Factually! with Adam Conover - We Have a Warped View of Crime with Jeff Asher

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

So much of today’s political policy is shaped by the public perception of crime—but what if that perception isn’t accurate to begin with? Donald Trump essentially won the election by spinning tall tales of record-level violent crime, and instead of pushing back, the Democrats mostly went along with it. But are things really as bad as they seem? And would we even know if they were? This week, Adam sits down with Jeff Asher, a leading expert on crime data and co-founder of the analytics firm AH Datalytics, to break it all down. They discuss the reality of crime in America, how flawed crime reporting has created roadblocks to meaningful criminal justice reform, and who stands to gain from controlling the narrative around crime in our country.SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thanks for joining me again. I don't know anything Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thanks for joining me again. You know, crime has been one of the major stories of the past couple of years. If you turn on the local news or Fox,

you'll be bombarded with news stories about how crime in America is out of control, especially in cities and especially in blue cities. Donald Trump won the election that way by stoking fear about crime, which he blamed on immigrants, and especially violent crime, which he especially blamed on violent immigrants.

But you know what? It wasn't just Trump. Both parties, Republican and Democrat, ran on tough on crime messaging. California, a deep blue state, overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure to increase penalties for theft and drug offenses. Colorado, also blue, did something similar.

And that means that criminal justice reform, a cause that I care about a lot and have covered for many years on every single one of my platforms and shows, is on the ropes right now. I mean, if you were to ask the average American or definitely the average politician, you will probably hear that crime in America is spiraling out of control

and that we got to do something about it. But here's the crazy thing. When you look at the actual crime data, that is not the case at all. There was a spike in murder during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, but rates are now falling faster than at any time in history, so that we are now very close to the pre-pandemic numbers. Violent crime more broadly is dropping to pre-pandemic levels too.

Car thefts are up, sure, but burglary is down, and shoplifting is back to pre-pandemic levels as well. In fact, by some measures, the crime rate is as low as it has ever been since the 70s. So why is it that public perceptions of crime differ so far from the reality? Are the national numbers just obscuring the local picture? Are we being tricked?

Or are we just super sensitive to increases in crime? And most importantly, as we discuss in this episode, when you look into crime data and how it is collected, you will realize that there are few pieces of data with more holes and less regularity in reporting than crime data. So why is crime data collecting such a fucking mess in this country?

Well, to answer all those questions, we have an incredible guest on the show. Before we get into it, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show and all the conversations we bring you every week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free. And if you like stand up comedy, and I hope you do, please come see me on the road. I am turning my brand new hour of comedy right now. It's called the Nihilism Pivot Tour.

You got to hear this new material. From January 10th through 12th, I will be in Dallas, Texas. From January 23rd through 25th, I'll be in Toronto, Ontario. February 12th, Omaha, Nebraska. February 13th, Minneapolis, Minnesota. After that, I'm going to Chicago, Boston, Burlington, Vermont, London, Amsterdam, Providence, Rhode Island, and Eugene, Oregon. Head to Adamonover.net

for all those tickets. And now let's talk about crime. To discuss recent trends in crime and why crime data is so hard to collect, we have one of the foremost experts on crime in America today. His name is Jeff Asher. He's a crime analyst and he's a co-founder

of the data analytics firm, A.H. Datalytics. Please welcome Jeff Asher. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you for having me. So look, we have two completely opposite stories about crime in this country. There's a lot of people who feel crime is out of control, it's never been worse, America's enveloped in chaos

and murder and destruction and death. And then there's other folks who say, actually, if you look at the statistics, released many statistics, crime is at an all time low in many ways, or a historic low in some respects. So what is the truth about crime in America? Is there a single truth at all?

Well, so the real challenge is, crime is a really easy word to say, and it's really poorly defined. So if you wanna talk about the major crimes, the stuff that the FBI has been measuring regularly since 1930, yeah, crime is at or near historic lows. And we have good data going back really to the early 1970s. We have data back to the 60s, but it's a so-so quality. And if you want to compare now the rate of crime,

major crime to where it was in the early 70s, it's about the same. It's been that way for really 10 to 15 years. We had a large increase in murder and gun violence in 2020 and 2021 and into 2022. in 2020 and 2021 and into 2022, that has largely resolved. The property crime, auto theft, which has risen in the last few years, burglary and theft are at or near historic lows, and violent crime is about where it was in the early 1970s. If you wanna talk about crime as other things, shoplifting, you want to talk about disorder, homelessness, things that maybe aren't inherently major crimes or are very difficult to measure

crimes but that lead to a sense of disorder, lead to a sense of unsafety, then you're talking about something that you can't really put a number on it. It's just sort of a feeling and you can't tell somebody that just because the major crime numbers are low, that your feeling of a lack of safety is inherently incorrect or that the city that you're in, yeah, maybe your downtown area isn't as safe as it once was in a broad sense,

even if the number of crimes being reported successfully has gone down significantly there. Well, let's pick some of these things apart a little bit because you mentioned other things that we would call crimes. So the major crimes, homicides, major property crimes, violent crimes, those are the things the FBI tracks. And then in the other bucket,

you mentioned shoplifting and homelessness. Now shoplifting is a crime and something that we would wanna not have happen. Homelessness is not a crime. At least I don't think I would define it as one. I think most people would define it as not inherently criminal to not have a home. Do you agree with that?

100%, not at all criminal. And it's the type of thing that you don't want inherently the criminal justice system being the organization that is solving it, even if we typically put the onus on the criminal justice system. That said, it's the type of disorder that leads to feelings of unsafety and leads people to maybe not feel particularly safe

in an area, even if it is 100% not at all criminal. And so when you ask people, do you feel safe? Do you feel that safety is getting worse? You kind of lump that into the crime bucket, even though a lot of these feelings are not necessarily tied to specifically two crimes occurring. Yeah, and I've encountered that fear

that people have of homelessness. And by the way, we're right into the meat of this right away, so I appreciate you bringing us here. Because I think this is part of the core problem. The fear that people have of homelessness is partially based on a certain form of almost bigotry. That like, oh, if I see someone on the street, I imagine they're a criminal.

Or a lot of people imagine that homeless people are inherently criminals. Like, if I see a homeless person, I'm worried they're going to jump me. That's actually like not fair or the case. However, I do think a lot of that fear is justified in a sense, which is that when you are walking by, you know, I have a tent encampments in my neighborhood. I don't feel comfortable walking by them. And part of the reason is because it is evidence that society is breaking down.

There are people living on the streets, you know, it is, it's not safe for people to be living under overpasses, right? It's not the society that we want to live in. And so it gives people this sense of general disorder. Now I do visit homeless encampments. I do street engagement with a group called CELA in my neighborhood, et cetera. And so I've been able to sort of remove

some of that negative feeling for myself. I have an intimate understanding of the issue, but it's completely, you understand why an average person seeing homelessness in their area would go, ah, things are not going as well in my city as I would hope that they would, right? Does that make sense? It makes total sense.

And because you've got this situation where the major crimes that get reported, it's kind of hard to gauge. Is that up or is that down? And people have no sense of what those numbers were, 30, 40, 50 years ago. So you lead to, well, I heard that my neighbor, you know, their cousin got robbed three months ago,

and you let those anecdotes be the driver of your feelings. And then you put on top of these, all these senses of disorder, and it basically makes people a poor judgment, poor judges of is this problem that is measurable, we can figure out around how many murders there were in a given year. And we can say with confidence it went down or it went up. Yet people are really bad judges of it.

And they put it under this large umbrella of crime. And it leads to this constant sense that crime is up, even if it's a poorly understood concept or a poorly defined concept, that all of the data shows us is actually going down. It's a really complex feeling that has a simple answer. Yeah, and it's a feeling that resists any kind of evidence, you know? And it seems as though almost everybody in every city

says crime is really bad in the city that they live in. They all say, I'm okay, but a couple blocks away from me in my city are really bad, even though they may not have experienced it directly. How much of this is the media? I recently went to the webpage of my local NBC affiliate, NBC, whatever it is, 456 Los Angeles, and every single article on the page was, you know, family of two stabbed here,

hit and run there, right? It was all violent crime. Now, I live in a city of over eight million people. Of course, there's gonna be a couple crimes every day, but this particular news outlet was making the choice of every single article on our page is going to be crime. How much does that contribute to the feeling of rising crime that people have? I think it's a large contributor.

There's the old saying that the media doesn't cover the planes that land. And I keep using this phrase. And you remember all the Boeing planes where like the door would fall off and the plane would land and they'd talk about it? That was one plane, Jeff. You're doing this yourself. Remember all the Boeing planes. There was one plane where the door fell off,

which is horrible and Boeing is a piece of shit company that needs to be investigated and broken up. But it was one plane. It inflates for us, yes. Yeah, and so there's, basically you don't get stories of, Hey, nobody was robbed last week, there were no shootings yesterday. Right. And, and so in the absence and part of this is a data issue.

If you want to look up how the chiefs are doing this year in football, you can tell, Oh, look, they just won last night. They're 12 and one. If I want to see how many yards, Derek Carr is my quarterback of my Saints. I wanna see how many yards he had, there's a statistic for that and I can see that and I can compare it through week 13 of every season how Derek Carr is doing.

He can't do that with crime very easily. And so in the absence of really strong, clearly communicated data to the public, you get anecdote driven feelings about your, your, your impression of crime is based on anecdote, and that's going to be heavily weighed by the media and the media is not publishing stories of nothing happening, because that's just, that's not how media works in any subject matter. And

so when you're gauging your feelings on is this going up or is this going down, you're trying to determine have I heard more anecdotes this year compared to last year, or compared to 30 years ago, when all of the data said there were more anecdotes back then than there are now, but you don't remember 30 years ago with any reliability. So your ability to figure all of this out is going to have this enormous bias towards the present. And it's gonna lead you to always think

that things are getting worse. So you're saying it's vibes based. We do not have the clear statistics that we need. And as a result, we are going based on the most recent anecdote that we've heard. Why do we have this problem with statistics? Like you, so you said a second ago, we have reliable statistics collected by the Like you, so you said a second ago,

we have reliable statistics collected by the FBI going back to the seventies, yet we don't have the sort of up-to-date statistics that we need. So walk me through what statistics we do have, what don't we have and why. All right, now we're talking about the things people wanna hear,

which is the history of crime data collection in the United States. Oh, you came on the right podcast to talk about this. We love to go deep on a topic to find out why we live in the horrible world today. So tell us all about it. No, this is great, because I just published what I call a brief history

of national crime statistics on my sub-stack. So this is very fresh in my memory. You are my man. This is exactly the guy I want to talk to. Walk us through this history. All right, so until 1920s, basically United States had nothing. And in the 20s, a bunch of police departments got together

and said, okay, we're gonna start to collect and we're gonna standardize what we're collecting. And so in 1930, the Uniform Crime Report was created. And the real challenge, and it's been almost a century and it affects our ability to understand trends today, is that it was created in a voluntary fashion. So agencies report in a voluntary manner. And so from 1930 until 1960, you were getting

a third of agencies up to half. In the 1950s, it got up to about 75% of the country being covered. And then around 1958, 1959, you were getting close to 90%. And it wasn't until 1960 that the FBI started putting out national estimates based on close to 100% of the country's population. Now not every agency was reporting every year. And it wasn't really until the 1970s that we had what was called state UCR programs,

where the agencies report to the state program. The state consolidates it, it standardizes it, and it makes sure the agencies are all doing the right thing. And then the state sends it up to the FBI. The FBI puts it together and puts out their national estimates based on that. So in the 1970s, we start to get really close to 95% of the country reporting data that's actually been standardized in some way and has some sort of quality control around it. In the 80s, 90s, things get better, they get worse. Some states like Illinois,

starting in the mid to late 1980s until the middle of the Obama administration have really shady collection and reporting for most agencies within the state. And you get states like Mississippi that you get 50 to 70% of the state reporting each year. You don't even get above 70% of the state's population being represented. And then you get to today where last year we were about 95% of the country reporting,

but it's voluntary. And so you get random years where big agencies, Spenic or Tucson, years where big agencies, Spenic or Tucson, um, didn't report. You get years like 2021, the FBI switched data reporting systems and you lost 40% of the country's reporting for 2021. And then they backtrack and they said, okay, supposedly when crime was spiking 2021, right? So it spiked in 2020, the 2021 estimates when it was still bad, Right. So it spiked in 2020. The 2021 estimates, when it was still bad, were just as terrible. And you got data that was basically unusable for national estimates. And then the FBI backtracked and said, okay, if you're not reporting under the old system, under the new system, you can report

under the old system. And so Los Angeles, for example, no 2021 data exists in the national estimates. Really? Pretty much the entire state of California does not exist. New York reported one murder in 2021 to the FBI. So it doesn't exist. And some states, it is, it's insane. Because this is the period when,

just to pause for a second, like at this point we have, you know, 2021 and beyond. We have politicians running in both of those states on crime is out of control. We need to end criminal justice reform. We need to lock people up again. Da da da da da. We need to pour money into the police, et cetera. This is in the wake of George Floyd's murder at the same moment when like all of California

is not reporting crime statistics to the feds. Yeah, essentially that's what happened. And they have backtracked. They have allowed agencies to report under the old system. So we're back to where we were before. It's a lot better collection, but if you want to say how many murders were there in the United States in 2021, you can't do it.

And so our real challenge is that it's voluntary. Some states, Minnesota mandates it. State law says you have to report. Other states don't. California being a good example of a place that's just a very difficult place in terms of reporting quality. And you get this system that is sometimes good,

sometimes somewhat questionable, and it makes it at times very difficult to speak with precision. And so what you have to do when you're talking about crime data is, yeah, we don't know exactly how many murders there were in 2023, but we can say reasonably accurately

that there were around what 19,000 or so murders last year, and it was around a 12%-ish decline from 2022. And any more level of precision leads to basically questions of, wait, this data isn't exact. And now I've said something precise that there were X number of crimes and it's changed. And you've basically gotten yourself in trouble by speaking with a level of confidence that is not earned from this data.

Wow. I mean, it's just completely insane to me that we're making political and policy decisions based on data that has so many holes in it. And I understand as a matter of statistics, you can sort of fill those holes in and you can adjust and you can say, oh, there's been a decline, but you're really limited in the amount of precision

that you have. I also wonder though, is there not a problem in this data being reported by the enforcement agencies? This is being reported by police departments and sheriff's departments, right? So those agencies are also, you know, their success or failure metrics as part of the political system

are determined by those statistics. Are they not incentivized to adjust the statistics a little bit, right? Ah, well, that wasn't quite a murder. You know, maybe that's a manslaughter or whatever. You know, I've seen the wire, right? I know what happens around season three or four, right? The statistics come in and as soon as your job

depends on a statistic, well, now you're trying to change a number rather than change reality. And I can imagine when you have all these different jurisdictions, different departments with their own histories, some of the departments, as we have discussed in a previous episode of this show, are run by criminal gang syndicates, in the case of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and many other sheriff departments around the country.

You know, I imagine there's a huge amount of variability in, you know in how this data is collected and how much influence the agency has to adjust the numbers up or down. I mean, I hear it. I never really subscribe to that as a reason not to trust the numbers. Just because you can make the argument, oh, they want their budget to go up, so they're gonna say there's been a surge in murder.

Or they wanna say that, look, there's all these issues. I think when you look at where there are clear reporting, where we can point to the data is wrong and the agency reported wrong, the issue is not malice. It, I don't even want to call it incompetence, but it's human error. And so I'll give you two examples. One Greenwood, South Carolina city of 20,000 in 2022 reported 58 murders. Now what they did for some reason. Greenwood, South Carolina, city of 20,000 in 2022 reported 58 murders. Now what they did for some reason.

All of the, all of the evidence that I have suggested, they probably had eight or nine murders for some reason. Some incidents were coded as murders incorrectly and they had, they reported to the state of South Carolina, 29 murders instead of the eight or nine that occurred. And again, for some reason, it got double. And so when the FBI reported Greenwood's 20,000 people, that's a murder rate of like 380,000, 380 per hundred thousand. It's, you know, 79 St. Louis's number. If, if that had been their murder rate, there would have been stories about it, nothing. Um, and so clearly digging deep, there was some sort

of human error. The other issue, Oakland, California last year reported 10,000 more violent crimes than occurred. And they acknowledged last summer that it was because of human error. And so that actually raised the national violent crime rate by 1% because of human error in Oakland reporting an enormous excess of violent crimes. And it got reported to the state. Everyone agrees that it was an error and yet the FBI took it in there. Nobody audited it. Nobody removed it. And it led to this issue of an incorrect number that next year will probably be revised down.

And so I think that when you look at it, and there's lots of examples, New Orleans, where I am year after year has been under reporting rate to the FBI. And you look at the numbers and you're like, well, these numbers are clearly wrong. You could, if you look, dig deep on pretty much any city, you're probably going to find numbers that are from year to year, not inherently correct. They're not always an underreporting. They're sometimes an over reporting.

And it just, you know, because of the voluntary nature and because it's humans in this enormous system with 19,000 agencies, you're gonna have issues. Yeah. So think about what personal information of yours is available online. Do you think that's limited to a social media profile or maybe an email address?

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about them, and please support our show and tell them we sent you this year Enhance Your Everyday with VIA. Why is it that it takes so long to get the results, right? I understand that when we're looking at national crime statistics, it's like, it takes a while before you can say, OK, here's how many crimes there were in this particular year. We don't have sort of like up to the minute crime statistics most of the time. Is that a problem as well? Oh, it's a huge problem.

And this is one. So the FBI in late September came out with their twenty twenty four numbers. Usually there are twenty three numbers, excuse me. So usually there's about a nine or ten month delay. late September came out with their 2023 numbers. So usually there's about a nine or 10 month delay. The reason being that basically the agencies have until the beginning of April of the following year to report data, to find errors, to fix data, to audit themselves. So they send it up to the state. The state comes back to them, says here, fix X, Y, or Z. Not every state requires them to send data monthly.

So a state may not, may, you know, January 10th of 2024 may be seen in agency's 2023 numbers for the first time. And so they send it up, the state makes corrections, the agency makes corrections, they send it to the FBI. The FBI puts it all together, builds all of their estimates, builds all of their tables, and then publishes it in September. It's an enormous issue. By that point, it's largely worthless, especially in a year where we're seeing declines. If you think back to the 94 crime bill and all of the, you know, the concept of juveniles

as super predators and all of this stuff that years later looked silly about how we're going to see this enormous rise in juvenile murder. And then November 95, the 94 numbers come out. We're in the midst of this discussion about how much worse crime is getting in America and murder has fallen 4%. In 95, it fell another 7%. In 96, it fell another 9%. So we're making all these policies based on this increasing crime as this thing was getting better.

It leads to bad policy decisions. And so what my company has actually done with a generous contribution from Arnold Ventures, which is this philanthropy that funds criminal justice issues, we built something called the Real-Time Crime Index, which is right now we have data from about 360 agencies nationwide, and we're basically able to, in near real time, we've got about a month and a half delay, track crime trends by looking at data

from about 75 to 80 million people across the country. And so we're able to see these trends as they develop, not with exactitude, but I hopefully have brought about the point that the data the FBI is producing isn't exact either. So we can basically understand the national crime as they develop without having to wait that nine or 10 month period for the FBI to put out data.

That sounds like a huge improvement again, because elections are being decided based on this data of like here's crime, especially prosecutor, district attorney elections. For instance, we just had one here in Los Angeles that turned on exactly this type of data. And so more timely data is really important. Do you think that there is a political reason

that we don't have better crime data? I mean, I understand you're a little bit more reticent to cast aspersions on law enforcement than I am, but there has to be a reason why, if I wanna look at weather data in America, I can go on NOAA, the National Weather Service's website. They have up to the second data that's freely available. They have a weather person

in every single jurisdiction in the country. And the same thing is not true for crime. We have this balkanized system that moves very slowly, that is voluntary and piecemeal. And people care about crime a lot more than they care about the weather. I mean, people like the weather, but, you know, it doesn't decide elections.

Well, it goes back to the original issue of this is voluntary. It's always been voluntary. And so the agencies do what the FBI asks for the most part, but the FBI can't tell agencies what to do. And so it leads to this situation where it's up to the agencies themselves if they want to produce faster data to do so. Now I will say we have come across a much better environment for faster crime data because more agencies are publishing their data faster than ever. States like Texas right now has started to publish its data in almost as close to real time as possible

of every agency that's reporting. And so we've got a situation where we have a better understanding of national trends faster than ever before, even if it's not a national phenomenon of every agency reporting. And we're never gonna get that because it requires a level of commitment

and really it requires the federal government saying you have to do this in order to have it get done for most places. And I just I don't see a world in which the federal government's ever going to do that. So I don't think it's political. I think it's just it's hard to interrupt the momentum of what has been. Uh huh. It's just inertia. I mean, look, I also have concerns about if you were to nationalize law enforcement,

I think there are concerns for how that would play out and it does make sense for it to be location-based, right? To be a local jurisdiction thing. But it creates, you know, so much room for these bad numbers, for bad actors. Let's talk about why we've seen the changes in the statistics. You said around the pandemic,

we saw a lot of major crimes and violent crimes spike, and then they went back down. Do we have any idea why that was? That's a good question. It's something that I always preface this question whenever I get it with, we don't know for certain why murder spiked in the 80s and the 90s and why

it went down very fast in the mid to late 1990s. And so I think that it's something that we can look at the timing and show it was up, it was elevated relative to 2020 or toward 2019 in the first part of 2020. And then it spiked in the summer of 2020 immediately after the murder of George Floyd. I don't subscribe to the theory that the protests were responsible, but you had all of these protests. You had what you might call de-policing

where police in a lot of places pulled back on a lot of regular activities, either in response to the protests or in response to the pandemic. And you had all of this confluence of factors. And then you had this enormous surge in gun sales and gun carrying, which began before Floyd was killed. Um, it, and the way that I looked at this with Rob Arthur, who I've written

a bunch of articles with, is we looked at the share of traffic stops and arrests in cities that had data that involved a firearm being found. And we had about 10 cities of data that showed this enormous spike across all of these cities in March, April, and May of 2020, which suggests that people were basically carrying firearms a lot more often. in March, April and May of 2020,

which suggests that people were basically carrying firearms a lot more often. And so you had this confluence of factors. I don't think the firearms was a cause, but I think it's sort of this accelerant on top of all of these other factors. And all of that led to this enormous surge in murder and gun violence.

And it's a type of thing, like, if you give me the ingredients for, you know, the most delicious chocolate cake anybody's ever tasted, you can tell me exactly which ingredients and in what amount there are. And I still can't bake the cake because I don't know how to do that. And we don't understand exactly

how the recipe is put together. And so we can kind of talk about what some of the ingredients are that likely led to it. We don't know whether one factor was most important than the other. And we also don't know just because the factors that sort of led to the increase in 2020, those aren't inherently the factors that led to murder still being very high in 2021 and for much of 2022 before starting to surge. And so it's kind of- It's hard to go down, you mean?

You can build a coherent narrative about what might have happened. Yeah. In 2023, murder fell, the FBI has it at 12% and the largest one-year decline ever recorded was 9% in 1996. So it's the largest one-year year decline in 2023 and then 2024, our data puts it about 17% decline. So we're looking at on top of 2023 and even larger decline in 2020, the murder spike was, was 30%.

So it went up a really long way and it has come down in the last two and a half or so years. So, yeah, we, we can't, we don't have the exact explanation for exactly which factors made the difference, but we can look at 2020 and 2021 and say, these were, this is a generationally weird couple of years that you had everybody, you had almost everybody out of work, lot of people out of work, lot of people cooped up inside,

lot of people getting stimulus checks, right? So what happens? Maybe more people are buying guns, more people are cooped up with people they don't like, they have more time on their hands, you know? Like there's, and then we have, you know, the generational protests against the over-policing of black communities, which causes a political response

from the police, you have the Blue Flu, you have police withholding their services as a political response, or in some cases, because they're too busy, I don't know, kettling protesters. And so, put all of that together, right? And it looks like the spike makes sense for that reason. And now we're a little bit back to normal.

We can't say exactly which of those things mattered the most, but it was like, we can look at 2020 and 2021 and say, those were weird years. That's the vibe that I'm getting from you. Does that sound about right? Yeah, and I think you also have to throw in the fact that because of the pandemic,

all of the local government actions, all of the state government, all of the philanthropies and the nonprofits that would have worked to basically reverse this surge, those were not in operation in 2020, 2021, and most of 2022. So all of the tools that we really would have relied on, we didn't have at our disposal really until 2022, 2023, when things started to get back to normal.

And so I think that that helps probably to explain, you had all of this government spending, all of this government hiring, all of the nonprofits and the philanthropies that work with people at risk that are working on the streets to interrupt cycles of violence. Those didn't exist in 2020 and 2021 for the most part,

or if they did, they were severely disabled. Now we've got those back as tools. And that might, I think, help to explain why we're now seeing this really sharp decline back to where we were pre-pandemic. It's just so frustrating because you saw, look, criminal justice reform is an issue I care a lot about.

I was talking about it in my work far before 2020. Mass incarceration is one of America's greatest sins against its own population. Over-policing is a horrible thing. We were finally starting to make progress on those issues with the moment caused by the murder of George Floyd. But then you saw all of these people running against that movement saying because of that movement, because of this progressive prosecutor, because of this emphasis on, you know, having

the police less involved in routine traffic stops or da da da da da, you know, getting rid of stop and frisk, et cetera. It's caused the spike in crime and we have to pull back on that. And we've seen that in LA where I live and in many jurisdictions across the country. But that, based on what you're saying, looks like opportunism because the rise in crime was not caused by that change in policy,

it was caused by how fucking weird those years were in the first place. That we had this pullback in services, that we had the pandemic, et cetera. It's just, I don't know, it's very frustrating to see what looks like a change based on the fundamentals. There was an earthquake caused by COVID-19 and everything that came afterwards.

That being blamed on the very necessary reform that we need to have in this country. I don't know if you have any stance on that, but that's what I'm thinking about as you're describing it. Yeah, I think that it's a real challenge because I think that we've put the prosecutor as crime fighter on the pedestal. And the issue is that one,

all of the research that we have suggests that the greatest deterrence is the certainty of getting caught, swiftness and certainty of getting caught, not the likelihood that you're gonna receive a long sentence for anything. So what happens for the prosecutor, I think is probably overstated from a preventing future crime or decreasing crime standpoint,

which is not to suggest that I don't think the role of the prosecutor is very important. I do, but I think that we've kind of suggested that much of where criminal justice reform has happened is in the prosecutor role. And I think that the role of the prosecutor is someone that's going to reduce that, is probably overstated and you look at, you know, murder, murder clearance rates fell from 60% in, uh, 2019, 60 ish percent to 52 ish percent in 2022. Um, you, you can look at especially the, the places that Washington posted a great

series in the, I think 2018, the pre pandemic timeframe, where they looked at what they called places where it was free to murder with impunity. And you can look at, take New Orleans, for example, where I am, the French quarter, every one of the shootings and every one of the murders this year has been solved. There's been a clearance in every one of them. Wow.

If you go a mile away to the seventh ward, which has historically been one of those violent places in the entire city, you're looking at like one in every eight or nine shootings and murders has been solved. So the places where you're likely to have the strongest deterrent value in predicting and in preventing future crime also happened to be the places that have the lowest clearance rates and are getting into the criminal justice system the least often. And then you can point at crimes like auto theft, auto theft.

We didn't talk about it, but auto theft surged a ton between 2020 and 2022. And then that video hit TikTok showing how to steal certain models of Kias and Hyundai's, and it led to this enormous explosion in auto thefts. The auto theft clearance rate last year was 80%. 80% of auto theft. Eight. Wow. Zero.

Zero 8% of auto thefts nationally. You can look at places like Seattle, where 70 something out of 9,000 auto thefts were reported as having been cleared by the Seattle Police Department in 2023. These are enormous issues that the prosecutor has no role in deterring future crimes as the crime fighter. When you're talking about crimes that have an 8% clearance

rate nationally, and in some places, you know, one, two, three, 4% clearance rate. And so I think that it probably leads to us pointing to criminal justice reform, which has this glaring, we're doing something different policy role to it, and kind of overstate the importance of it

from a crime reduction or crime increase standpoint. Thank you. That's a really wonderful nuanced view of that. And it makes a lot of sense to me. You know, I'll admit it, okay? I'll finally come clean and say it. I'm a little bit of a gadget guy. I gravitate towards devices that make my life

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between the 80s and 90s, and we're still figuring out why it decreased in the last couple of years. There's a lot of people in society who think, hey, the tougher you are generally, the more you, you know, staff the police, et cetera, the more money that you pour into our police departments, right? Police departments suck up an incredible amount of, uh, uh,

of city budgets currently and have never really declined nationally. Um, how much does that affect the crime rate? Are we able to say how much at all? So there's a lot of research that shows that as you increase the number of officers, you do have a, a, a impact on the number of crimes, especially like things like murder, where I don't remember the exact numbers, but there's essentially a ratio of X number of additional police officers usually leads to why fewer murders or fewer violent crimes.

Now it also leads to more arrests for what you might call trivial or for non-essential or non-emergency or non-violent heights of action. So you get heavier policing, more officers, likely fewer crimes, but you're going to have more arrests. And so this is an issue that cities in normal times need to think about it. There is a trade-off there. That said, nearly every large department since the pandemic has lost officers

and many of them have lost a ton of officers. Seattle that I was just talking about has lost like 30% of its staffing. New Orleans where I am went from about around 1200, 1215 officers and recruits in 2019 to 940 or so today. New Orleans spent $80 million on officer recruitment, on officer raises, on recruitment bonuses and retention bonuses. And when they did this, they had about 950 or so officers, about two and a

half years ago, they're at 940 today. Police departments are losing officers, cities are spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to retain them and cities are essentially failing. Cities are still losing officers. The rate of loss has slowed down, but police departments, especially in big cities, are not growing. And it's a major issue that departments need to think about that you can spend untold millions of dollars,

you're probably not going to be successful. And so cities need to begin to grapple with what can you do about this? And I always point to, I mean, you talk about crime and police officers, but the bigger issue is that when you lose officers, especially by the hundreds, your response times go up. And so when your response times go up, New Orleans went from 50 minutes on average response time in 2019, which is not good, but was the best we had. 50 minutes is bad. You call 911 and they come in 50 minutes?

Like you're dead. On average. Now for an emergency, it's probably going to be like 10 minutes on average. Okay, okay, okay. But on average, regardless of the type call type, in April of 2023, New Orleans averaged 180 minutes on average response time. And so when you get that, you have incidents where,

I'm not calling the police, because if my car was broken into, maybe a couple of bucks were stolen, I'm not sitting here outside the bar at two in the morning for three hours as the department tries to show up. Or the other thing that happens is you call the police, they say, we'll send an officer as soon as we can.

They send that officer in one in the morning when everything's quiet, you're asleep, your phones are do not disturb. The officer calls three times and then marks it up as unfounded or gone on arrival. And so you get this major community trust, you get under reporting of crime, especially with non-emergency crime, but we were looking in New Orleans and we found something like 40 in 2022, the first half of 2022,

there was something like 40 something rapes that were downgraded from emergency to non-emergency. The response time skyrocketed and the share of those incidents that were marked on arrival went up. And so you've got this happening in city after city and it has serious community trust issues and you can't throw money at the problem to solve it from hiring more officers. And so what New Orleans did is they hired a whole bunch of civilians and they hired contractors to respond to non-injury traffic accidents.

And so now the response times, despite the fact that they have no more officers, response times are back to that 50 minutes on average timeframe. So there's steps cities can take, but they need to grapple with the fact. The question is not to hire more officers or not to hire more officers. It's we can't hire more officers.

What do we do now? Well, the it sounds like a pretty good solution to hire civilians to do things that we don't really need cops to do in the first place, like non injury traffic accidents. Like, you know, if if we if we I don't think we need a lot of highly paid people with guns, you know, dealing with fender benders. But the first question I want the answer to,

and there's a whole lot I wanna discuss here, the first question I have is why are departments all across the country having so much trouble hiring more officers when, you know, here in LA they've done exactly the same thing. Oh, we have a big deficit of officers, let's give them all raises. They give them all raises and there's no more officers. Well, great. Now you're spending a lot more money on the same people. So what, why is it that people don't want to be cops?

That's a good question. I think that the glamorousness of the profession probably has taken a hit over the last decade or so. Yeah, the glamour, the glamour, the glamness of the profession probably has taken a hit over the last decade or so. Yeah, the glamour, the glamour, the glamour of stopping and frisking teenagers or like whatever it is. Yeah, it's not, yeah, I mean, maybe at some point there was some glamour in like the 1950s when you just got to walk around with a shiny club and tip your hat to pretty ladies. But yeah, it's not a glamorous occupation now. No, and I don't think, as many people grow up wanting to be police officers,

I think that the pay is not particularly great, especially considering in a lot of places to sort of make a living wage, you've got to work a ton of overtime, you've got to work details and shifts outside of work. Like it's not an easy profession and there's a heavy spotlight on police officers, you know, certainly rightly so if you use use of force incorrectly, you know, you could end up being charged with a crime and certainly rightly so,

but it's, it's a very difficult profession, I think. And it also takes a long time. And you're looking at background checks take months to carry out and then you gotta do physical fitness tests and you gotta do all 16 weeks of training and then 16 weeks of on the job training. And so it takes a really long time and you could do that in a big city

or you can go to the suburbs and you get better pay. It's an easier job. You're not doing the really tough policing work as you would do in a big city. You're policing the local mall looking for shoplifters as opposed to trying to hunt down murderers. And it's just as much pay or more for an easier job. And so that's kind of what we see, that small cities and the suburbs are not having the same hiring issues as big cities are right now.

And it's probably just, you know, you go where there's the least difficulty and right now it's just very difficult to be a big city police officer. Yeah, well, I think it's because our big city police officers are doing the wrong things. I'm going to keep editorializing and you don't have to endorse any of it. But, you know, in our big cities, one of the things that we have

our police do is, you know, over police black and brown neighborhoods. Hey, let's just go around and drive around Brownsville, Brooklyn, or like South LA and just fucking bother people and crack heads and like be a sort of violent occupying force and Like there's only so many people in our country who want to do that kind of work You know like if it was actually what you know the the best homicide cops do on the wire people might have more fun But when it's literally just we're gonna try to Like there's a bunch of poor people and we're going to try to keep them like segregated and poor and suppressed. That's not like a fun job to have. Now that's not, that's my

view of what a lot of city police do. It's not what every single police officer does, but it is certainly the way that we've prioritized a lot of law enforcement in this country. I think though that another problem is that the police are not even that good, the police departments as currently structured are not even that good at giving us the feeling of safety. Like I don't know a lot of people who see a cop, at least in LA where I live, and think, oh good, I feel safe right now.

And I'll give you an example from my own life. A couple years ago, I was walking down the street, I was walking home from a subway station, I'm lucky enough to live not a 15 minute walk from a subway station here in LA. It's nighttime, it's about 10 p.m., I pass a woman who is clearly homeless, she has no shoes on, she's not wearing enough clothes,

she's holding a blanket, and she's yelling, help, help, like she just out, you know, she's yelling help, right? And so I stop, this woman's yelling help, I say, how can I help you? She just keeps yelling help, help. That makes me feel unsafe, right? That's one of those things that we talked about. It's not a crime, but I'm like, oh my God,

this is an upsetting thing to see on my walk home, right? That contributes to the impression that crime's out of control. I walk another block, because I couldn't help this lady, I walk another block, I see two cops on the street corner. I'm like, oh my god, wonderful, here are some cops. I say, hey, there's a lady down there calling for help. And they look at me and they laugh at me,

and they say, oh, she's just crazy. That was their answer to me. Now, this is a woman who clearly needs help. She didn't have, you know, it was nighttime. She had no shelter, right? This woman could have easily been a victim of a crime the next moment. But the cops, the people who my city pays,

my tax dollar pays to stand around on the corner and supposedly help people are completely unequipped to help that problem. And in the homelessness work that I do, I've seen similarly when there's a really bad problem, we need to call emergency services. Someone's having an overdose, something like that, the cops show up and they're often unequipped

to deal with the actual human problems that people have. And so it seems like there's this mismatch where beyond the statistics, we have all the anecdotal stuff that you're talking about that makes us feel that crime is out of control. That, that feeling based stuff is what the cops are uniquely unequipped to deal with under the way that American policing is structured in a lot of cities. I'm curious if you have any, any view on that, or if that's just my editorializing.

No, it speaks to we, how we as a society have prioritized who we want to respond to certain things. And basically what we've done is we've said, X is a problem, let's have the police be the ones that respond to it. And I think you probably talk to officers that are like, this is, if this woman is wielding a knife

and threatening people, then the police are probably the best ones to respond. But if someone is nonviolent, going through a mental health episode, we as a society should have built a response mechanism that is not the person that is a police officer, because that is inherent. And a lot of police departments are doing a good job of training officers in crisis intervention,

how to respond to incidents like that, but certainly not every officer is going to be equipped with that training. It's something that a lot of cities need to do a better job of having the tools to not call the police in that situation. And a city like Denver has their STAR program, which does this.

And sometimes the police go along when there's a safety issue alongside the mental health episode. But a lot of times they will go without having any sort of support from the police department. And so it leads to a much stronger response. And even the STAR program needs to be beefed up.

It speaks again to how do we as a society, it's I don't, when you know, your commentary, I don't blame the police department for being ill equipped because I think officers would also say that we're frequently ill equipped to handle these things. It's just that we put this on the plate of a police department rather than actually solving the problems. And you look at the things that a lot of communities

that you might call over policed, it's not a matter of over policing, it's not getting the right policing. It's having these communities where your likelihood of getting pulled over and stopped and frisked and whatnot is really high, but your murder clearance rate is really low, even though there are high levels of violence.

And so we should be prioritizing fast response to incidents and solving especially the most serious crimes. I don't need a 90% shoplifting clearance rate, but we really shouldn't have a 50% national murder clearance rate that in a lot of places is 20, 30, 40%. We shouldn't have rape clearance rates in the single digits or teens. We should be prioritizing solving these crimes, getting justice, and ensuring that we have the deterrent value

that comes with swift uncertainty of response. So I think everything you've talked about speaks to the fact that our priorities of what we want the police department to do are out of whack and we can't blame the police departments for basically city government failing to properly set up a situation where they can do the things that we really should be having them doing well

and not putting on their plate the things they really shouldn't be doing in the first place. I think that's really great, Jeff, and you helped moderate and add nuance to my commentary really well, I think, because a lot of those neighborhoods that are over policed where the police drive around and treat everyone who lives in the area as a suspect, this is the problem with stop and frisk.

If you're walking down the street, oh, well, let's stop and frisk you because you might be on your way to commit a crime, et cetera. Those are the same neighborhoods where the murders aren't being cleared, right? Where there are real problems that would benefit from a more appropriate or more evidence-based form of policing rather than the, you know,

hey, let's just drive around and crack some heads approach. And similarly, like, why don't people want to be cops? Well, it must not be fun to get called to homeless encampments over and over again, where all you can do is take someone who's having a psychiatric episode and lock them up overnight, right? Because, okay, let's get them off the street tonight,

that doesn't really benefit them, doesn't really benefit anybody, that's the only tool that you have. That's not really a fun job. You're probably not feeling you're helping society when you do that. When in reality, there is a real problem there that a more appropriate application of government energy

and force could solve, but we have not created a system that does that. Now I do think that the structures of some police departments are at fault. We do have a problem with gangs or cliques, as they wanna call them sometimes, in a lot of law enforcement departments. But we also have cities that have told

their police departments to do things that are not effective. There's this very funny dichotomy that we have in crime where the people who complain about crime the most are often those who are not the victims of crime, right? Like the thing about homeless folks who live on the street is they are disproportionately victims of crimes. They are the ones who are being harmed,

but it is the affluent people in the houses who have the political power and are able to say, let's do something about that. And their response is they see someone's tent getting set on fire by an arsonist, and they say, oh, the homeless people are setting their tents on fire. Whereas, you know, often it'll be someone from the outside who says, aha, I can attack a homeless person, no one will do anything. So they'll say, let's sweep the encampment away.

But actually if you asked the unhoused person, what, you know, what do you need from law enforcement? They would say something very different and they're the person who's the victim in that case. And so we have this like mismatch between who is setting the priorities and who is actually at need in law enforcement in general. I don't know if you agree with that. I do.

I don't know if you saw the Andy Samberg video that was just on SNL, the Here I Go, and it's all about Andy Samberg as an affluent white man in the suburbs, essentially calling the cops on everybody that comes across his lawn. And it's the most addictive song I've ever heard. It's been in my head for the last like two weeks since it came out. But that's where my brain immediately when that it is a problem and it is because the people that are oftentimes yelling the loudest or are oftentimes yelling the loudest after an outlier event.

So there is a heinous murder. There is a terrible tragedy. Something really goes wrong that doesn't frequently happen, but leads to policy choices to respond to this thing that very rarely happens at the expense of all of the stuff that happens basically every day, this everyday gun violence, you know, the crime and issues that occur every day that are the, not to say that like the heinous murder is not a murder that we should be trying to solve, but it takes our attention away from this is an everyday issue that we're not developing effective solutions for.

And so I do think that the loudest people tend to have a unfortunately oversized voice in what gets solved. And the answers from that are always this sort of tough on crime, let's do things that we know tend not to work. I think that there are things that we can do that can have effective deterrent value, but it's kind of like boring solutions. It's not the, you know, let's increase penalties

and throw everybody in jail for as long as possible and be as tough on crime as we can be. It's a lot more, you know, city investment in programs and in ensuring that cases are being solved and in identifying and targeting people in places that are at significant risk with potential solutions. I think there are things that we can do, which isn't to say that like, you know,

heinous murder where some kids, in New Orleans there was a carjacking where these four kids carjacked this elderly woman and her arm got, it was torn off and you can edit out the details of this and post if you want but she ended up dying and it's led to this like you know we need these kids that we need to throw them in jail and you know we need to be very tough on juvenile crime and it's just horrific just awful this poor woman but also that shouldn't be the thing that guides our policy solution to all of these problems, because it's fortunately a relatively rare thing, even if you can kind of agree that this is just

a horrific incident that, you know, cannot feel worse for everybody involved in this. The way you put it, there was something that you said, if we identified the people who are most at risk of crime and actually tried to reduce their risk, that would be policing that would matter, right? That would really help. And the problem is those would disproportionately be poor people who have less of a voice in our political system and the priorities end up getting run by, you know,

the people who are less at risk, quite frankly. The people who are watching news at night in their big houses saying, ooh, I feel scared. You know, like when Rick Caruso was running for the mayor of Los Angeles, or against Karen Bass a couple years ago, an example he kept saying, this stuck out so much to me, he said, people are, crime is out of control.

People are afraid to wear their jewelry out at dinner. And I was like, wow, that's your priority, is someone who's scared to put their pearls on when they go to a fancy restaurant. That's not actually my concern. That's not the people who are most at risk of crime. That's someone who has an imagined problem. They're literally imagining someone is gonna run up

and steal their jewels off their neck at a restaurant. That's not who the victims of crime are in Los Angeles, even when crime was spiking. And that's the problem in our political system. I think everything is downstream of that in my view. We've kept you here too long. I want to ask you really quickly before I get to your policy prescriptions. You mentioned...

Can I respond to that real quick? Oh, yeah, please say something on that. I was just going to say, I think I would disagree that when you identify... And so there's all this research by this guy, Andy Papachristos at Northwestern University that basically shows that if someone that you know is the victim of gun violence, your risk, it acts as a disease essentially.

Your risk for future involvement in gun violence goes through the roof. And so you can use all this research to identify who is at risk for victimization. The key is not in developing and delivering policing solutions. It's in developing and delivering non-policing solutions. What can a city do? What programs can we involve somebody with? How can we deliver help to somebody that has done nothing wrong, has not been the perpetrator of a shooting, but is at really high risk,

especially relative to everyone else, at being involved in a future shooting. And so you can send the police out to arrest them and do pre-crime, and we know that that's a terrible idea. How do you develop solutions that aren't policing that can work? And I don't think we have that worked out, but it involves combining policing data,

policing awareness of gun violence with non-law enforcement solutions. And I think the city that does that effectively will have a real effective long-term solution to gun violence in its hands. Oh my God. Jeff, thank you so much for that. Because that's the kind of correction I love to have.

Because, you know, look, I'm a victim of my own media environment as much as anybody else, and, you know, talking to folks on this show, et cetera. And that adjustment of, you know, I was saying, oh, if we policed to protect people who are at risk, that would be great. You to come back and say, actually, it's not policing at all.

There are non-policing things that we can do to protect those people. If we look at crime as an epidemic or a disease sort of model a little bit, oh my, I love that so much. And I think that that is the kind of solution that I think you could actually rally people behind if you could convince policymakers, right, to do it.

And we're starting to have little glimmers of that here in LA where I live, and I know places like Denver, et cetera. It's just unfortunately been swamped by so much of the tough on crime resurgence. And we're starting to have little glimmers of that here in LA where I live and I know places like Denver, et cetera. It's just unfortunately been swamped by so much of the tough on crime resurgence, reactionary resurgence we've seen in the last couple of years. So this is why I love talking to people like you

who actually know your shit, because I can spout off and then you can tell me where I'm wrong. That makes for a great podcast, I think. Okay, so I wanna ask you about shoplifting because you mentioned it a while ago and that was such a huge story right after the pandemic at 2021, 2022. You had all these stories about flash mobs

made for great clips, great footage for the local news, right, of multiple people running through a CVS, or actually, it was higher end places like that, like jewelry stores, things like that. And it led to this, you know, sort of national crackdown on shoplifting. We had a ballot proposition passed here in California that, you know, turned a bunch of that kind of crime

back into felonies. You have the state of California devoting extra resources to that. You have like Walgreens and CVS putting all their products behind glass and locking it up. And then later Walgreens admitted that they had like lied about their shoplifting statistics, et cetera. So it's a very sort of fraught topic.

Has there actually been an epidemic of shoplifting according to the statistics that we have? What is the cause and what are the solutions? Maybe. You want to talk about a crime that is, do I have to elaborate there? You want to talk about a crime that is virtually impossible to measure.

You're talking about something that the Bureau of Justice statistics has a survey runs each year called the National Crime Victimization Survey. They find somewhere around a third of thefts get reported each year for all thefts. Shoplifting, maybe we're talking about 15 to 20% of these incidents getting reported, just reported successfully to the police. Then you're talking on an incident type that has a 10 to 12% clearance rate.

So of the 20% of these incidents that get reported, maybe 12% get cleared. So you could do whatever you want from a prosecutorial standpoint. You're going to have no effect when you're talking about a 1%, 2% clearance rate in terms of the real number of incidents that occur. So it's really, it's an incident type that is extraordinarily difficult to measure. It's extraordinarily difficult for stores and for companies to actually be able to articulate

because they plop shoplifting and theft into basically this loss category, which is most frequently just, hey, we lost, you know, somebody accidentally misplaced merchandise. Yeah. Or, or, or we rang up one by mistake and they actually had two, like that kind of thing. Yeah. And so you talk about stores that are just not good at counting this stuff and understanding, did we lose something because it was shoplifted or did we lose something because Joe did a poor job of inventory? And it so it's something that the stores themselves can't really articulate.

And so I'm not saying that we haven't seen an increase in shoplifting. I don't think it helps that we've seen this surge in viral videos and how easy it is to do Tik Tok and just put stuff online and next door. And look, there's a ring video of someone stealing a package from my door and somebody else posted one, two months ago. So we must have an epidemic, but that's like two out of the 10,000 packages that were delivered on my block that got stolen.

So we have no context there. You show an incident goes viral. The vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of shoplifting is going to be small stuff getting stolen. And then you have kind of this, it's an easy boogeyman, I think, for a lot of stores. So Target closed all of these stores in New York and they closed them in Seattle and Portland. And I looked at the numbers

and the places that had the worst theft problems were not the stores that were being closed. It was the small stores. They had these stores in Portland. They opened them in not great neighborhoods and they were these small basically grocery only stores that were opened on like the block of three other grocery stores.

So it was basically a poor business decision in a not particularly great neighborhood that, yeah, they may have had shoplifting, but it wasn't worse than anywhere else. And instead of saying, hey, you know, our bad, we made a poor decision. It was crime is forcing us to do this. That's a much easier thing to say than this was a business gamble that did not pay off. And so you put all of that together and I'm sympathetic to the plight of stores that this may be an issue, but it's not something that they're measuring. And it's not something that I think lends itself to being communicated accurately and easily to the public

to understand, yes, this is a major problem or no, it's not. And if it's a problem that is solved by putting all the razor blades behind glass, the that you're not gonna lose that much in sales. And if it solves the shoplifting problem, then I mean, it's not great, but. We've solved the problem. We're not having to measure it.

It's not, it's not a bad thing that things are behind glass because you've solved the problem. You don't have to close stores because you just, you need more associates now to just go with their key and open it 15 minutes after you asked it's it's so. I don't know. I think it is bad that things are behind glass because I'll say for myself, I have just stopped purchasing things at CVSs and my local supermarket because you push the button

and nobody comes. I'm like, all right, I guess I won't fucking buy toothpaste, man, like I'm buying other shit here, but I can't get in there. Like it is bizarre how many of these stores I think have really hurt their own businesses by sort of chasing this phantom. And it's a decision that I don't really understand because they must have cut their sales because

the number of times I have been in these stores, press the button and nothing happens. Like it adds five minutes to your shopping trip, even if someone does come is like kind of ludicrous. And they have to stand there while the associate is standing there watching you try to choose the best deodorant, you know, you're like reading the back of the thing and it's stressful cause they're like standing there, jingling their keys, waiting to lock the thing up again.

And it's, it just makes it a bad shopping experience. But I, I agree that I think shoplifting, there was a good microcosm of how bad the statistics problem is, because as you say, hard to measure, hard to get, almost impossible to get any kind of overall statistic about. So it ends up going based on vibes. You have this huge media culture that's inflating

the prevalence of it. And the companies have a political incentive to say, to blame the crime, right? Because it covers up their own business malpractice, their own mistakes and maybe they get some handouts or kickbacks from a city or a state government saying, okay, we'll really help you guys out because stores are struggling.

It ends up being this perfect storm of, you know, no evidence or bad evidence leads to bad policy outcomes for everybody. Now everyone is scared about shoplifting that might not exist. The, the shopping experience is worse. The companies are making less money and we're maybe investing city or state resources trying to stop shoplifting that, that we can't even verify is real. So this is like a huge, this is a, it's a test case in how bad statistics

and misinformation can lead us astray as a society. So let's go from here to find out what the hell should we do about it. In terms of, statistics is the main thing that you focus on, just in terms of getting better information about crime data, what can be done to change our information environment here?

So it's not so fucked in a word. Well, that's up to the stores. The stores have to measure it effectively. If the stores aren't gonna be able to tell themselves what was lost due to theft and what was lost due to misplacement, you know, we have no prayer of accurately understanding it. And so if the stores, especially the main chains, where I'm guessing the majority of shoplifting occurs each year, aren't willing to do that,

then there's no way to solve this problem. There's not a data solution to it. It's just a, we think it's getting worse. We think it's bad. Let's just guess and try and maybe we're correct. And I don't know if there's interest from stores or for retail bureaus or things like that, but in the absence of that work, it's, there's nothing you can do from a data perspective. What about how can we improve crime data overall

for our entire society? So I've said this, I don't know if you're a baseball fan, I'm a huge baseball fan, but- I like baseball, okay, I tune in, you know. So you familiar with Statcast? Tell me for those who don't know, and also maybe me. Statcast is this thing that Major League Baseball put into place a couple of years ago,

where in every Major and Minor League stadium, they're using these fancy radars, these fancy cameras, and they're measuring everything that happens. So ball leaves the pitcher's hand. We can see the spin rate, we can see the speed, we can see the angle. If it's a curve ball, we can see the break in the ball. It hits the bat. We can see the spin rate, we can see the speed, we can see the angle. If it's a curve ball, we can see the break in the ball. It hits the bat.

We can see the exit velocity. We can see the launch angle. We can see how far it went. And then we can measure what happened. We can show how was the, you know, did the field or take the step in and then back? Did the field or take the optimal route? What was the catch percentage? We measure everything that happens on a baseball field.

We need to do a much better job of that from the crime perspective. And what that really means is that we need agencies to report data faster to their states. There's two ways agencies can report. And again, we're getting really into the weeds, but there's something called XML and there's something called flat file. Flat file is basically we jotted down on a piece of paper, everything that happened and then once every quarter

or once every six months, we send it up to the state. XML is basically as it happens, we have a pipeline to the state. And the agencies that are reporting via XML are the places that are able to publish it fast. So Texas, every agency is reporting via XML, state gets it, the state publishes it. If you want the November numbers for Texas cities,

you get that by like November 10th or by December 10th. So, okay. So up to the minute statistics. Up to the minutes. Yeah. More or less, you know, up to the month statistics. And it's not correct.

It's you're going to have, oh, this auto theft was actually a, he forgot where he parked and so you're going to have preliminary, unaudited numbers, but if you can put an audit system behind that and you can kind of agree, okay, maybe we're understating the number by one or 2%. Maybe we're understating the number by one or 2%. If I see murder is down 18% in this sample of 350 cities, maybe it's actually down 17%. I don't really care about that 1%. You're able to see trends as they develop.

That's really what crime data needs is it needs more agencies reporting faster, states being willing to publish the data. I don't want to call it a workaround from what the FBI is doing because then the to publish the data. And I don't want to call it a workaround from what the FBI is doing, because then the FBI takes the data. It can still put it all into a format that's usable. It can then present its estimates. It provides us with the continuity over time,

but it also allows us essentially to understand our trends as they develop and understand which agencies are having issues, understand which agencies are doing the right thing. We can focus on cities that are doing well. We can identify cities that when things are going well nationally or not doing well and figure out, okay, murders up, but that's just probably randomness because the number of aggravated assaults and shootings are down.

Or we've got a city like last year, Greensboro, North Carolina saw a doubling of murder despite having a decline nationally of 12%. So how can we identify these outliers? And it just can contribute to better policy. I think, you know, of course the data guy is gonna say that the problem is data, but if our data is not good, nothing we're doing elsewhere matters. And it leads to uncertainty, it leads to poor policy solutions. And so, you know, the first step is a data step. Yeah. And it leads to fear. And

on the part of the populace, you know, if we don't have real information and people are just going based on the anecdotes, it tilts our entire system in a direction that is honestly what we're currently living with, where we are investing money in the wrong places and people are still frightened, et cetera. And so the first step is knowing what's actually fucking going on in the country. So I think that you as a data guy

are exactly right in this case, and I think that you as a data guy are exactly right in this case, and I thank you for working on this issue and coming out to talk to us about it. And also for- You can lead with this. Lead with this? We lead this as the start, put this at the start of the podcast,

just so everybody knows everything that's gonna come is correct. We're gonna clip this out and be like, thank you for being a data guy, data guys are great. No, for real. And I also appreciate you adding some nuance to my heated Jeremy ads. So thank you so much, Jeff, for real. And I also appreciate you adding some nuance to my heated Jeremy ads. So thank you so much, Jeff, for coming on.

How can people find more of your work? And actually, what's a good spot if they really wanna know what's going on with crime data? What is the most reliable source they can go to? So I write a weekly newsletter on crime data and crime analysis, jasher.substack.com. We'd love to have followers there. Our website, realtimecrimeindex.com, we update monthly.

So usually around the middle of the month, we'll update for the preceding month. And so that's something that's gonna be growing and hopefully we'll turn into this library of understanding crime data, analyzing trends as they develop, seeing historic data, things like that. So, you know, the federal government is in charge,

they produce the most biggest volume of data, but because everything is inherently gonna be imprecise and everything is really slow, typically with the feds, or if it's not slow, it's unaudited, there are solutions to these problems that can be found outside of just the federal government. So hopefully we're providing those solutions to people. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on.

I can't thank you enough. Thanks for having me. Oh my God, thank you once again to Jeff Asch for coming on the show. If you want to support the show and all these conversations head to patreon.com slash Adam Cahn over five bucks a month gets you every episode ad free. For 15 bucks a month, I will read your name in the credits of this podcast and put it in the credits of every single one of my video monologues.

This week I want to thank the Dusty Shredder, Thor Tron, Samuel Montour, David Snowpeck, Eric Carlson, Scooty Chimkinuggy, Miss Me With a Fascism, Aaron Explosion, Robert Fuss, and Game Grumps. Thank you so much to all of you for supporting the show. If you'd like to join them, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. If you wanna come see me on the road in Dallas, Omaha, Nebraska, Toronto, Vancouver, Boston, Chicago, all these other amazing cities, Eugene Ornigan, head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates.

I wanna thank my producers, Tony Wilson and Sam Rodman, everybody here at Head Gum for making the show possible. And I want to thank you for listening. We'll see you next week on Factually. That was a HeadGum Podcast. Hi, I'm Caleb Herron, host of the So True Podcast now on HeadGum. Every week me and my guests get into it and we get down to what's really going on. I ask them what's so true to them, how they got to where they are in life, a bunch of other questions, and we also may or may not test their general trivia knowledge. Whether it's one of my sworn enemies like Brittany Broski or Drew Fualow or my actual biological mother Kelly, my guests and I are just

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