The Jeff-alytics Podcast
Can data uncover the real story of crime and justice in America?
Jeff Asher—nationally recognized crime data analyst, co-founder of AH Datalytics, co-creator of the Real Time Crime Index, and author of the Jeff-alytics Substack—sits down with policymakers, academics, journalists, and everyday people to reveal what the numbers actually show. Each episode challenges the myths we believe, exposes the gap between headlines and reality, and asks: what happens when we finally see crime clearly?
New episodes drop every other week! Visit ahdatalytics.com to learn more.
Episodes
51 episodes
Deciphering The American Way Of Killing with Malcolm Gladwell
The 50th episode of the Jeff-alytics podcast called for a special guest and this episode delivers. Today's guest, Malcolm Gladwell, has a new book out today titled <...
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Reducing Crime Through Environmental Design with Megan Grable
Most efforts to reduce crime focus on who is committing it. Megan Grable's work focuses on where.She's a neighborhood planner with the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the unlikely champion of something called CPTED or Crime Pr...
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What Good Policing Should Look Like with Mo McGough
Mo McGough is a former DOJ attorney and self-described cop’s kid who has spent her career trying to improve how police operate. Mo helped build an NIJ program called Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science (LEADS), which identifies and devel...
Running DOJ's Criminal Division with Kenneth Polite
The Department of Justice encompasses nearly a hundred U.S. attorney’s offices, employs thousands of prosecutors, and touches basically every dimension of public safety in America, but most people have no idea how any of it actually works.<...
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Rebuilding a Police Department in Free Fall with Brian O'Hara
Minneapolis recorded more shooting victims than it had sworn police officers in 2021. At that time, a huge chunk of the department had walked out the door just as gun violence had surged and the city council was publicly vowing to reorganize...
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How The Federal Data Landscape Is Changing With Denice Ross
Every crime rate, every per capita statistic, every trend line in American public safety depends on something most people have never thought about: the data infrastructure underneath it. You only notice it when it starts to break down. Today...
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Stitching Together America’s Criminal Justice Data with Mike Mueller-Smith
The criminal justice system is big, it is complicated, and it is expensive. But how do we know what parts of it, if any, are working? Enter Mike Mueller-Smith.A decade ago, Mike started building the
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Guns, Data, and the Law with Thomas Chittum
Every time a gun is recovered at a crime scene in America, a quiet process begins. The gun is traced backward through manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers to find out where it came from and how it got to the scene. Most people have no i...
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Using Social Networks To Reduce Gun Violence With Andrew Papachristos
My guest today is Andrew Papachristos, one of the smartest people (though he is a Bears fan) thinking through how to use data to reduce gun violence. Andy has spent his career trying to read networks more systematically. He’s a professor at ...
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Crime Is Falling. Can Public Perception Catch Up? with Insha Rahman
My guest today is Insha Rahman, the president of the Vera Institute of Justice, the oldest and largest justice reform organization in the country. Insha has spent the past ten years building out everything from bail reform research to a 501c...
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A Deep Dive into Why Crime is Falling with John Roman
Crime is falling fast in America , and, as the many different opinions on the podcast can attest, almost nobody can agree on why.My guest today has spent thirty years inside the question of America’s changing crime trends, firs...
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Using Technology to Improve Crime Analysis with Andy Wheeler
Today's guest is Andy Wheeler, a renowned criminologist, data scientist, and founder of Crime Decoder. Andy is a terrific voice for understanding the role of technology in analyzing and ...
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Documenting the History of Crime & Punishment in America with Lynn Novick
My guest today has an incredible new documentary coming out this November called
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Improving Policing Through Effective Reform With Christy Lopez
When crime rises, the instinct is usually to hire more officers, increase enforcement, and ask police departments to do even more. But after spending years investigating police departments and working on reform efforts across the country, my...
Behind Kansas City's Crime Drop With Mayor Quinton Lucas
One of the hardest things for any mayor to do is convince people that a problem can actually be solved.That may sound obvious, but when a city has struggled with violence for decades, cynicism starts to s...
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The Public Health Approach To Reducing Shootings With Dr. Megan Ranney
“We should treat gun violence like a public health problem” is a phrase that is often used but rarely defined. My guest today is Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician, injury prevention researcher, and the Dean of the Y...
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1,000 Levers For Reducing Gun Violence With Rob Wilcox
The national conversation around gun violence tends to revolve around what laws should be passed next. But a lot of the work of reducing violence doesn’t happen in Congress. It happens in cities, hospitals, community organizations, police de...
Building Towards Certainty Rather Than Severity With Greg Newburn
For decades, the response to rising crime has been fairly predictable: increase penalties, increase sentences, and hope it works. My guest today says that framework misses the point.Greg Newburn is the Director of Criminal Just...
Why Accountability and Prevention Don't Have to Be in Conflict with Neera Tanden
Most debates about crime policy are framed as a choice. You’re either tough on crime or you’re not. You focus on enforcement or prevention. And the answers tend to sound simple.But once you move from talking about crime to actu...
The Past, Present, and Future of Gun Violence Reduction with Senator Chris Murphy
What actually drives change on an issue like gun violence? Is it policy? Culture? Policing? Or something harder to measure?To help answer that question I’m turning to Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. Senator Murphy has been...
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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 “rig...
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Investigating Crimes That Were Never Meant to be Reopened with Jill Collen Jefferson
Sometimes the hardest part about a crime isn't figuring out what happened — it's revisiting what's already been decided. Once a case is closed and a conclusion settles in, changing that can be just as difficult as investigating it was in the...
How Criminal Justice Policy Gets Made In The White House With Rachel Harmon
What happens when the people shaping national crime policy don’t actually have the data they need?In this episode, I sit down with Rachel Harmon, law professor at the University of Virginia who previously served as a senior pol...
Covering the FBI and DOJ in 2026 with Ken Dilanian
Ken Dilanian is a seasoned journalist covering the Justice Department and FBI, and in this episode he shares his insights on the evolving landscape of covering those agencies. We talk about crime data, the challenges of media coverage ...
The Future of Criminal Justice in New Orleans with Mayor Helena Moreno
New Orleans has had one of the nation's highest murder rates every year for decades. Since 2023, however, violent crime has dropped sharply — and in this episode, I talk with Mayor Helena Moreno about crime and criminal justice in New Orlean...
