talk through the differences in how we can explain what's happening now, the role of policing and social factors, and how concepts like disorder shape how people experience safety in ways that don't always show up in traditional metrics. Let's dive in. Charles, thank you so much for joining me. Absolutely happy to be here. So let's start with your background. How did you get to be here?

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Gosh, that's a great question. The answer is that I used to be a journalist. I worked for a publication called the Washington Free Beacon for about five years. And there I sort of developed a data-driven policy-focused beat. A lot of my work focused on crime and social policy, although not exclusively, but part of how I differentiated myself, and I should say, you know, I work for a right of center think tank, the free beacons are right of center publication. Part of how I differentiated myself, particularly among the sort of right-of-center world, was trying to answer questions with numbers, trying to not just sort of report what people told me, but really dig into the data and teaching myself the skills to do that. And then at some point that evolved into my work at a think tank, the Manhattan Institute, where I now am, where much of my, you know, my focus very broadly is on what I like to talk about as the public policy of antisocial behavior. What I mean by that is a lot of policy questions are concerned with coordination. We have fixed resources, we have infinite wants. How do we divide things up? Healthcare policy is a great example. Doing those things, how can you do that in a responsible and functional fashion? Crime is a natural component of that. Public disorder, which I think we're going to talk about today, drug use, any social issues is a wide, wide swath of policy. So, you know, I I and I try to come at those from uh an evidence-informed and uh data-driven perspective to sort of bring a little more nuance to those conversations.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

All right. So I like to start these interviews off and start with sort of the easy softball questions and get harder as we go along. So why is murder falling?

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Great question. That's a very that's a very straightforward one. Uh you know, I look, the responsible answer is we don't know. And I'm sure I'm not the first guest on your show to say that. And, you know, I go out of my way to offer that caveat because I'll then I'll then offer my theories, but they are just theories. And in some senses, you know, obviously we can't estimate the counterfactual world in which the set of things I talk about don't happen. We don't, we don't know. As a general rule, though, the way that I have tended to think about the decline over the past couple of years is that, you know, it is not like the big increase and decrease in murder in the 1960s through the 1990s, that that's sort of the big cr the great crime wave and then it's retreat. There, I tend to think that the demographic structural factors tell us a lot. The the big part of the story I like to say, the big thing I like to highlight is that's when the baby boom generation ages into and out of crime. Frank Zimring, the criminologist, estimates that's about half of the increase and decrease is the baby is the age structure of the population. Here we don't see the that sort of same long-term demographic trends. It's just like up and then down. And I think that, you know, at a structural level, we should expect crime rates to be low. The population is graying, we're all more obese than we used to be, although that's maybe turning around a little bit. We're all way more surveilled than we used to be. Like all the all the factors that sort of determine the equilibrium crime level point towards like lower crime. And then we saw this sort of sharp upwards deviation and then a return almost as sharply over a brief period of time. And so I tend to think it's like that that that tells me there's some kind of shock. There's an exogenous shock to that otherwise equilibrium level. And I tend to say, look, there are two sides to that story. One is the COVID-19 pandemic clearly has to be a part of that story. There's a sort of an immediate and durable change in the level of social control provided by both formal and informal institutions. We closed all the jail, we closed many jails, we shut down courts for a long time, schools were closed, places of work, like the places that you go to be socially surveilled, those stopped operating for a while. That clearly is a big part of the story. That can't be the whole story. A, because other nations did not experience the same increase that we did, even though they were treated by code as well. B, because there's basically like a negative correlation between COVID compliance and being willing to commit crimes, i.e., the sort of people who murder each other mostly probably were not following social distancing rules. They aren't the kind of people on average who are likely to do that. Which means I also think that a big part of the story is the drawdown in police activity in the immediate aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the defund the police movement. You see this across a number of different sources. In your own work, in particular, the decline in staffing in big city departments, where we've seen not a decline in the overall police staffing level, but I think you see officers flowing to departments where there is less crime, and so you have less access to those resources. There are some measures by which you see declines in police activity or police proactivity. Cops are doing fewer stops, fewer arrests. And in many places, those have rebounded. So, you know, I tend to think like basically that problem has gotten better, at least to some degree, although not absolutely. The COVID problem has obviously gotten a lot better. And also just like there's a natural burnout where like the people who are victims of murder are often also the people who commit murder. And you know, to be morbid, like those people eventually are no longer in the supply of murderers because they themselves have been murdered. And so you end up getting a burnout effect. And so all those factors, I think basically, you saw this big shock in 2020, murder goes up, but it wasn't a like demographic structural change. It wasn't a change to the equilibrium level of violence. So I'm not surprised that we eventually came back down. That was very long.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

I mean, that's that's as succinct as I've ever put it. So it's it's certainly a very difficult question and one that I I hate trying to answer, which is why I guess I'm I'm trying to get you to answer it as succinctly as possible here. Are there explanations that sort of for you know, more towards the more recent decline in crime that are sort of out there? I know you mentioned the the weight gain, but not really, we're actually losing weight thanks to GLP1s. I've heard that bandit about are there explanations like that that you think they're like this is a crazy explanation, but it also maybe helps to explain a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Um you mean and specifically since 2020.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Yes, specifically since 2020. I mean you could even things that are sort of changing the equ equilibrium.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

You know, well Yeah, I mean I think like, you know, there there clearly are some longer run factors. Like we we seem to keep we we increasingly get more and more surveilled every year in a way that like clearly is gonna matter, at least in the medium term. Um, you know, I don't I uh I have my disagreements with has John Roman been a guest on this podcast? No, he said he's already listening to John. He's a very natural guest, and I think he has leaped very heavily into this model of like basically there was all of this uh recovery uh COVID recovery money that was flowing around to state and local governments that yielded increases in state and local employment in the sort of like caring sectors. I think there's like not nothing to that argument, and I can kind of tell a story that jives with my priors there, but I'm like I think he puts way too much emphasis on that explanation and very little emphasis on all other explanations. So, you know, there there, I think that's a little bit off the wall. I wouldn't give it 90%. I might give it five to ten percent. I have to think about other examples of like off-the-wall explanations for the decline. But I mean, I do tend to think it's just like a story about violence went up and there was no reason for violence to stay up, and so what goes up must eventually come down in the absence of some reason for it to, you know, remain up.

SPEAKER_00 8:29

Do you find an explanation between you know we've got falling opioid deaths that are falling like a rock, traffic accident deaths that are falling at a decent clip, alcohol-related deaths that are falling, and then murder, and they all tell the same story in such a way that it they have to be connected.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

Well, I just I mean, like, maybe, but be wary of that, right? So, like, I think about this as the the deaths of despair. Um, or I think if this is my analogy, the deaths of despair concept, which is like basically you can lump together drug RD deaths and suicide deaths and alcohol-associate like cirrhosis of liver deaths, and those all sort of occur among the same populations, and they all sort of like you can conceptually link them in your head. And so it's like these are clearly together. Except I did some work on this several years ago. Like they they actually don't, if you sort of look under the hood, they really aren't related at all. Like the trends are different, the subpopulations to whom they're happening are different. And I think the same thing is true here. Like, you could sort of describe like a like a uniform factor of recklessness that explains a bunch of these phenomena. Like you could say car crash deaths and opioid deaths and drug deaths. There is clearly some overlap in the associated population, and you know, some of it is associated with like impulsive behavior. But like the people who do murders are different from the people who are overdosing on drugs. I also think it's just like in several of those cases, we'll talk about car crash deaths, but in the case of opioids, I tend to think it's actually there's clearly something totally exogenous and hard to explain that's happening there. I do think it's possible that you see there part of that is a similar burnout phenomenon where like you saw a very large increase in overdose deaths in 2020, and the people who died from overdose in 2020 weren't available to die in 2023, 2024. There is some sort of dividend that isn't really a dividend in that regard, because we don't want them to die at all optimally. That would be better if people didn't die. I'm against that. But so, you know, I think you can see a simple analogy, but it is like a different, it's a different population, right? It's like the people who are committing the overwhelming majority of gun homicides are disproportionately young men in close social circumstances with other young men and they have guns and they have low systems of social control. The people who are addicted to opioids and who are overdosing on them are sometimes that population, but like overwhelmingly not that population, and or are often in a different social context than the population. So you could like imagine a social force pressing down on both of them, but I tend to prefer, like I am secretly very materialist in my understanding of the world. Like I'm always very wary of sort of big social forces up there. I'm much more point of being like something changed in the opioid supply, or we turned up the social control variable some and things got better, or you know, like a bunch of people died enough and then there was no more dying available to do.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

So I guess I'm gonna sort of echo on their hone in on this concept of like something changed societally, which I guess as an analyst is like it's easier to say, yeah, something changed. I don't know what it was. It's it's like magic thing. As the analyst, I'm just describing the trend. It's it's done. But when we look at crimes that are specifically where the offenders are tend to put disproportionately be youths. I'm thinking about carjackings, vehicle burglaries, auto thefts. I think the auto thefts trend is a lot easier to explain as like all the kiosks and Hyundai's were stolen and now it's falling. But we've seen this enormous decline in carjackings, an enormous decline in vehicle burglaries. Could it plausibly be just like some sort of societal the kids are all right is kind of conceptually in my head how I think about it? Or can you think of more specific controls or things that have changed even in the last two years that have caused these trends to shift?

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Yeah. I mean, there I look at specifically things like rates of turncy, where like that can't be all of it because sorturancy really did spike in 2020, 2021. I mean, Malkus at AEI has done good work on that. And then it like was coming back down pretty slowly and it's kind of stalled out recently. But you know, when when you talk about teenagers, to me, the story is just as much about like basically A, the the transaction cost, as you've written about the sort of transaction cost associated with carjacking went down because like there was knowledge about how to do a carjacking, that knowledge diffused, people got it through TikTok, which was cool for them, bad for every get everyone to go into Kia or a Hyundai. And then like there were some physical patches, and so it became harder to do that stuff. But then it was also just like, you know, I I I'm able to say this and you're able to agree because we were both presumably once young men, and young men are like dumb and impulsive, and you know, young, dumb, impulsive men or it's sometimes it's women, but it's disproportionately men, will sort of go, This seems like a good idea, and then do it if they are not subject to some arrangement of like we use this phrase several times, social control, which just means like somebody is looking out for them. Somebody's like, hey, you need to be in a place at a time, you need to be following the rules. And that somebody can be the government, but it can also be like a teacher or a parent or somebody else in the community. Uh, it can be an informal system of social control. And so when I look at like, you know, when I look at the carjacking thing, my response is basically like, where were the teens? What are the what are the risks associated with carjacking? Because those went up because a bunch of cities said, we're gonna focus on this as a serious issue. What are the benefits, you know, how easy is it to carjack? It got way easier for a while, and now it's probably harder again. Uh, and then just like, what are the potential carjacking offenders doing with their time at the margins? Many of them were not in school previously, and some of them are now back in school, which like is good in my opinion, both from a crime prevention perspective and also because like kids should go to school. So even there, like, like I tend to look for what are the what are the like big structural factors of, you know, or it's not like like I'm I, you know, what are the not not so much the vibe factors as like what are the the routine activities view? What is the like, what are what are the opportunities? Is there a capable guardian? Is there a motivated offender? Like how can, you know, do we have the arrangement of variables to make crime happen versus not?

SPEAKER_00 14:31

So if you were sort of the the czar of crime reduction policy, nationally, locally, statewide, whatever wherever you you want to imagine yourself, what would you do to sort of sustain these declines now that we've seen them?

SPEAKER_01 14:44

Again, you you started with all the really easy questions. Um So I've you know, I've I've done a bunch of work on this topic of what I talk about as like like the I've talked previously about criminal justice modernization and the capacity of the criminal justice system, where my argument is essentially, you know, we we tend to think about like, is the criminal justice system too punitive? Is it not punitive enough? We should sort of move that variable up and down. Whereas I tend to think about like, does the criminal justice system have the capacity to solve the problems that are in front of it? Does it have enough swan officers? Does it have enough jail cells? Does it have enough judges? Does it have enough prosecutors? Does it have enough defense attorneys? Like there's a, you know, there's there's for there's a certain level of like demand for the criminal justice system, and you know, because it's not a market-provided good, like we determine what the supply of criminal justice is. And my argument has been that on many margins, we don't have an adequate supply of criminal justice. The police to population ratio, the number of officers per American or per thousand Americans, has actually been declining to the Great Recession. We we like stopped spending money around then because there was state and local austerity, and it's just sort of like continuously declining. Also, the 94 violent crime bill, that wave was just started retiring, and so like that ratio went down. Courts moved, there's a great um report on this from I think the National Center for State Courts. Courts move way slower than they did 30 years ago for like extremely basic reasons of just like they've gotten worse at case processing. The judges just don't know how to do it as quickly. Um jail capacity has declined, our prison infrastructure is aging. We've gotten way worse at data, and or actually we've remained about as bad at data as we were. We've gotten like, no, like you know, I'm doing Jeff Asher's show, so I can say I say to journalists sometimes, I'm like, the best crime data in the country comes from this guy named Jeff. And we all like Jeff very much, but it's kind of ridiculous that the good crime data comes from Jeff. Like that's that's not a that's not a reasonable situation.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

My wife would get mad at me when uh I would be like explaining the situation to national reporters. I'd be like, it's weird that this random guy on Twitter is like the source for all of this.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

But that is the situation, right? Like the New York Times is like, we're gonna get our data from Jeff. And it's like, okay, or the CCJ is now doing it, the Council of Criminal Justice is now doing it, but that's crazy and that's a capacity problem. It's like like average citizen should not be able to outperform the government at the provision of these basic services. And my my last favorite statistic on this is I did some math for this report. The National Institute of Justice, which is the major grant-making body of the Department of Justice, spends less per year, or about equivalent per year in research grants as the National Institute of Eye Health, which I believe crime is a greater social problem than eye health. I mean, eye health is a reasonable problem. I don't want to minimize the suffering of people, but like I think crime is a bigger problem than eye health. And so that's crazy to me. And so my consummate answer is like, you know, both from a crime prevention perspective, from a quality of the criminal justice system perspective, from a fairness perspective, everything that everybody left and right cares about, like ultimately those are resource constraints, or to the extent that they are not as good as they could be, that is ultimately a resource constraint. And so my answer to the original question is just like, look for easy opportunities to turn up the available resources and then try to do that wherever possible. Because, like, that's how I think about the problem. It's not about punitivity, it's not about like, you know, the sort of cultural baggage, it's all just like, do we have the supply to meet the demand?

SPEAKER_00 18:17

So moving along, I want to talk about uh disorder because you mentioned that uh I'm guessing this is probably the area that we maybe disagree the most about in this conversation, but I'm just curious, can you sum up like the role specifically that disorder might play? First off, what is disorder? And second, the role that you think it plays in how people perceive what's happening versus what's actually happening or measuring happening.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, my my interest in this as a topic came in large part from the like mismatch between the constant mismatch between what was showing up in major crime figures and what people's perceptions reported, self-reported perceptions of crime aren't, where this is just a phenomenon of like everybody thinks crime is getting worse all the time, and we live in a really crime-bitten society. And then I sort of go, well, the statistics show that things are actually getting much better, and people go, well, the statistics are all fake. And you have this real problem of, you know, a sense of credibility when you show people the major crime numbers and say, you know, look, things really are improving. Um I find myself now in arguments with people on the right all the time where they insist that, you know, the numbers are faked by source, prosecutors, or whatever. And I'm like, I had this argument with people on the left five years ago. It's not actually productive to do this on either side. Like the numbers are almost certainly not the exact level, but they're probably decently correlated with reality and they're the least worst available resource to stop have, you know, stop inventing conspiracy theories. So my argument is and has been that part of specifically over the past couple of years, part of what explains the mismatch between the increase in the decrease in crime and people's perceptions of crime is that there's a separate increase in sort of uh more petty antisocial behavior, some of which is criminal and some of which is not, which I refer to as disorder. The definition of disorder that I offered a while back when I was sort of first talking about this is that disorder is the domination of public space for private purposes, which is like that can refer to unsheltered homelessness and public camping, it can refer to public drug use, it can refer to graffiti, it can refer to people playing their music too loudly, it can refer to the guy on a like public transit, it can refer to the guy who's like letting his dog run out of control in the public park. It's like, are people being respectful of the commons? Um are they are they acknowledging that this is a thing that we need to share, or are they not? And my argument was, and you know, I have to think about uh I think the numbers have changed a little bit since I first started writing about this, but you know, my my argument is basically like a lot of what people are perceiving when they say when they talk about crime, a lot of what people are actually responding to is their perception of public disorder around them. That like mostly most people will not will go through their entire lives never witnessing a murder or shooting. And so like your personal perception is probably not fundamentally about what the current shooting rate is. It's much more about like, is the stuff that I see around me that feels crime-like is that how how prevalent is that? And my argument is like, at least in some places, people's perceptions of crimes were accurately mapping to what the limited available data said was going on with public disorder. So like that's that's the top line of what is disorder, and then also like what you know, where how I think that explains part of that mismatch, which is what originally motivated me.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

So I guess my uh I disagreement is probably too strong of a word, but my qualm with that is that we're really bad at measuring pretty much everything but murder and maybe auto theft. We're especially bad at measuring disorder. And so are you familiar with like really solid ways of of measuring? These things like shoplifting is often the one that gets bandied about, and it's like, well, yes, shoplifting is up, but also maybe Target just started reporting it. You know, yes, shoplifting is down, but Target just closed their store. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:13

No, I I I think this is completely reasonable. Um, and it, you know, it it like there are no national inde in indices of this. Part of what launched my work on this was spending some time in Chattanooga. And I promise I'm coming back to answer your question. Where like what I, you know, I I went to Chattanooga because I I knew some people were there who were interested in crime in the city. And what became apparent to me is like all the people thought that crime is a serious issue, and there just clearly it clearly wasn't a serious issue in Chattanooga. Like basically the police department had done everything it was supposed to be doing to deal with violent crime. It had like followed all the evidence-based guidelines and they had mostly worked. Like they saw what everyone else, you know, they saw an increase and then crime went down. But, you know, from talking to people, they cited the same sources of concerns, public drug use, unchildren's homelessness, and they said, okay, I can't there there is no one index. Uh let me go look at a bunch of different measures that are like plausibly our proxies. Um, what are the what does the homeless census say? What do 311 calls say? What do arrests for petty offenses say? I like 311 calls as a resource. The data source is gonna vary across cities, and like, you know, usually you sort of have to like, does the Department of Public Works publish anything? So, you know, it is it is pretty imprecise. I think that's a totally reasonable criticism. And I think the least twist available tool is just like you have to look at a bunch of different data sources and say, what's the, you know, what's the impulse here? What's the like like if you do the dimension reduction on this, what does it appear to look like? And then at least some places and at some times, it seems to match, you know, measures like sanitation reports, measures like 301 complaints, measures like, you know, the the the measures that correspond to these, not necessarily the criminal behaviors, seem to point in one direction. I agree that it's like it is, it is, it is hard to measure the thing. Uh, shoplifting is a great example. Some uh a lot of the time it's measurement error. We did a report, we had the Manhattan Institute did a report from John Hall about exactly this problem in New York City. But like you can sometimes get some signal out of the noise. And I think the best thing you can do is basically say, like, what is the, you know, what is the underlying factor here.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

So I guess summing all of this up, I mean, both of us, both of us have kind of this similar mission of the perceptions don't match reality. We want to tell people what the reality is. How do we, how do you and I, as like essentially data communicators, research communicators, how do we do a better job of communicating this, even if it's not a better like how are we more, how can we be more effective in this?

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Yeah, I I mean, I think it's a great question. It's a really hard question. Part of what motivates me in talking about disorder is an issue is that it's really hard to tell people that their perceptions are wrong. And I'm sure you've had this experience. And like sometimes you have to say your perceptions of reality are wrong, like the thing you think is going up is going down. But I try to believe where possible, that people are often perceiving real phenomena, even if they don't give the right names to it. The the argument that major crime is up when it is measured to be down usually doesn't hold a lot of water with me. But I tend to believe that people are responding to something real when they say it feels less safe than it previously did. There's something going on there that it is like incumbent on us as data communicators, as people talk about crime, to say, what is that something? Like what is the what is the thing that you are actually talking about there that you are associating with serious violent crime? Um is is it is it that you're seeing more people who make you feel uncomfortable? Is it that you're seeing more acts? Uh, is it that you feel you talked about, you know, murder motor vehicle crashes? And we have decent data on that. That was the other data source I was thinking about, right? Like, like we know, we know what people are doing. You know, we love what we know what deaths on the highway, we know about uh crashes, we have independent data sources for that. Are you do you feel like the world is less safe because people are driving more irresponsibly? That's like a thing that we can measure. And so, you know, I think my my immediate response is you have to give some explanation. You you have to be able to offer some explanation for why people's perception what where people's perceptions of reality are coming from. And I second point or you know, sub-point is like that explanation can't be basically like you've been propagandized, right? There is there is rigorous research that shows media portrayals of of crime has an impact on people's perceptions of crime. That's real, but it does not explain the like overwhelming majority of perception. It explains some variants, it doesn't explain all the variants. And it also just like it doesn't work to be like, well, you just need to turn off the TV, the local news, and then you'll stop worrying about crime. Like that that does not persuade people. So yeah, I mean, it's like like my argument is basically like you have to, you know, you you're not gonna be successful if you tell people you think you're unsafe, but you're wrong. But you can be successful if you're like the thing that you think is causing this is not actually the thing that's causing it. But it could be this other thing, and let's try to understand what this other thing is so we can have a more informed conversation. Because, like, it's actually pretty reasonable for people to want to feel safe in their communities. You know, it's it's not reasonable for them to like take just feelings of safety and create bad policy, but like we we we should prioritize that desire in our communication with them and like recognize that as a reasonable desire.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

You mentioned the media. I I really struggle with this because the the statement that I always think to come to is uh that the media doesn't cover the planes that land. And you it's I think irrational to expect the local news to cover the fact that that there were no robberies last week. Like they they do a story when stuff happens. Is there a way on this issue, maybe writ large, to get the media to be better than every six months they're gonna cover CCJ's reports or a media, you know, you or I might get an interview after a monthly report comes out. Like it it how do how do we do better at getting the people that are actually able to reach the large audiences to do better at this?

SPEAKER_01 28:12

Yeah, I mean the unfortunate answer is it's like it's really hard because in some senses the explanation for crime can neither be, you know, everything is better than it was in the 90s, therefore there's no problem. And it also can't be there was a crime last week, therefore you need to like hide and you know, shelter your children and flee to wherever. It has to be like nuanced, right? It has to be like, well, this is up and this is down, and it's things are better compared to A, but worse compared to B. And here is the national trend, but here's the local trend. And that's like seven data points, which is way more. You know, I totally reasonable practice, and I don't, I'm not I'm not criticizing this person, but I had a, you know, I was I was interviewed by a fairly prominent publication about crime trends, and I had like a 20-minute conversation, and you know, one snippet of one thing I said ended up in the piece. That is a completely standard journalistic practice, and there's nothing wrong with doing that. Uh, I have no objection to this, but it is like very challenging, you know, the the the snippet of me that ended up in the piece, which is like a very small part of everything that I thought was going on. Uh that's just like a feature of the medium. So, you know, I think I I I think in some senses, here's that's my like pessimistic take. My optimistic take is that like there is more demand for information than ever, and more ways of delivering information than ever. Like, I do actually think people want nuance. People watch like four-hour podcasts for some reason. I don't understand it. Like they will watch join another three and a half hours. Yeah. I know, it's crazy. Yo, this is it, you know. We're gonna get right. The answer is we gotta get Jeff Asher on Joe Rogan. Uh, they'll be I I I would watch that. I think that would go well. Like, like, you know, I think I think that you have to sort of say you have to demand nuance, and then you have to be clear that your nuance is like, like nuance actually can't be an additional, you know, to just like a different simplistic take. You have to be like, really, there is nuance here. And then often, you know, when people claim to be offering nuance, what they are actually doing is just sort of saying, well, if you put this in another perspective, then it's advantageous to my political team. Like, no, you have to actually demand nuance, which is really hard. And I don't have a good solution for getting people to care about it. But I like, you know, as a as as like a good American patriot, believe that actually people sometimes want it and you can just sort of like keep blasting out that maybe they'll get it, hopefully.

SPEAKER_00 30:37

I I mean up I'm the same, and like that's that's where this podcast came from. It's where the subset comes from. It's just if we talk about it, maybe somebody will hear it and that will help. And it's, I don't know, shouting at the ocean or something.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

But Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I like like on the other hand, I think there's, you know, the fact that, as we looked through earlier, major publications are going and being like, we need this data, there's clearly a lacuna, right? There's clearly, there's clearly a lack there that is being filled. So I try to be an optimist about these things. I try to say, like, people want, don't don't just want the headline. People really don't just want to be told, like, you know, the the the the simple story is correct, the dumb explanation is correct. People, you know, people can't sustain 10 data points, like they just can't cognitively do it on average if this isn't what they think about all day. But they can take three, they can do four, and that's better than one, which is nice.

SPEAKER_00 31:31

So, and then probably the easiest question I have for you, which is how do we detangle politics from perceptions of crime? And Gallup has their poll that shows uh it's not just a republic, it's become more of a Republican thing than a Democrat thing in the last eight years, but it's always been that the party in power, a higher percentage or lower percentage, thinks crime is rising than the party out of power. Is there a way to do this? To sort of disengage the two?

SPEAKER_01 32:02

No, probably not. I think it wouldn't agree if we could, but like the reality is that crime prevention is a fundamental government service, right? It's it's something, it's something it is the thing that ev almost everyone agrees the government should do. People don't agree about basically everything else, but they agree that like the government should keep us safe and there should probably be an army. There are exceptions to this rule, but like mostly that's the thing people agree on. And so I think it is extraordinarily hard to depoliticize that or to get people, you know, to to shift on that. My, you know, my my standard advice, and look, this is ultimately advice to Democrats, because like Republicans own the issue, is that just like Democrats can be weaker or stronger on this. They can like make this more or less of a more or less of a like, you know, of a of a time bomb for themselves or an issue for themselves, right? They can they can disarm the GOP more or less on this, which doesn't mean you have to like capitulate to crazy talking points. You don't have to be like, yes, Donald Trump did bring down the homicide rate somehow, using that, like that, you know, Cash Patel did it with his with his magic FBI sneakers. So you don't have to do that. Uh, but you can be like, you know, like a number of exec big city execs have been like they kind of tried to do at the tail end of the Biden administration, but I think not that persuasively. Like, say, we don't consider law enforcement, like we consider law enforcement a legitimate issue for the Democratic Party. I made this argument um on Matt Iglesias's substack slow boring. I wrote a piece for him about this in which I said, look, every until the Biden administration, every 30 years, a Democratic administration and a Democratic Congress would pass a major federal overhaul to the criminal justice system. It happened under FDR, it happened under LBJ, it happened under Clinton. This is like, and this was totally normal for Democrats. It was just like, we are the party of good government. We believe that government should provide services. Criminal justice is a service, therefore we should provide it better. Totally reasonable. So, like, I mean, that that you know, that that that's very that's advice that's targeted at the Democratic Party. But I think it's like the best answer I have for depoliticizing it is just like it if if you don't allow Republicans to own the issue, if you're like Democrats can be good on this too in a credible way, then I think it becomes plausibly depoliticized at least a little bit because it's not like so obviously partisan valenced. Is it still gonna be that way? Yeah, totally. It's I mean it's just like you can't, you can't change people's I can't fix polarization. Maybe you can, I can't do it. Um, but I think like if you sort of find a reasonable middle ground, then you don't at least allow one party to so obviously run away with it in public perception.

SPEAKER_00 34:35

So speaking to the I guess we're we're gonna have theme music play here that's gonna say guest does job of host for him or something like that. I I really I I really do want to attack this issue from all sides. This is why I I wanted to have you on the show. Are there other voices? It it felt very lonely in 2023 and 2024, not from the left, but definitely from the right, to be saying this is what the data looks like, which as you mentioned was the exact opposite of what happened in 2020. Um, and I, you know, you you may not have felt it, you may not be as exposed to the left, but I like I I certainly remember getting yelled at by the left when talking about the fact that it was rising. So are there ways, are there people that you think on the right on the sort of conservative end that would be good to talk to about this that aren't gonna bring the like the crazy, just the the crazy talking points, but uh legitimately move this conversation forward. And and if so, who would you suggest?

SPEAKER_01 35:32

Yeah, I mean, in some senses, you're covering your bases. You know, my my colleague Rafa Mangal would be a little weird to have two MI guys on, although I think they have complimentary functions. Uh Ralph and, you know, Ral Ralph wrote a great book on crime and criminal justice policy that I highly recommend to your audience. But is is, I think, uh tries very hard to be a sober voice in this space who's not just interested in, you know, throwing, throwing partisan bombs and talking about source prosecutors and whatever. I mean, you know, very bluntly, I think that there are any of a number of uh folks in the broadering world who don't do this very well. So I I'm not gonna I'm not gonna pick those fights, but you know the the other place that I look where these guys aren't necessarily on the right, but they aren't like definitively on the left, are sort of the whole universe of copademics. Um you had Ian Adams on the show very recently, and Ian's great. Well, and I won't ascribe sort of right-wingness to Ian. He can do that and not himself, but like Ian used to be a cop, and that puts him at odds with many of his act, you know, it's not even necessarily that he's on the right, so much as like many of his very left criminologist colleagues think that like he's a fascist. I don't think Ian is fascist. But there are other folks, Scott Morcos, who's a colleague of his from Utah. They often work with a guy with Justin Nix, who's at Omaha. Barry Latzer, who's emeritus at CUNY, um, and Barry, Barry is very much a friend. I think we call himself on the right, is a friend of City Journal of the Manhattan Institute, uh, who's also, I think, generally pretty sober and has written a bunch of stuff on long-run trends in crime that I recommend. I have to think of other right-of-centered names, but those are the things.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

We can take that offline. Yeah, that's great. I appreciate that. Good list. So again, get getting more broadly, uh, two quick topics. I know we don't have a ton of time, but um, two quick topics I want to talk about that are only tangentially related to crime. You've written about this. Um I think we're probably on the same page, but is there a way to get uh talking about sports gambling? Is there a way to get that genie back in the bottle? And again, I I'm just asking because I'm interested in about this. I think I went to a Pelicans game recently and like these two 20-somethings sat next to me and they only cheered for I'm saying with my kids, they only cheered for like, you know, Trey Murphy to hit a three. And like otherwise they weren't watching the game. And it drove me in the bones.

SPEAKER_01 37:41

McKay Coppins just had a great piece in The Atlantic uh about his like multi-month experiment with with sports gambling, which I thought was quite good. Yeah, I mean, look, you know, the most important thing is just not to have political pessimism about this stuff. Like your unease is, I think, the modal position in America currently, and there's lots of polling. Americans still don't want to banned. I have made the public arguments that actually we should just ban it, but that's like a prudential argument because I'm skeptical of our ability to just sort of regulate away the problems, but there are lots of regulations you can implement that would make it much saner. You could just, I mean, you could ban the advert depository buzzer advertising bans, you could ban some of the more absurd forms of bets like uh parlays or in-game prop bets, you can uh have deposit limits, you can force corporate force the sports books to more aggressively police problem users. There's lots of stuff you can do. That's like all very practical. The trick is just like at this point, it's just having the political will to actually try some of this stuff. I think everybody does use this analogy of like, you know, the genie's out of the bottle, you can't put the toothpaste pack on the tube. And I'm like, you can totally do that. Like, we banned sports gambling nationwide in 1992. Like, that's that's not that long ago. Like, uh I was born in 1994, so it's my entire lifetime ago, but it's like it's objectively speaking, you know, sports gambling was illegal in 2017 in everywhere but Nevada, essentially. That's just not that long ago. It was totally possible for us to sustain that. By the way, it was a totally functional arrangement in American life for that to be the status quo. You know, I think, I think the trick is like at this point is looking at places where you can turn that popular, you can coalesce that popular sentiment into real action. I've been saying, you know, privately, not say it's publicly, if you happen to have$15 million to run an outlet initiative, I I don't, but I assume you do. If you have$50 million for a ballot initiative, the thing I would do is I would get a ban on prop bets on the ballot in Ohio. Because I think it would win. I think the governor would endorse it. I think the state legislature would endorse it. I think they would ban prop bets in Ohio in 2026 if you gave them the opportunity to do so. You just got to spend the money to do the signatures. But there were lots of opportunities like that. You can spend money in Massachusetts, you could do it at the federal level. There are lots of, you know, there are ideas floating around. I just think that like there are very simple regulatory solutions that we could conceivably implement. I think that there are problems with that at like uh, you know, a public policy math level. But like I would be very happy if we got closer to that arrangement. But like doing that requires at this point just political will and everybody knowing that everybody else is uncomfortable with what's going on, and then just like, you know, putting putting some political pedal to the metal. Like that's totally doable. We can do it. We've done it historically. It's been done. Like we can do it again.

SPEAKER_00 40:24

So as soon as we're done, I'll go downstairs and look in the couch cushions and see if I could get at least a couple of million, get me closer to the goal of 15 million. So my my last question, and we were talking about this before we started recording, but how do you think AI changes our jobs, our approaches in the future? And then sort of an add-on, it seems like half the battle is like just changing perceptions on AI adoption and how it can be used and in ways that's not it's gonna hallucinate answers about your medical condition. So, you know, any thoughts on sort of changing how people think of what these tools can do?

SPEAKER_01 40:57

Yeah. I mean, and you know, I am, I am, I am a I let's say I'm like uh fiscally bearish, socially bullish on AI, which is, you know, and and I'll get into the socially bullish thing, which is just like I I won't get into that very much to just to say like I think it is gonna be hugely socially disruptive in certain harmful ways. Uh, but like from my from my just like doing my doing my job perspective, AI is great. And doing your job, like AI is great. You and I were talking about this beforehand. Like, like for somebody who's really in our sweet spot of like wants to use data to tell stories, the amount of friction that it reduces is great. I think getting people like everyone is super, everyone is super pessimistic about it about AI right now. Everyone is very negative about it. You look at the polling, and to a first approximation, I have argued that this is because the people who are selling it are doing a really terrible job of selling it. Like people are like, AI is going to take all of your jobs, and oh, by the way, it might kill everybody, and you should let us do it. I'm like, what? So I I mean, I've argued that at the very least, the first thing is probably not going to happen that like the sort of you know, the the the economics really does militate towards an increase in human productivity, making us all richer and more employed and like you know, more productive and not like mass disemployment. Um, I don't think that's going to happen. But I actually just think like you have to change the messaging around this stuff. And in particular, you have to understand, like AI is going to be for many people, not everybody, but for many people, AI is much more likely to be a compliment than it is a substitute, right? And like AI is a compliment for me, AI is a compliment for you. It's making us more efficient at what we do. We can do more than we used to. Humans have, you know, economics, humans have infinite wants and finite means to achieve those wants. If we increase our productivity, we will come up with new things to do with it. Uh, I will do things with the several hours that I get back by using AI that will be great. Like we're not just gonna, you know, we're not just gonna stagnate. There isn't a lump of labor. But I think people have to, you know, people really have to be like concretely, here's how AI is gonna make your life better. I can say that. The people who are trying to sell AI really need to say that. I think it's like mostly true, bracketing some social concerns that I have, but like certainly from an economic perspective, I think it is gonna make our lives better. I think it'll make us richer and more productive and like give us more leisure time. That's great. I'm in favor of those things.

SPEAKER_00 43:15

But you have to actually sell it that way, as opposed to telling me it's only it's it's been weird that like, you know, thanks to AI, the thousand people that we need to do this job, we only need 200 people now. So we can either use the other 800 people we already have hired to do more for the company and like build, or we could fire everybody and do the exact same job and be, you know, similarly productive. And it's weird to think that like the former is how they're selling it.

SPEAKER_01 43:40

Right. Well, you know, I think I mean, I think there's been like there have been these layoffs, and I'm like, I think that's pretextual. I think it's like they hired all these people when interest rates were low and those people weren't doing anything, and now they're yeah, they're using AI as a pretext. No, I'm but like, yeah, that's like fundamentally most technological technological innovations. Has not yet led to mass unemployment. There is an interesting argument that this could lead to mass unemployment, but I don't actually think that that's like the standard case. And I think the standard case is that like if you are freed from doing drudgery by AI, you get to use your otherwise limited time for higher uses, and that's good. I like that.

SPEAKER_00 44:19

That's great. Well, this has been wide-ranging and I really appreciate it. Charles, what is next for you and where can people find you?

SPEAKER_01 44:25

Oh gosh, what is next for me? I'm working on a handful of projects. I'm actually, I need to, I need to do some more work and maybe we can talk about this, but I'm I'm reporting a piece on why crime went down in Baltimore. That we'll we'll see, we'll see where that ends up. Bunch of other things. Uh I encourage people to check me out. I'm on Substack. I get lots of referrals from Jeff Asher and Substack, but I'm it's it's the causal fallacy, C-A-U-S-A-L, not casual, causal. It's it's a really nerdy reference to James Q. Wilson. I kind of regret it because people can never spell it. And I'm also I'm on Twitter slash X. I'm at Charles F. Lehman, if you want to find me there. That's great.

SPEAKER_00 44:59

And by the time this is out, we will have just had uh Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott on the podcast. So highly recommend that as a I'm I'm ready. I'm reading off you that, yeah. Thank you so much for joining me. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to the Jeffalytics Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and to learn more, head on over to ahdatalytics.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.