December 12, 2023 • 39 mins
After many years of reassuring declines, some crime rates, like homicides and violent assaults, soared nationwide during the Covid-19 pandemic. These trends weren’t geographically or politically specific: Residents in cities, suburbs, and rural areas all suffered through that shift, and it didn’t matter if they lived in a city run by a Democrat or a Republican – more murders, the data showed, plagued every urban area. On the other hand, robberies, burglaries, and larcenies dropped during the pandemic’s onset. Crime statistics are subject to spotty methodology and reporting gaps, making it hard to rely on the data with absolute certainty. Public safety isn’t a trivial topic and there’s no question that many Americans say they feel less safe on some streets than they once did – despite the fact that violent crime rates are well below where they were during the 1990s. Ames Grawert is a lawyer and expert on crime statistics at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and
social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm
Tim O'Brien. Today's crash Course crime trends versus statistics and reality.
After many years of reassuring declines, some crime rates soared
nationwide during the COVID nineteen pandemic. Homicides jumped about thirty
(00:25):
percent in twenty twenty compared to the prior year, and
violent assaults rose by more than ten percent. According to
a number of different groups that track the data, these
trends weren't geographically or politically specific. Residents in cities, suburbs,
and rural areas all suffered through that shift, and it
didn't matter if they lived in a city run by
(00:45):
a Democrat or a Republican. More murders, the data showed,
plagued every urban area. On the other hand, robberies, burglaries,
and larcenies dropped during the pandemics onset. As the pandemic,
war on murder rates andolent crime rates overall settled down,
the numbers rose, but not nearly as sharply as they
(01:05):
did early on. Another wrinkle, crime statistics are subject to
spotty methodology and reporting gaps, making it hard to rely
on the data with absolute certainty. Public safety isn't a
trivial topic, and there's no question that many Americans say
they feel less safe on some streets than they once did,
despite the fact that violent crime rates are well below
(01:26):
where they were during the nineteen nineties. So what was
behind the pandemic surge and murders and assaults and what
lessons can residents and public officials draw from what happened.
Joining us today to chat about all of this is
Ames Growert, a lawyer and expert on crime statistics at
the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School.
The Brennan Center is a nonprofit focused on a number
(01:48):
of legal and public policy issues, including research into the
sources of violent crime. Welcome, Ames, Thank.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
You so much for having me. It's a pleasure to
be here.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
So set the stage alone a little bit for us. First,
tell us a little bit about the work you do
at the Brennan Center and how the Brennan Center intersects
with crime research and crime statistics.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Absolutely so. Our theory of criminal justice reform is that
we can have a country that is both safer and fairer,
that we can has common sense criminal justice reform policies
that lead to a justice system that is fairer to
all who are impacted by it. That's including people who
are victims of crime as well as people accused of crime,
and that while doing so, we can also have a
(02:30):
safer country. As a whole. Part and parcel of that
research is trying to understand what's actually happening when it
comes to crime trends around the country. So around eight
years ago, some colleagues before I joined the Brendan Center
actually released a report called What Caused the Crime de Client.
This is sort of the origin of this work, but
it's also very much still relevant to the work we
do today. They're thinking was, we need to understand the
(02:51):
huge drop off and crime rates that happened between nineteen
ninety one and roughly twenty fourteen. Over that course of time,
murder rates in the United States the drops of half.
Some sociologists call this the Great Crime Decline. It's a
rarely remarked upon but incredibly important social phenomenon. So they
set out to figure out, you know, why what happened.
They came to a couple conclusions, one of which is
(03:12):
it's very difficult to untact something that complicated, but a
couple of their findings were that improving economic conditions partially
helped explain drops in crime nationwide, and that incarceration was
not as powerful an explanation as some had expected. So
that was the genesis of this work, an idea that
we need to you know, understand what's really happening with
crime trends across the country, and that you know, we
(03:33):
continue to this day to monitor what's happening around the country,
keep abreast of the very best research, and contribute our
own where we can well.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
And socioeconomic factors play into our understanding what happened during
the pandemic too, So let's get into that a little bit.
What happened in the early stages of the pandemic, particularly
twenty twenty, that caused homicides and violent crimes to spike.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yeah, just to give you a bit of context, I
know you touched on at the top of the show,
but the key statistics are we saw the national murder
rate increase by about thirty percent year every year from
twenty nineteen to twenty twenty. We saw assault increase by
around ten percent or so, you know, that's a significant
increase in violence. And I think, much like we don't
have a complete answer as to, you know, why crime
dropped so precipitously between you know, the early nineteen nineties
(04:19):
and today. We don't yet have and may not have
for a long time, a full accounting of what happened
during the COVID nineteen pandemic. When my colleagues and I
investigated this to try to figure out, you know, what
could explain such a dramatic increase in violence concentrated in
such a short period of time. We can do a
couple explanations, but we've always been careful, and I just
want to re emphasize to your listeners too, that this
(04:41):
isn't the full accounting. We're not saying, you know, these
are the factors that one hundred percent explained everything that
happened since twenty nineteen. I don't know who'll ever get there,
but a couple of those factors were Number one, increasing
access to firearms and increasing carrying and use of them.
And I can go into that at greater length. It's
really interesting.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
So, surprise, surprise, more guns on the street produce more
violence against other people. That's about right, I'm shocked to
discover that.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
You know, so often we look for counterintuitive findings, but
this just feels very intuitive. It's sometimes these sort of
explanations that resonate with us. It's just common sense. There
actually is research back into it, and people can push
back and say, you know, well, it's true that more
guns is an mulos equal more crime. A lot of
second and third guns are bought by collectors, but in
the pandemic, we actually did see a sort of closer
(05:26):
link at least between more guns more crime.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
There had been years of a surge on guns on
the streets that also corresponded with a drop in homicides
and violent crimes. So even there, the link is not
entirely direct, right, It's.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Very complicated yet. So one of the pandemic ara statistics
we look at is something that the ATF refers to
as time to crime. What that means is when a
gun is recovered from a crime scene, how long ago
was it lawfully purchased. So it's sort of the time
between when a gun enters the market legally and when
it turns up at a crime scene. Time to crime
actually dropped during the first two years of the COVID
(05:59):
nineteen pandemic that suggests there's sort of a closer link
between gun purchases and guns being used unlawfully. But frankly,
this is an area where we need more research to
understand better the link between gun purchases and gun violence.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Were there other factors in addition to availability to firearms?
Access to firearms?
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yes, So this is a tough one. I think. You know,
when you talk to some people, they will give you
a very strong case of this argument, and I'm going
to give you the sort of middle way case of
the argument, that is that the social disruption caused by
the COVID nineteen pandemic had some effect on crime trends,
and especially violent crime. This is a tough one because
I don't know if we'll ever be able to fully
quantify exactly how this relationship played out, What happened, What's
(06:40):
the mechanism that explains the link between the onset of
the pandemic and violent crime. We might not ever have
a full understanding of that, but a couple of mechanisms
that we're sort of thinking through are this. When we
saw the pandemic begin, the government response was not immediately
adequate and not immediately encouraging. So a lot of people
and people that we talked to in communities affected by
(07:01):
violence said that members of their community lost faith in
the government, didn't believe that their institutions were there to
keep them safe. At the same time, a lot of
basic parts of the community fabric, like libraries, third places
so called where people can congregate after work or on
the weekends, those shut down or inaccessible programs like community
violence intervention initiatives, which are programs run by people at
(07:23):
street level to help stop violence, support starts. Those sor
programs often have to be run face to face, and
you can't do that during a respiratory pandemic. That's just
not how it works. So all these factors that sort
of work together in the background almost to keep communities safe,
all of them sort of fell apart at once, And
it would almost be surprising if that had no effects.
The question that we ask, and I think researchers need
(07:45):
to continue to ask, is what sort of effect did
it have? What was the magnitude of that effect?
Speaker 1 (07:49):
So it would all be under the umbrella of people
freaked out, it.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Would be more into the umbrella of once in a
generation pandemic having untold, difficult to quantify, difficult to really
fully appreciate, effects on the social fabric and the sort
of informal ties that keep the communities safe.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah, people certainly had existential dread. People were reaching out
to connect to one another more, and it was uncertain
what the pandemic's effects would be. It's interesting to me
to contemplate that. Then another stage and thinking was lashing
out against other people, you know, either with guns or hands.
Yet another statistic in all of that, though, is interesting
(08:26):
to me, is that auto thefts also jumped. So in
addition to, you know, you had certain kinds of crime
to decline, and then you had homicides and assaults jump,
but auto thefts jumped too. What are you thinking about that?
That's a category to me that's sort of intriguing.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Yeah, this is a really interesting one. One way to
think about what happened during the COVID nineteen pandemic is
how does the onset of a major respiratory virus affect
someone's opportunity to commit a type of crime. So retail
thefts tended to drop during the COVID nineteen pandemics. People
simply weren't going to stores but at the same time,
you know, you might not have eyes on your car
that you parked up the street a couple of weeks
(09:00):
ago because you haven't left your house. That's one factor
that might partially explain increasing motor vehicle thefts. But there
are a couple others too. One and this comes from
a conversation I had with Jeff Asher, who's a fantastic
analyst of crime trends. He pointed out that motor vehicle
thefts tend to go hand in hand with more serious
forms of violence. So, you know, a car is stolen
and then used in a drive by shooting, so it's
(09:21):
possible that, you know, you would see that type of
offense increase alongside murder, which is what we in fact
saw during the COVID nineteen pandemic. More recently, there have
been security vulnerabilities discovered and a couple of vehicle brands,
and there have been videos and stuff.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
So glad you're bringing this up. You're getting to the
TikTok video. Yeah, part of the argument. Excellent.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah, there's a social media video explaining how easy it
is to short circuit the security defenses of some vehicles.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
And specifically kias and Hyundais.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
I believe, Yeah, I believe that's right. And I can't
tell you that that explains, you know, fifty percent or
whatever percent of the increase in motor vehicle thefts, but
it's not trivial. I think that that sort of effect
of not just opportunity but means becoming more available might
help explain the increase in those offenses as well.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
So all of the reasons you're giving for why the
numbers jumped, both in these separate categories which can be
caused by unrelated factors, and then some of the ones
that are caused by related factors, none of these are
necessarily the reasons that captured the public's imagination as to
why homicides and violent crime were rising in year one
(10:24):
of COVID nineteen. Tell me about that. What were the
reasons that many people latched onto for why this was happening.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Yeah, that's the key question. One of the frustrating things
about working on crime research and trying to understand the
way the criminal justice system works is it's easier to
disprove some theories than it is to proved them. That's
because the data are very hard to come by sometimes,
But when you have a concrete idea. Sometimes you can
gather the data you need to actually test the theory,
and that's what my colleagues and I have done in
some cases, and researchers around the country have done in others.
(10:53):
And I'll get to exactly what the data show in
a minute. But one of the most popular theories about,
you know, why crime rose, especially in New York City,
was bail reform. This was a major initiative enacted in
twenty twenty that changed the way the state's pre trailer
released laws worked, so detension bail were largely taken off
the table for our misdemeanors in some lower level felonies.
(11:14):
People jumped to the conclusion very quickly that bail reform
might explain rising crime in New York City. But when
you really kick the tires of that data, it just
doesn't add up. For one, as you know, as we've
been discussing folent crime and murders rose around the country,
it would be very odd, indeed, if bail reform in
New York somehow powered a nationwide increase in violent crime.
It just doesn't compute. Really. Subsequent researchers backed that up
(11:36):
as well, and I'm happy to go into that too.
Another point that people argued was that this might be
a quote city phenomenon, that this is something that originates
in nebulously defined, quote blue city governance. I think this
idea is sort of a holdover of the way crime
used to look in this country. You know, if you
go back to the nineteen nineties, there were multiple thousands
(11:58):
of murders in New York every year. Amasite raid in
a city like New York was well about the national average,
And I think people sort of came to expect that
violent crime is a city problem. But fast forward thirty
years down the line, that's not quite so true. New
York City is one of the safest big cities in
the country. It's murder rate is below the national average.
So this idea that violent crime was caused by and
(12:20):
primarily a problem of cities, it's also simply not true,
but became a very prevalent narrative, especially during the early
days of the COVID nineteen pandemic. One of the other
theories that we've looked into, and others have really taken
a lot of time to try to research, is whether
the inauguration of district attorneys who believe in criminal justice
reform policies. The label you here as quote progressive prosecutors,
(12:42):
But I've talked to these people. They don't all subscribe
to that label. They subscribe to the idea that they
are elected district attorneys who believe in criminal justice reform policies.
But one of the arguments against them has been that.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
We'll still wanting to enforce the law.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Indeed, yes, they're elected district attorneys who believe in criminal
justice reform as a means of making their community safer,
not as a political point. So one of the arguments
has done that these so called progressive prosecutors have presided
over a rise at crime and helped kick it off
in their cities, and the data just don't support that.
There's a really good study that was co authored by
Anna Harvey at NYU's Public Safety Lab that tried to
(13:18):
revide a relationship between progressive prosecuters and rise and crime,
and she couldn't do it. She just couldn't find any
sort of relationship. More researchers coming out on this. Now,
that was a popular narrative, but it just hasn't held up.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
And then moreover in successive years, in twenty twenty one
and twenty twenty two, the homicide rate drop, the rate
of violent crimes dropped. What changed? Do you have a
handle on what was behind that phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
That's a question we're sitting with too. I actually think
it does suggest one point. So if you were as
we were sitting in the beginning of the COVID nineteen
pandemic and wondering, you know, what's happening in the country,
why are we seeing crime rates increase so much? If
you had a theory that part of this might be
due to factors related to the COVID nineteen pandemic, like
(14:02):
social disorder, like the shuddering of key institutions that help
keep communities safe, you might hypothesize that as the pandemic recedes,
we might start to see murder rates go down, and
that is in fact what we're now seeing. So I
think it's a point of evidence that suggests, but doesn't
conclusively prove, that much of the reason that we sew
violence spike so much in the early years of the
(14:24):
pandemic might be due to these factors related to the pandemic,
And as the world sort of returns to normal, as
businesses reopen, as people get back to their daily life.
As community rhythm's return, that sort of network of safety
and invisible bonds that keep us safe sort of re
establishes itself. I don't have a complete answer for this question,
but I think that's at least one theory worth thinking over.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
So the lesson to be drawn from that is state
away from guns during year one of any lockdown, because
that's when people are most likely to fire them.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
A question we think about too is sort of how
to build resilience into communities and how do you build
resilience into society as a whole? And trust absolutely and
trust I think that's a really good way of putting it.
There were some surprising things that we found when we
looked into, you know, not just what caused crime to
increase in twenty twenty, but you know what solutions people
were talking about. There's actually some research these days that
(15:13):
medicaid expansion, which we just saw go into place, and
I believe it was North Carolina, is actually associated with
lower arrest rates and lower rates of priscidivism in some cases.
This suggests to me that as you build a society
that has a stronger safety net and is more focused
on taking care of people. You might help firm up
that sort of invisible network that keeps us all safer.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
On that note, Ames, I'm going to take a quick
break so we can hear from a sponsor, and then
we will come back in to chat further about all
of this. We're back with Ames GROWERDT and we're discussing
murder and other crimes during the pandemic and after Ames
we talked a little bit earlier about people citing the
(15:56):
wrong factors for this spike and murder and viol and
assaults during the pandemic and what some of the real
factors might have been. You know, we're having this conversation
and the context of the data is still recently fresh.
The events are still relatively recent, and no one knows
for certain, but our goal is to try to really
get it real cause and effect so we can get
better solutions. How was the narrative around the crime spike
(16:20):
during the COVID pandemic and after construct it. I'm interested
in that from your perspective. How did that narrative come
into the public consciousness, because it's certainly different than some
of what we just talked about earlier in terms of
the factors that actually informed the spike.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Yeah, that's a really good question and something I spend
a lot of time thinking about. I'll do my best
to give you as clear of an answer as I can,
but it's a complicated subject. On the one hand. You know,
I think when people see something like the covidanteen pandemic
and they see, you know, hard data showing what they're
feeling that violence is increasing, people naturally feel afraid and
(16:58):
feel concerned for their states, see in the safety their
loved ones, and those feelings are valid and important, and
we should respect that. Number one one temptation when these
very reasonable fears arise, I think it's tempting for some
to look for sort of easy explanations. It's tempting to
say this is a problem, and here's the solution, and
that solution will work tomorrow. When people gravitate to those
(17:19):
easy answers, those answers feel good, they might sound attractive,
but they might be wrong, and more than that, they
might actually end up doing more harm than good. So
I think that's one factor, and telling the narrative onward
is know, when crime rose, people looked for sort of
a single factor answer, you know, crime rose by thirty
percent in twenty twenty because of X, and insert into X,
(17:42):
you know, bail reform, quote, blue city, something like that.
That answer might have a certain narrative and intuitive appeal,
it just happens to be wrong. Another factor I think
we've seen, and I touched on this a little bit earlier,
is I think because of the way that crime trends
in the country used to look, people are sort of
primed to think of crime as a city issue rather
than an American issue, and people are primed to believe
(18:03):
that cities like New York are uniquely dangerous, when actually
almost the opposite is true. Representative Jim Jordan hosted a
field hearing in New York City designed to highlight how
crime in the city was increasing. It just happened to
be at a time when murder trends in the city
were actually declining sharply, and the evidence for rising crime
in New York City was simply nowhere to be found.
(18:23):
You know, the city, like other places in the country,
had experience of crime spike during the pandemic, but by
all accounts that spike was in the process of reversing.
These narratives, they have an intuitive appeal. It's up to
you know, policymakers and other opinion leaders like us in fact,
to talk through why those narratives might not actually be
true and why there might be other solutions that can
(18:43):
make us safer. A colleague of mine who I do
some work with, in Hirahman at the Beer Institute. She
has a really interesting saying, I think in something that
I think about daily. She says, you know, if we
focus on the wrong problems, we also focus on the
wrong solutions. So if you yourself in a narrative where
you think the reason that crime is up is because
(19:04):
cities are doing something wrong and bail reform or progressive
prosecutor or something like that, you might miss some other
solution that has nothing to do with those quote problems
and that could actually lead to safer communities down the line.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
And as I noted at the top of the show,
suburbs and rural areas saw a very similar spike to
what cities saw. So the idea again that cities themselves
are unique kind of breeding grounds or Petrie dishes for
violent crime is belied by reality in the data.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Having said that, aims about the similarities of suburbs and
rural areas and cities. There is also reality at work here. However,
there is no denying that city streets do for a
lot of people feel less safe. A lot of small
businesses have boarded up, there's less people walking around in
the streets, particularly late at night. Homelessness has been on
(19:57):
the rise in every big city I think, or at
least most of the big ones, and I've visited a
number of them since COVID began, and you just notice
homeless people wandering in greater numbers in the past, and
there is this perception that the streets aren't as safe,
even if the data doesn't show us that. Let's talk
about that a little bit, because that is a reality
(20:19):
based conclusion for a lot of folks.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Absolutely it is, yes, And when people have that impression,
they were reacting to something real. I'm not one to
discount people's experiences and fears about their community. I think
one thing at work here is people see social disorder,
People see hardship in their lives, such as an increasing
number of people living on the streets, and they make
a sort of intuitive connection between bad and crime. But
(20:42):
social disorder and crime are not necessarily one of the same.
They might in some cases go hand in hand, but
that might be one reason why we see a sort
of a gap between the perceptions and realities around the trends,
especially in major offenses. These are real problems. They don't
want to downplay it. Like I've seen the data on
homelessness and Portland, I've seen the data on homelessness in
California and New York, and you're right, it is up.
But the solutions to those problems might lie outside the
(21:06):
criminal justice system, where they might lie in other policy
interventions disconnected from the problem of crime in the United.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
States, and the sense of menace that some people might
feel from a homeless person doesn't necessarily translate into the
homeless person whipping out a gun and shooting you or
assaulting you.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Right, But you know people's fears about their safety and
about seeing disorder in their community. I want to make
sure that we take that seriously, and policymakers should. They
should just be careful about what solutions we can offer
to try to build healthier communities for everyone.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Two of the other sort of marquee incidents that have
I think also make people worried about cities are shoplifting waves.
As we know from the data, most shoplifting is carried
out by a small cohort, often acting in conjunction with
one another. They're repeat offenders. Again, that doesn't take away
from the fact that the shoplifting is occurring and it
(21:55):
appears to be unstopped. Storefronts are shattered, or people walk
into a retail store and just sweep stuff off the shelves.
Have you thought about shoplifting it's just a category of
sort of urban blight, or maybe the data there I
don't actually know. Is the data similar again across the
board of shoplifting a problem also in suburbs and in
rural areas as well.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
This is a challenging question too, because there are a
number of things that can explain trends in shoplifting. Different
stores have different strategies or protocols for reporting shoplifting to
the police. For example, a colleague is a former prosecutor
mentioned this to me. You know, if I go into
a convenience store every day one week and steal you know,
(22:36):
ten dollars worth of property, is it the store policy
to report me the first time and every subsequent time?
Is it the store policy to call the police only
after the seventh and then report every incident. These sort
of differences in how stores and store owners report shoplifting
to police can sort of confound our understanding of the data,
and it makes it very hard to understand precise trends
(22:56):
in shoplifting around the country and individual cities. One thing
does seem to be clear, though, and most data that
we have does point to this, and that is that
shoplifting has increased in some major cities. In New York City,
the data seems very clear that shoplifting increased sharply in
twenty twenty two, and that it actually increased year over
year for I think going back more than a decade.
(23:16):
So the problem is very real, even if we need
better data to fully understand what's going on.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
And tell me. As a last category before we move
on to other and grander things, or carjacking, that has
also seemed to have been on the rise in urban areas,
prekly in places like Chicago, in very stark ways. You know,
drivers are pulled over by another car, or is they're
getting out of a car or into a car, they're
essentially held up and their car is stolen. And that
seems to be a more frequent and visible crime than
(23:44):
it was a few years ago.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
That's right, and this is actually a tough crime for
us to study as well. I feel like I'm saying
that a lot, but you can get an idea of
how challenging the data can be. Sometimes. The reason is that,
until very recently, and I know we'll talk about this
in more detail, car jacking was not broken out as
a separate fence studied by the FBI. It was sort
of rolled into robbery. So in many places we don't
really have an idea of year to year trends in carjacking.
(24:07):
The data that we do have does show that it
is increasing or increased in twenty twenty two. We also
know from city reports. I think you mentioned Chicago. I'm
not familiar with the data, but I'm sure you're right.
But we know in Washington, DC carjackings definitely have increased.
As to why it's a tough question, I go back
to something I mentioned earlier. There might be some correlation
between types of motor vehicle theft and other more serious crimes.
(24:30):
As you steal a car, you carjack a car to
be used in a more serious efense down the line.
It could be that those types of defenses go hand
in hand.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
And is there like a psychology of crime that when
you see categories of crime as a resident spike, whether
it's murders or assaults, it leads you to believe that
every kind of crime that could take place might take
place and will also increase. And that sort of feeds
on itself, and people can get into that space without
(24:57):
necessarily finding easy ways to reverse the fears they're feeling.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
I think that's true. It goes to a sort of
broader concept. I think people of all types like to
see accountability and like to see people, you know, face
consequences for their actions. So if they see people committing
crimes and facing no consequence for it, it leads them
to draw broader conclusions about the health of society and
the moral fabric of their communities. That might be one
way that we see fears about one type of crime
(25:23):
bleed over into another. Sort of an interesting thing if
you ask people what types of crime they're most worried about,
it really depends on the community. Number One, when we
saw violence brise in twenty twenty, it was very very uneven.
The violence spiked more in New York city, for example,
in neighborhoods that have always been for have always struggled
with violence, so that increase might not have been as
visible to other people. But often you see people are
(25:45):
more worried in some cases about what we in the
policy field might call relatively lower level offenses, as in
not the most serious offenses known to law enforcement, but
crimes like shoplifting, crimes like turnstile jumping, things like that.
Those sort of crimes can definitely affect people's perception of safety.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
And this is a good moment to point out that
it is our neighbors and fellow Americans at the lowest
part of the socioeconomic ladder who experience the brunt of
violent crime increases, particularly homicides and violent assaults. So within
those statistics, they don't apply in a blanket and uniform
way across our society. They really affect usually the most
(26:24):
vulnerable and disadvantaged people the hardest.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
That's absolutely right. There's a complicated relationship between poverty and crime,
but if you look at cities around the country, you
tend to see violence and rising crime in twenty twenty
clustered in communities that have suffered from other disadvantages. Those
sort of inequalities have always existed, you know, you go
back years, you'll see the same sort of prends. They
simply became more exaggerated or pronounced during the COVID nineteen ten.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Dem let's take another break, games, then we'll come right back.
We're back, and I'm having a conversation about crime and
the COVID nineteen pandemic with Aames Groward. Ames, I think
we have a data collection and data analysis problem around
crime statistics that transcends politics and disagreements, and maybe it
(27:09):
even makes them worse from my perspective, But I was
wondering what you thought of that.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
That's absolutely right. Someone we've worked with before, a law
professor John faff I'm going to borrow point that he makes,
and that is we have up to the minute data
on the economy, unemployment data, jobs created, et cetera. But
when it comes to our data on crime, until very recently,
we had to wait almost a year, nine to ten
full months between the end of a year and the
(27:34):
release of national crime data by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
So be give you an example. If you wanted to
see national crime data on twenty nineteen. You had to
wait until late September twenty twenty for that data to
come out. That's nowhere close to the real time data
that policymakers need to actually craft interventions and understand what's
(27:54):
happening in their community relative to communities around the country now.
To be sure, local data is much more up to date.
I could pull up New York City's constant portal right
now and it would have data that's probably less than
a week old. Depending on the day of the week,
it might be, you know, yesterday. But when we don't
have national data, or when we have delayed national data,
it also has an effect on the narrative. So to
(28:16):
give you an example, you know you will hear policymakers
talk about rising crime in major cities. Over the past month,
I've heard many policymakers on the federal level talk about
rising crime in major cities. In every case, they're citing
data from twenty twenty. You know, that's three years ago.
Why aren't they using more recent data? Why aren't they
aware of more recent data? And the answer is not
(28:36):
necessarily bad faith. The answer might be in part that
we have such a delay between the year that we're
interested in studying and when crime data actually come out
that it sort of takes a while for the public
to understand and adjust to what those data show. There's
sort of a lag time between our reality of national
crime trends and our perception of what those trends actually
(28:57):
look like. And it's actually gotten worse in the past
couple of years due to transition of the way the
FBI calculates crime data, which I could talk to you
about as well well.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Since you mentioned the FBI, My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Justin Fox,
who loves to crunch and examine numbers around all sorts
of things, has been particularly frustrated by the FBI's methodology.
He recently wrote this about how the FBI colates data
around four major crimes to analyze violent crime rates, and
I'm quoting Justin here. To calculate violent crime rates, the
(29:27):
FBI simply adds together the incidents of the four violent crimes,
meaning the rate ends up being determined by the most
common ones, robbery and especially aggravated assault. That's not great.
What do you think of Justin's thoughts on that?
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Your colleague is absolutely right to make the problem even
more stark when people talk about the overall crime rate,
what they tend to be referring to is the incidences
of the four violent offenses that Justin referred to, plus
the three property crime offenses historically tracked by the FBI,
so burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft. But when you add
all those together, larceny is far and away the most
(30:02):
common offense, overwhelming all of them. So when people talk
about the quote crime rate, there's often a risk that
you're really talking about the larceny rate with some other
crimes thrown in there. It's a very sort of blunt
way of looking at crime trends.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
And skewed statistically skewed.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yes, especially because we actually saw this phenomenon in the
COVID nineteen pandemic. Larcenies have fallen for starting in nineteen ninety,
they fill every year until I think twenty twenty two.
So you could look at quote overall crime data in
twenty twenty and see a decline in crime rates twenty
nineteen to twenty twenty. So you could hear people say, well,
the murder rate is up and respond with well crime
(30:40):
is down, and you're both right. But if you're discounting
a thirty percent spike in murder. By looking at larceny data,
you're just not.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Doing apples and oranges.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
Yes, as oranges. You're not doing the real analysis the
public needs. That's part of the challenge of it.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
So how do we get better data so we all
have better confidence in what we're talking about?
Speaker 2 (31:00):
So here I actually have some good news for you,
which I think we're all eager for. At this time,
the FBI is in the process of a transition to
something called the National Incident Based Reporting System. So when
that transition is done, we will have two things. Number One,
we'll have a system that tracks a much wider array
of offenses in much greater detail. So we won't just have
(31:22):
data on larsenies. We'll have data on larceny dash, shoplifting,
larceny dash, by fraud, larceny dash, you know, every variety
of every variety of crime. That's going to allow for
much richer, more thoughtful analysis of crime trends year over year.
And you can actually see that in some work already,
because many cities have already adopted this new system. You
(31:43):
can see that in some work by the Council and
Criminal Justice A great nonprofit organization. They put together an
analysis of shoplifting trends across the country using NYBERS data,
which is how people in my field refer to the
National Incident based Crime Reporting System, and they had a
much richer look at what's actually happening shoplifting around the country.
It was really interesting. Their finding was, as we discussed,
(32:04):
that it's a real problem in New York. But so
number one, we'll have a richer analysis of what the
data actually look like. Number two will actually have more
timely data. The FBI is in the process of rolling
out quarterly reports, so rather than have to wait for
September October every year for your dose of national crime data,
every quarter you should get a little more data on
(32:25):
the national picture. That data will still have a lag time,
it will still be fairly stale by the time you
read it, but you won't have to wait a year.
And I think that's the real improvement and should help
policymakers come to better and more thoughtful and more timely
conclusions about crime data. I can't give you unallied good
news here though, because although this new system is going
to be fantastic when it's fully implemented, implementation is going
(32:49):
better than it was a year ago, but it's not
going great. That's because to switch over to the system,
police departments, that is, the agencies that report crime data
up through their state to the federal government, have to
rework their computer systems and their way of tracking crime data.
That takes time, that takes money, it's difficult to do,
take staff, and many departments, through no fault of their own,
(33:10):
don't have the ability to do that and.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Happen, including some pretty big ones, some.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Very big ones in fact, so Florida and Pennsylvania remain
big blind spots and the incident based reporting system, as
does New York City.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Right, and you've mentioned now two different states in a city.
How reliable is data comparing one state to another or
one city to another when when you see these sort
of comparisons about what's safe and what isn't, what's a
crime written place and what isn't.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Yeah, let me put it this way. You know, the
FBI's role is they seek to standardize the data to
the extent possible between cities so that you can make
these comparisons insofar as they're possible to be made at all.
But that can definitely be a little challenging. Even with
that standardization. The one data point that we sort of
know is accurate and reflects, you know, what is actually
(33:58):
happening on the ground is murder. Because of the tragic
nature of defense. At the end of it, someone has
lost their life, and that tends to be reported to
many different authorities. So murder counts, murder rates tend to
reflect the actual number of those offenses committed in a community.
But the same might not be true of larceny. The
same might not be true of burglary in all cases,
(34:19):
you know I'm thinking of You know, I had my
bike stolen in Brooklyn, and I certainly never told the
police that bike was gone. So those sort of challenges
and reporting rate also might have an issue a way
of confounding comparisons between jurisdictions, It's not impossible. Those comparisons
are certainly meaningful, but they might not fully reflect facts
on the ground. They might come close to it. More.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
You mentioned murder again, and we started talking about murder
in this happy episode we're having, and I wanted to
ask you, given this spike in the homicide rate in
twenty twenty, and it's cooled down subsequently, but it's still
higher than it had been. What aren't we doing about
homicide and violent crimes that could address that more directly?
Speaker 2 (35:01):
That is the question. Two metrics that I've been thinking about,
and I'm going to refer to the work of some
other scholars in the process, are clearance rates and response times.
So the clearance rate is you can think of it
very roughly as the rate at which police solve an offense.
So it's the ratio of crimes in which an arrest
has been made or in which an arrest is impossible
to the number of crimes that are actually reported to them.
(35:23):
So if you have four murders in a given year,
and you make an arrest in three of them, your
clearance rate is seventy five percent. Unfortunately, seventy five percent
would be an outlier clearance rate in many cities in
this country. We've seen clearance rates below fifty percent in
some major cities, and in Chicago one year I think
it was below thirty percent. That suggests that, you know,
quite literally, people can get away with murder, and that's
(35:43):
very dispiriting, that's horrifying. I think we need to figure
out exactly what's happening and see if we can figure
out a way to increase clearance rates so people who
commit these most serious of offenses are actually brought to justice.
That's one factor. Anna Harvey, a researcher who I mentioned before,
is also some thought into studying police response times, which
in some jurisdictions can be quite high, and that also
(36:05):
can lead you a feeling of impunity. You know, if
by the time police show up it's an hour later,
it's much more difficult to solve that crime. So these
are two statistics that feed into each other, but I
don't want to talk exclusively about those two metrics. Another
promising intervention we've seen is something called the community violence
intervention programs. These are models where people from the community
build nonprofit organizations and employ people from the community to
(36:27):
help stop violence before it starts. So a model that
I've seen in Newark, New Jersey, which is quite near
to me, you will see people who have experienced in
the criminal justice system spend time in their communities, hear
what's happening here about nascent fights that might be brewing,
hear about conflicts that might be brewing, and then find
the people affected by those conflicts and try to put
(36:48):
a stop to it. Try to say, you know, I
understand what you're going through, but violence is not the
solution here. These sort of programs, when they work, they
are very effective. New York is one of very few
cities that didn't see homicide rates in create appreciably in
twenty twenty, for example. But they're very hard to get right,
and they typically require more money and more professionalization and
more staff than they're ever given. So this is a
(37:10):
promising option that I'm glad to say. Here's another piece
of good news. The Biden administration has actually taking a
serious interest and promoting and investing in ames.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
I always like to ask guess what they've learned that
is an aha or a new thing to them about
the subject we're discussing. In your longtime observer of crime trends,
what did you learn watching the way that crime statistics
took shape in the early parts of the pandemic and
where they are now and the kind of public debate
we had around all of that.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
That's a great question to think through. One thing I've
learned is statistics don't always reflect people's experience. We actually
see this in the economy as well. To bring it
near to a topic that always care about. The data
may show one thing, but people may feel another thing.
So there's a real gap often between people's perceptions of
safety and the actual data. And the reasons for that
may be really complicated. They may be because we've discussed
(38:00):
the data don't quantify the offenses that people are actually
worried about. But whatever the reason for that gap, we've
just got to take people's perceptions seriously. And it is
no answer to someone who's worried about their safety to say, well,
technically crime is down. That's non answer. That's not an
answer that helps bring us to a safer and more
just place. Games.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
We're out of time. Thank you for coming on today.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Ames Groward is an expert on crime statistics and Senior
counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU
Law School. Here at Crash Course, we believe that collisions
can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising, and always instructive. In
today's Crash Course, I learned that the perception of crime
can almost be as influential for people as the reality
(38:45):
of crime itself and has to be taken into consideration
when we're coming up with policies to address crime. What
did you learn? We'd love to hear from you. You
can tweak at the Bloomberg Opinion, handle at Opinion or
me at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course.
You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening
right now and leave us a review. It helps more
(39:08):
people find the show. This episode was produced by the
Indispensable and always Lawful Anna Maazarakis and me. Our supervising
producer is Magnus Hendrickson, and we had editing help from Sagebauman,
Jeff Grocott, Mike Nize and Christine Vanden Bilart. Blake Maples
does our sound engineering, and our original theme song was
composed by Luis Gara. I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back
(39:30):
next week with another Crash Course
Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and
social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm
Tim O'Brien. Today's crash Course crime trends versus statistics and reality.
After many years of reassuring declines, some crime rates soared
nationwide during the COVID nineteen pandemic. Homicides jumped about thirty
(00:25):
percent in twenty twenty compared to the prior year, and
violent assaults rose by more than ten percent. According to
a number of different groups that track the data, these
trends weren't geographically or politically specific. Residents in cities, suburbs,
and rural areas all suffered through that shift, and it
didn't matter if they lived in a city run by
(00:45):
a Democrat or a Republican. More murders, the data showed,
plagued every urban area. On the other hand, robberies, burglaries,
and larcenies dropped during the pandemics onset. As the pandemic,
war on murder rates andolent crime rates overall settled down,
the numbers rose, but not nearly as sharply as they
(01:05):
did early on. Another wrinkle, crime statistics are subject to
spotty methodology and reporting gaps, making it hard to rely
on the data with absolute certainty. Public safety isn't a
trivial topic, and there's no question that many Americans say
they feel less safe on some streets than they once did,
despite the fact that violent crime rates are well below
(01:26):
where they were during the nineteen nineties. So what was
behind the pandemic surge and murders and assaults and what
lessons can residents and public officials draw from what happened.
Joining us today to chat about all of this is
Ames Growert, a lawyer and expert on crime statistics at
the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School.
The Brennan Center is a nonprofit focused on a number
(01:48):
of legal and public policy issues, including research into the
sources of violent crime. Welcome, Ames, Thank.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
You so much for having me. It's a pleasure to
be here.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
So set the stage alone a little bit for us. First,
tell us a little bit about the work you do
at the Brennan Center and how the Brennan Center intersects
with crime research and crime statistics.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Absolutely so. Our theory of criminal justice reform is that
we can have a country that is both safer and fairer,
that we can has common sense criminal justice reform policies
that lead to a justice system that is fairer to
all who are impacted by it. That's including people who
are victims of crime as well as people accused of crime,
and that while doing so, we can also have a
(02:30):
safer country. As a whole. Part and parcel of that
research is trying to understand what's actually happening when it
comes to crime trends around the country. So around eight
years ago, some colleagues before I joined the Brendan Center
actually released a report called What Caused the Crime de Client.
This is sort of the origin of this work, but
it's also very much still relevant to the work we
do today. They're thinking was, we need to understand the
(02:51):
huge drop off and crime rates that happened between nineteen
ninety one and roughly twenty fourteen. Over that course of time,
murder rates in the United States the drops of half.
Some sociologists call this the Great Crime Decline. It's a
rarely remarked upon but incredibly important social phenomenon. So they
set out to figure out, you know, why what happened.
They came to a couple conclusions, one of which is
(03:12):
it's very difficult to untact something that complicated, but a
couple of their findings were that improving economic conditions partially
helped explain drops in crime nationwide, and that incarceration was
not as powerful an explanation as some had expected. So
that was the genesis of this work, an idea that
we need to you know, understand what's really happening with
crime trends across the country, and that you know, we
(03:33):
continue to this day to monitor what's happening around the country,
keep abreast of the very best research, and contribute our
own where we can well.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
And socioeconomic factors play into our understanding what happened during
the pandemic too, So let's get into that a little bit.
What happened in the early stages of the pandemic, particularly
twenty twenty, that caused homicides and violent crimes to spike.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yeah, just to give you a bit of context, I
know you touched on at the top of the show,
but the key statistics are we saw the national murder
rate increase by about thirty percent year every year from
twenty nineteen to twenty twenty. We saw assault increase by
around ten percent or so, you know, that's a significant
increase in violence. And I think, much like we don't
have a complete answer as to, you know, why crime
dropped so precipitously between you know, the early nineteen nineties
(04:19):
and today. We don't yet have and may not have
for a long time, a full accounting of what happened
during the COVID nineteen pandemic. When my colleagues and I
investigated this to try to figure out, you know, what
could explain such a dramatic increase in violence concentrated in
such a short period of time. We can do a
couple explanations, but we've always been careful, and I just
want to re emphasize to your listeners too, that this
(04:41):
isn't the full accounting. We're not saying, you know, these
are the factors that one hundred percent explained everything that
happened since twenty nineteen. I don't know who'll ever get there,
but a couple of those factors were Number one, increasing
access to firearms and increasing carrying and use of them.
And I can go into that at greater length. It's
really interesting.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
So, surprise, surprise, more guns on the street produce more
violence against other people. That's about right, I'm shocked to
discover that.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
You know, so often we look for counterintuitive findings, but
this just feels very intuitive. It's sometimes these sort of
explanations that resonate with us. It's just common sense. There
actually is research back into it, and people can push
back and say, you know, well, it's true that more
guns is an mulos equal more crime. A lot of
second and third guns are bought by collectors, but in
the pandemic, we actually did see a sort of closer
(05:26):
link at least between more guns more crime.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
There had been years of a surge on guns on
the streets that also corresponded with a drop in homicides
and violent crimes. So even there, the link is not
entirely direct, right, It's.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Very complicated yet. So one of the pandemic ara statistics
we look at is something that the ATF refers to
as time to crime. What that means is when a
gun is recovered from a crime scene, how long ago
was it lawfully purchased. So it's sort of the time
between when a gun enters the market legally and when
it turns up at a crime scene. Time to crime
actually dropped during the first two years of the COVID
(05:59):
nineteen pandemic that suggests there's sort of a closer link
between gun purchases and guns being used unlawfully. But frankly,
this is an area where we need more research to
understand better the link between gun purchases and gun violence.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Were there other factors in addition to availability to firearms?
Access to firearms?
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yes, So this is a tough one. I think. You know,
when you talk to some people, they will give you
a very strong case of this argument, and I'm going
to give you the sort of middle way case of
the argument, that is that the social disruption caused by
the COVID nineteen pandemic had some effect on crime trends,
and especially violent crime. This is a tough one because
I don't know if we'll ever be able to fully
quantify exactly how this relationship played out, What happened, What's
(06:40):
the mechanism that explains the link between the onset of
the pandemic and violent crime. We might not ever have
a full understanding of that, but a couple of mechanisms
that we're sort of thinking through are this. When we
saw the pandemic begin, the government response was not immediately
adequate and not immediately encouraging. So a lot of people
and people that we talked to in communities affected by
(07:01):
violence said that members of their community lost faith in
the government, didn't believe that their institutions were there to
keep them safe. At the same time, a lot of
basic parts of the community fabric, like libraries, third places
so called where people can congregate after work or on
the weekends, those shut down or inaccessible programs like community
violence intervention initiatives, which are programs run by people at
(07:23):
street level to help stop violence, support starts. Those sor
programs often have to be run face to face, and
you can't do that during a respiratory pandemic. That's just
not how it works. So all these factors that sort
of work together in the background almost to keep communities safe,
all of them sort of fell apart at once, And
it would almost be surprising if that had no effects.
The question that we ask, and I think researchers need
(07:45):
to continue to ask, is what sort of effect did
it have? What was the magnitude of that effect?
Speaker 1 (07:49):
So it would all be under the umbrella of people
freaked out, it.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Would be more into the umbrella of once in a
generation pandemic having untold, difficult to quantify, difficult to really
fully appreciate, effects on the social fabric and the sort
of informal ties that keep the communities safe.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah, people certainly had existential dread. People were reaching out
to connect to one another more, and it was uncertain
what the pandemic's effects would be. It's interesting to me
to contemplate that. Then another stage and thinking was lashing
out against other people, you know, either with guns or hands.
Yet another statistic in all of that, though, is interesting
(08:26):
to me, is that auto thefts also jumped. So in
addition to, you know, you had certain kinds of crime
to decline, and then you had homicides and assaults jump,
but auto thefts jumped too. What are you thinking about that?
That's a category to me that's sort of intriguing.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Yeah, this is a really interesting one. One way to
think about what happened during the COVID nineteen pandemic is
how does the onset of a major respiratory virus affect
someone's opportunity to commit a type of crime. So retail
thefts tended to drop during the COVID nineteen pandemics. People
simply weren't going to stores but at the same time,
you know, you might not have eyes on your car
that you parked up the street a couple of weeks
(09:00):
ago because you haven't left your house. That's one factor
that might partially explain increasing motor vehicle thefts. But there
are a couple others too. One and this comes from
a conversation I had with Jeff Asher, who's a fantastic
analyst of crime trends. He pointed out that motor vehicle
thefts tend to go hand in hand with more serious
forms of violence. So, you know, a car is stolen
and then used in a drive by shooting, so it's
(09:21):
possible that, you know, you would see that type of
offense increase alongside murder, which is what we in fact
saw during the COVID nineteen pandemic. More recently, there have
been security vulnerabilities discovered and a couple of vehicle brands,
and there have been videos and stuff.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
So glad you're bringing this up. You're getting to the
TikTok video. Yeah, part of the argument. Excellent.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah, there's a social media video explaining how easy it
is to short circuit the security defenses of some vehicles.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
And specifically kias and Hyundais.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
I believe, Yeah, I believe that's right. And I can't
tell you that that explains, you know, fifty percent or
whatever percent of the increase in motor vehicle thefts, but
it's not trivial. I think that that sort of effect
of not just opportunity but means becoming more available might
help explain the increase in those offenses as well.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
So all of the reasons you're giving for why the
numbers jumped, both in these separate categories which can be
caused by unrelated factors, and then some of the ones
that are caused by related factors, none of these are
necessarily the reasons that captured the public's imagination as to
why homicides and violent crime were rising in year one
(10:24):
of COVID nineteen. Tell me about that. What were the
reasons that many people latched onto for why this was happening.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Yeah, that's the key question. One of the frustrating things
about working on crime research and trying to understand the
way the criminal justice system works is it's easier to
disprove some theories than it is to proved them. That's
because the data are very hard to come by sometimes,
But when you have a concrete idea. Sometimes you can
gather the data you need to actually test the theory,
and that's what my colleagues and I have done in
some cases, and researchers around the country have done in others.
(10:53):
And I'll get to exactly what the data show in
a minute. But one of the most popular theories about,
you know, why crime rose, especially in New York City,
was bail reform. This was a major initiative enacted in
twenty twenty that changed the way the state's pre trailer
released laws worked, so detension bail were largely taken off
the table for our misdemeanors in some lower level felonies.
(11:14):
People jumped to the conclusion very quickly that bail reform
might explain rising crime in New York City. But when
you really kick the tires of that data, it just
doesn't add up. For one, as you know, as we've
been discussing folent crime and murders rose around the country,
it would be very odd, indeed, if bail reform in
New York somehow powered a nationwide increase in violent crime.
It just doesn't compute. Really. Subsequent researchers backed that up
(11:36):
as well, and I'm happy to go into that too.
Another point that people argued was that this might be
a quote city phenomenon, that this is something that originates
in nebulously defined, quote blue city governance. I think this
idea is sort of a holdover of the way crime
used to look in this country. You know, if you
go back to the nineteen nineties, there were multiple thousands
(11:58):
of murders in New York every year. Amasite raid in
a city like New York was well about the national average,
And I think people sort of came to expect that
violent crime is a city problem. But fast forward thirty
years down the line, that's not quite so true. New
York City is one of the safest big cities in
the country. It's murder rate is below the national average.
So this idea that violent crime was caused by and
(12:20):
primarily a problem of cities, it's also simply not true,
but became a very prevalent narrative, especially during the early
days of the COVID nineteen pandemic. One of the other
theories that we've looked into, and others have really taken
a lot of time to try to research, is whether
the inauguration of district attorneys who believe in criminal justice
reform policies. The label you here as quote progressive prosecutors,
(12:42):
But I've talked to these people. They don't all subscribe
to that label. They subscribe to the idea that they
are elected district attorneys who believe in criminal justice reform policies.
But one of the arguments against them has been that.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
We'll still wanting to enforce the law.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Indeed, yes, they're elected district attorneys who believe in criminal
justice reform as a means of making their community safer,
not as a political point. So one of the arguments
has done that these so called progressive prosecutors have presided
over a rise at crime and helped kick it off
in their cities, and the data just don't support that.
There's a really good study that was co authored by
Anna Harvey at NYU's Public Safety Lab that tried to
(13:18):
revide a relationship between progressive prosecuters and rise and crime,
and she couldn't do it. She just couldn't find any
sort of relationship. More researchers coming out on this. Now,
that was a popular narrative, but it just hasn't held up.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
And then moreover in successive years, in twenty twenty one
and twenty twenty two, the homicide rate drop, the rate
of violent crimes dropped. What changed? Do you have a
handle on what was behind that phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
That's a question we're sitting with too. I actually think
it does suggest one point. So if you were as
we were sitting in the beginning of the COVID nineteen
pandemic and wondering, you know, what's happening in the country,
why are we seeing crime rates increase so much? If
you had a theory that part of this might be
due to factors related to the COVID nineteen pandemic, like
(14:02):
social disorder, like the shuddering of key institutions that help
keep communities safe, you might hypothesize that as the pandemic recedes,
we might start to see murder rates go down, and
that is in fact what we're now seeing. So I
think it's a point of evidence that suggests, but doesn't
conclusively prove, that much of the reason that we sew
violence spike so much in the early years of the
(14:24):
pandemic might be due to these factors related to the pandemic,
And as the world sort of returns to normal, as
businesses reopen, as people get back to their daily life.
As community rhythm's return, that sort of network of safety
and invisible bonds that keep us safe sort of re
establishes itself. I don't have a complete answer for this question,
but I think that's at least one theory worth thinking over.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
So the lesson to be drawn from that is state
away from guns during year one of any lockdown, because
that's when people are most likely to fire them.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
A question we think about too is sort of how
to build resilience into communities and how do you build
resilience into society as a whole? And trust absolutely and
trust I think that's a really good way of putting it.
There were some surprising things that we found when we
looked into, you know, not just what caused crime to
increase in twenty twenty, but you know what solutions people
were talking about. There's actually some research these days that
(15:13):
medicaid expansion, which we just saw go into place, and
I believe it was North Carolina, is actually associated with
lower arrest rates and lower rates of priscidivism in some cases.
This suggests to me that as you build a society
that has a stronger safety net and is more focused
on taking care of people. You might help firm up
that sort of invisible network that keeps us all safer.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
On that note, Ames, I'm going to take a quick
break so we can hear from a sponsor, and then
we will come back in to chat further about all
of this. We're back with Ames GROWERDT and we're discussing
murder and other crimes during the pandemic and after Ames
we talked a little bit earlier about people citing the
(15:56):
wrong factors for this spike and murder and viol and
assaults during the pandemic and what some of the real
factors might have been. You know, we're having this conversation
and the context of the data is still recently fresh.
The events are still relatively recent, and no one knows
for certain, but our goal is to try to really
get it real cause and effect so we can get
better solutions. How was the narrative around the crime spike
(16:20):
during the COVID pandemic and after construct it. I'm interested
in that from your perspective. How did that narrative come
into the public consciousness, because it's certainly different than some
of what we just talked about earlier in terms of
the factors that actually informed the spike.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Yeah, that's a really good question and something I spend
a lot of time thinking about. I'll do my best
to give you as clear of an answer as I can,
but it's a complicated subject. On the one hand. You know,
I think when people see something like the covidanteen pandemic
and they see, you know, hard data showing what they're
feeling that violence is increasing, people naturally feel afraid and
(16:58):
feel concerned for their states, see in the safety their
loved ones, and those feelings are valid and important, and
we should respect that. Number one one temptation when these
very reasonable fears arise, I think it's tempting for some
to look for sort of easy explanations. It's tempting to
say this is a problem, and here's the solution, and
that solution will work tomorrow. When people gravitate to those
(17:19):
easy answers, those answers feel good, they might sound attractive,
but they might be wrong, and more than that, they
might actually end up doing more harm than good. So
I think that's one factor, and telling the narrative onward
is know, when crime rose, people looked for sort of
a single factor answer, you know, crime rose by thirty
percent in twenty twenty because of X, and insert into X,
(17:42):
you know, bail reform, quote, blue city, something like that.
That answer might have a certain narrative and intuitive appeal,
it just happens to be wrong. Another factor I think
we've seen, and I touched on this a little bit earlier,
is I think because of the way that crime trends
in the country used to look, people are sort of
primed to think of crime as a city issue rather
than an American issue, and people are primed to believe
(18:03):
that cities like New York are uniquely dangerous, when actually
almost the opposite is true. Representative Jim Jordan hosted a
field hearing in New York City designed to highlight how
crime in the city was increasing. It just happened to
be at a time when murder trends in the city
were actually declining sharply, and the evidence for rising crime
in New York City was simply nowhere to be found.
(18:23):
You know, the city, like other places in the country,
had experience of crime spike during the pandemic, but by
all accounts that spike was in the process of reversing.
These narratives, they have an intuitive appeal. It's up to
you know, policymakers and other opinion leaders like us in fact,
to talk through why those narratives might not actually be
true and why there might be other solutions that can
(18:43):
make us safer. A colleague of mine who I do
some work with, in Hirahman at the Beer Institute. She
has a really interesting saying, I think in something that
I think about daily. She says, you know, if we
focus on the wrong problems, we also focus on the
wrong solutions. So if you yourself in a narrative where
you think the reason that crime is up is because
(19:04):
cities are doing something wrong and bail reform or progressive
prosecutor or something like that, you might miss some other
solution that has nothing to do with those quote problems
and that could actually lead to safer communities down the line.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
And as I noted at the top of the show,
suburbs and rural areas saw a very similar spike to
what cities saw. So the idea again that cities themselves
are unique kind of breeding grounds or Petrie dishes for
violent crime is belied by reality in the data.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Having said that, aims about the similarities of suburbs and
rural areas and cities. There is also reality at work here. However,
there is no denying that city streets do for a
lot of people feel less safe. A lot of small
businesses have boarded up, there's less people walking around in
the streets, particularly late at night. Homelessness has been on
(19:57):
the rise in every big city I think, or at
least most of the big ones, and I've visited a
number of them since COVID began, and you just notice
homeless people wandering in greater numbers in the past, and
there is this perception that the streets aren't as safe,
even if the data doesn't show us that. Let's talk
about that a little bit, because that is a reality
(20:19):
based conclusion for a lot of folks.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Absolutely it is, yes, And when people have that impression,
they were reacting to something real. I'm not one to
discount people's experiences and fears about their community. I think
one thing at work here is people see social disorder,
People see hardship in their lives, such as an increasing
number of people living on the streets, and they make
a sort of intuitive connection between bad and crime. But
(20:42):
social disorder and crime are not necessarily one of the same.
They might in some cases go hand in hand, but
that might be one reason why we see a sort
of a gap between the perceptions and realities around the trends,
especially in major offenses. These are real problems. They don't
want to downplay it. Like I've seen the data on
homelessness and Portland, I've seen the data on homelessness in
California and New York, and you're right, it is up.
But the solutions to those problems might lie outside the
(21:06):
criminal justice system, where they might lie in other policy
interventions disconnected from the problem of crime in the United.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
States, and the sense of menace that some people might
feel from a homeless person doesn't necessarily translate into the
homeless person whipping out a gun and shooting you or
assaulting you.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Right, But you know people's fears about their safety and
about seeing disorder in their community. I want to make
sure that we take that seriously, and policymakers should. They
should just be careful about what solutions we can offer
to try to build healthier communities for everyone.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Two of the other sort of marquee incidents that have
I think also make people worried about cities are shoplifting waves.
As we know from the data, most shoplifting is carried
out by a small cohort, often acting in conjunction with
one another. They're repeat offenders. Again, that doesn't take away
from the fact that the shoplifting is occurring and it
(21:55):
appears to be unstopped. Storefronts are shattered, or people walk
into a retail store and just sweep stuff off the shelves.
Have you thought about shoplifting it's just a category of
sort of urban blight, or maybe the data there I
don't actually know. Is the data similar again across the
board of shoplifting a problem also in suburbs and in
rural areas as well.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
This is a challenging question too, because there are a
number of things that can explain trends in shoplifting. Different
stores have different strategies or protocols for reporting shoplifting to
the police. For example, a colleague is a former prosecutor
mentioned this to me. You know, if I go into
a convenience store every day one week and steal you know,
(22:36):
ten dollars worth of property, is it the store policy
to report me the first time and every subsequent time?
Is it the store policy to call the police only
after the seventh and then report every incident. These sort
of differences in how stores and store owners report shoplifting
to police can sort of confound our understanding of the data,
and it makes it very hard to understand precise trends
(22:56):
in shoplifting around the country and individual cities. One thing
does seem to be clear, though, and most data that
we have does point to this, and that is that
shoplifting has increased in some major cities. In New York City,
the data seems very clear that shoplifting increased sharply in
twenty twenty two, and that it actually increased year over
year for I think going back more than a decade.
(23:16):
So the problem is very real, even if we need
better data to fully understand what's going on.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
And tell me. As a last category before we move
on to other and grander things, or carjacking, that has
also seemed to have been on the rise in urban areas,
prekly in places like Chicago, in very stark ways. You know,
drivers are pulled over by another car, or is they're
getting out of a car or into a car, they're
essentially held up and their car is stolen. And that
seems to be a more frequent and visible crime than
(23:44):
it was a few years ago.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
That's right, and this is actually a tough crime for
us to study as well. I feel like I'm saying
that a lot, but you can get an idea of
how challenging the data can be. Sometimes. The reason is that,
until very recently, and I know we'll talk about this
in more detail, car jacking was not broken out as
a separate fence studied by the FBI. It was sort
of rolled into robbery. So in many places we don't
really have an idea of year to year trends in carjacking.
(24:07):
The data that we do have does show that it
is increasing or increased in twenty twenty two. We also
know from city reports. I think you mentioned Chicago. I'm
not familiar with the data, but I'm sure you're right.
But we know in Washington, DC carjackings definitely have increased.
As to why it's a tough question, I go back
to something I mentioned earlier. There might be some correlation
between types of motor vehicle theft and other more serious crimes.
(24:30):
As you steal a car, you carjack a car to
be used in a more serious efense down the line.
It could be that those types of defenses go hand
in hand.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
And is there like a psychology of crime that when
you see categories of crime as a resident spike, whether
it's murders or assaults, it leads you to believe that
every kind of crime that could take place might take
place and will also increase. And that sort of feeds
on itself, and people can get into that space without
(24:57):
necessarily finding easy ways to reverse the fears they're feeling.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
I think that's true. It goes to a sort of
broader concept. I think people of all types like to
see accountability and like to see people, you know, face
consequences for their actions. So if they see people committing
crimes and facing no consequence for it, it leads them
to draw broader conclusions about the health of society and
the moral fabric of their communities. That might be one
way that we see fears about one type of crime
(25:23):
bleed over into another. Sort of an interesting thing if
you ask people what types of crime they're most worried about,
it really depends on the community. Number One, when we
saw violence brise in twenty twenty, it was very very uneven.
The violence spiked more in New York city, for example,
in neighborhoods that have always been for have always struggled
with violence, so that increase might not have been as
visible to other people. But often you see people are
(25:45):
more worried in some cases about what we in the
policy field might call relatively lower level offenses, as in
not the most serious offenses known to law enforcement, but
crimes like shoplifting, crimes like turnstile jumping, things like that.
Those sort of crimes can definitely affect people's perception of safety.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
And this is a good moment to point out that
it is our neighbors and fellow Americans at the lowest
part of the socioeconomic ladder who experience the brunt of
violent crime increases, particularly homicides and violent assaults. So within
those statistics, they don't apply in a blanket and uniform
way across our society. They really affect usually the most
(26:24):
vulnerable and disadvantaged people the hardest.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
That's absolutely right. There's a complicated relationship between poverty and crime,
but if you look at cities around the country, you
tend to see violence and rising crime in twenty twenty
clustered in communities that have suffered from other disadvantages. Those
sort of inequalities have always existed, you know, you go
back years, you'll see the same sort of prends. They
simply became more exaggerated or pronounced during the COVID nineteen ten.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Dem let's take another break, games, then we'll come right back.
We're back, and I'm having a conversation about crime and
the COVID nineteen pandemic with Aames Groward. Ames, I think
we have a data collection and data analysis problem around
crime statistics that transcends politics and disagreements, and maybe it
(27:09):
even makes them worse from my perspective, But I was
wondering what you thought of that.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
That's absolutely right. Someone we've worked with before, a law
professor John faff I'm going to borrow point that he makes,
and that is we have up to the minute data
on the economy, unemployment data, jobs created, et cetera. But
when it comes to our data on crime, until very recently,
we had to wait almost a year, nine to ten
full months between the end of a year and the
(27:34):
release of national crime data by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
So be give you an example. If you wanted to
see national crime data on twenty nineteen. You had to
wait until late September twenty twenty for that data to
come out. That's nowhere close to the real time data
that policymakers need to actually craft interventions and understand what's
(27:54):
happening in their community relative to communities around the country now.
To be sure, local data is much more up to date.
I could pull up New York City's constant portal right
now and it would have data that's probably less than
a week old. Depending on the day of the week,
it might be, you know, yesterday. But when we don't
have national data, or when we have delayed national data,
it also has an effect on the narrative. So to
(28:16):
give you an example, you know you will hear policymakers
talk about rising crime in major cities. Over the past month,
I've heard many policymakers on the federal level talk about
rising crime in major cities. In every case, they're citing
data from twenty twenty. You know, that's three years ago.
Why aren't they using more recent data? Why aren't they
aware of more recent data? And the answer is not
(28:36):
necessarily bad faith. The answer might be in part that
we have such a delay between the year that we're
interested in studying and when crime data actually come out
that it sort of takes a while for the public
to understand and adjust to what those data show. There's
sort of a lag time between our reality of national
crime trends and our perception of what those trends actually
(28:57):
look like. And it's actually gotten worse in the past
couple of years due to transition of the way the
FBI calculates crime data, which I could talk to you
about as well well.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Since you mentioned the FBI, My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Justin Fox,
who loves to crunch and examine numbers around all sorts
of things, has been particularly frustrated by the FBI's methodology.
He recently wrote this about how the FBI colates data
around four major crimes to analyze violent crime rates, and
I'm quoting Justin here. To calculate violent crime rates, the
(29:27):
FBI simply adds together the incidents of the four violent crimes,
meaning the rate ends up being determined by the most
common ones, robbery and especially aggravated assault. That's not great.
What do you think of Justin's thoughts on that?
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Your colleague is absolutely right to make the problem even
more stark when people talk about the overall crime rate,
what they tend to be referring to is the incidences
of the four violent offenses that Justin referred to, plus
the three property crime offenses historically tracked by the FBI,
so burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft. But when you add
all those together, larceny is far and away the most
(30:02):
common offense, overwhelming all of them. So when people talk
about the quote crime rate, there's often a risk that
you're really talking about the larceny rate with some other
crimes thrown in there. It's a very sort of blunt
way of looking at crime trends.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
And skewed statistically skewed.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yes, especially because we actually saw this phenomenon in the
COVID nineteen pandemic. Larcenies have fallen for starting in nineteen ninety,
they fill every year until I think twenty twenty two.
So you could look at quote overall crime data in
twenty twenty and see a decline in crime rates twenty
nineteen to twenty twenty. So you could hear people say, well,
the murder rate is up and respond with well crime
(30:40):
is down, and you're both right. But if you're discounting
a thirty percent spike in murder. By looking at larceny data,
you're just not.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Doing apples and oranges.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
Yes, as oranges. You're not doing the real analysis the
public needs. That's part of the challenge of it.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
So how do we get better data so we all
have better confidence in what we're talking about?
Speaker 2 (31:00):
So here I actually have some good news for you,
which I think we're all eager for. At this time,
the FBI is in the process of a transition to
something called the National Incident Based Reporting System. So when
that transition is done, we will have two things. Number One,
we'll have a system that tracks a much wider array
of offenses in much greater detail. So we won't just have
(31:22):
data on larsenies. We'll have data on larceny dash, shoplifting,
larceny dash, by fraud, larceny dash, you know, every variety
of every variety of crime. That's going to allow for
much richer, more thoughtful analysis of crime trends year over year.
And you can actually see that in some work already,
because many cities have already adopted this new system. You
(31:43):
can see that in some work by the Council and
Criminal Justice A great nonprofit organization. They put together an
analysis of shoplifting trends across the country using NYBERS data,
which is how people in my field refer to the
National Incident based Crime Reporting System, and they had a
much richer look at what's actually happening shoplifting around the country.
It was really interesting. Their finding was, as we discussed,
(32:04):
that it's a real problem in New York. But so
number one, we'll have a richer analysis of what the
data actually look like. Number two will actually have more
timely data. The FBI is in the process of rolling
out quarterly reports, so rather than have to wait for
September October every year for your dose of national crime data,
every quarter you should get a little more data on
(32:25):
the national picture. That data will still have a lag time,
it will still be fairly stale by the time you
read it, but you won't have to wait a year.
And I think that's the real improvement and should help
policymakers come to better and more thoughtful and more timely
conclusions about crime data. I can't give you unallied good
news here though, because although this new system is going
to be fantastic when it's fully implemented, implementation is going
(32:49):
better than it was a year ago, but it's not
going great. That's because to switch over to the system,
police departments, that is, the agencies that report crime data
up through their state to the federal government, have to
rework their computer systems and their way of tracking crime data.
That takes time, that takes money, it's difficult to do,
take staff, and many departments, through no fault of their own,
(33:10):
don't have the ability to do that and.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Happen, including some pretty big ones, some.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Very big ones in fact, so Florida and Pennsylvania remain
big blind spots and the incident based reporting system, as
does New York City.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Right, and you've mentioned now two different states in a city.
How reliable is data comparing one state to another or
one city to another when when you see these sort
of comparisons about what's safe and what isn't, what's a
crime written place and what isn't.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Yeah, let me put it this way. You know, the
FBI's role is they seek to standardize the data to
the extent possible between cities so that you can make
these comparisons insofar as they're possible to be made at all.
But that can definitely be a little challenging. Even with
that standardization. The one data point that we sort of
know is accurate and reflects, you know, what is actually
(33:58):
happening on the ground is murder. Because of the tragic
nature of defense. At the end of it, someone has
lost their life, and that tends to be reported to
many different authorities. So murder counts, murder rates tend to
reflect the actual number of those offenses committed in a community.
But the same might not be true of larceny. The
same might not be true of burglary in all cases,
(34:19):
you know I'm thinking of You know, I had my
bike stolen in Brooklyn, and I certainly never told the
police that bike was gone. So those sort of challenges
and reporting rate also might have an issue a way
of confounding comparisons between jurisdictions, It's not impossible. Those comparisons
are certainly meaningful, but they might not fully reflect facts
on the ground. They might come close to it. More.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
You mentioned murder again, and we started talking about murder
in this happy episode we're having, and I wanted to
ask you, given this spike in the homicide rate in
twenty twenty, and it's cooled down subsequently, but it's still
higher than it had been. What aren't we doing about
homicide and violent crimes that could address that more directly?
Speaker 2 (35:01):
That is the question. Two metrics that I've been thinking about,
and I'm going to refer to the work of some
other scholars in the process, are clearance rates and response times.
So the clearance rate is you can think of it
very roughly as the rate at which police solve an offense.
So it's the ratio of crimes in which an arrest
has been made or in which an arrest is impossible
to the number of crimes that are actually reported to them.
(35:23):
So if you have four murders in a given year,
and you make an arrest in three of them, your
clearance rate is seventy five percent. Unfortunately, seventy five percent
would be an outlier clearance rate in many cities in
this country. We've seen clearance rates below fifty percent in
some major cities, and in Chicago one year I think
it was below thirty percent. That suggests that, you know,
quite literally, people can get away with murder, and that's
(35:43):
very dispiriting, that's horrifying. I think we need to figure
out exactly what's happening and see if we can figure
out a way to increase clearance rates so people who
commit these most serious of offenses are actually brought to justice.
That's one factor. Anna Harvey, a researcher who I mentioned before,
is also some thought into studying police response times, which
in some jurisdictions can be quite high, and that also
(36:05):
can lead you a feeling of impunity. You know, if
by the time police show up it's an hour later,
it's much more difficult to solve that crime. So these
are two statistics that feed into each other, but I
don't want to talk exclusively about those two metrics. Another
promising intervention we've seen is something called the community violence
intervention programs. These are models where people from the community
build nonprofit organizations and employ people from the community to
(36:27):
help stop violence before it starts. So a model that
I've seen in Newark, New Jersey, which is quite near
to me, you will see people who have experienced in
the criminal justice system spend time in their communities, hear
what's happening here about nascent fights that might be brewing,
hear about conflicts that might be brewing, and then find
the people affected by those conflicts and try to put
(36:48):
a stop to it. Try to say, you know, I
understand what you're going through, but violence is not the
solution here. These sort of programs, when they work, they
are very effective. New York is one of very few
cities that didn't see homicide rates in create appreciably in
twenty twenty, for example. But they're very hard to get right,
and they typically require more money and more professionalization and
more staff than they're ever given. So this is a
(37:10):
promising option that I'm glad to say. Here's another piece
of good news. The Biden administration has actually taking a
serious interest and promoting and investing in ames.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
I always like to ask guess what they've learned that
is an aha or a new thing to them about
the subject we're discussing. In your longtime observer of crime trends,
what did you learn watching the way that crime statistics
took shape in the early parts of the pandemic and
where they are now and the kind of public debate
we had around all of that.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
That's a great question to think through. One thing I've
learned is statistics don't always reflect people's experience. We actually
see this in the economy as well. To bring it
near to a topic that always care about. The data
may show one thing, but people may feel another thing.
So there's a real gap often between people's perceptions of
safety and the actual data. And the reasons for that
may be really complicated. They may be because we've discussed
(38:00):
the data don't quantify the offenses that people are actually
worried about. But whatever the reason for that gap, we've
just got to take people's perceptions seriously. And it is
no answer to someone who's worried about their safety to say, well,
technically crime is down. That's non answer. That's not an
answer that helps bring us to a safer and more
just place. Games.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
We're out of time. Thank you for coming on today.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Ames Groward is an expert on crime statistics and Senior
counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU
Law School. Here at Crash Course, we believe that collisions
can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising, and always instructive. In
today's Crash Course, I learned that the perception of crime
can almost be as influential for people as the reality
(38:45):
of crime itself and has to be taken into consideration
when we're coming up with policies to address crime. What
did you learn? We'd love to hear from you. You
can tweak at the Bloomberg Opinion, handle at Opinion or
me at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course.
You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening
right now and leave us a review. It helps more
(39:08):
people find the show. This episode was produced by the
Indispensable and always Lawful Anna Maazarakis and me. Our supervising
producer is Magnus Hendrickson, and we had editing help from Sagebauman,
Jeff Grocott, Mike Nize and Christine Vanden Bilart. Blake Maples
does our sound engineering, and our original theme song was
composed by Luis Gara. I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back
(39:30):
next week with another Crash Course
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.