The Jeff-alytics Podcast

My guest today has an incredible new documentary coming out this November called Crime and Punishment in America. It's a four-part, 8 hour review of the history of crime and incarceration dating back hundreds of years all the way to today (I was fortunate enough to get a preview). 

Lynn Novick (The Vietnam War, College Behind Bars, The Us and the Holocaust) is the writer and director of this terrific new documentary and she sat...

When crime rises, the instinct is usually to hire more officers, increase enforcement, and ask police departments to do even more. But after spending years investigating police departments and working on reform efforts across the country, my guest today has started asking a different question…

What if we’re asking policing to do too much in the first place?

Christy Lopez is a professor at Georgetown Law, former DOJ Civil...

One of the hardest things for any mayor to do is convince people that a problem can actually be solved.

That may sound obvious, but when a city has struggled with violence for decades, cynicism starts to set in. Residents get frustrated. Headlines get harsher. And people assume that high levels of violence are simply part of life.

My guest today rejects that idea.

Quinton Lucas has served as mayor of Kansas City since 2019, a period t...

“We should treat gun violence like a public health problem” is a phrase that is often used but rarely defined. 

My guest today is Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician, injury prevention researcher, and the Dean of the Yale School of Public Health .

She sees firearm injury as part of a much broader health issue, one that affects not just the person who was shot, but families, communities, health care providers, an...

The national conversation around gun violence tends to revolve around what laws should be passed next. But a lot of the work of reducing violence doesn’t happen in Congress. It happens in cities, hospitals, community organizations, police departments, schools, and increasingly through coordination between all of them.

My guest today is Rob Wilcox, the president and CEO of the Fund for a Safer Future and the former deputy direc...

For decades, the response to rising crime has been fairly predictable: increase penalties, increase sentences, and hope it works. My guest today says that framework misses the point.

Greg Newburn is the Director of Criminal Justice at the Niskanen Center, where his work focuses on reducing both crime and punishment at the same time through evidence-based policy .

In this episode, we talk about why the criminal justice system may have...

Most debates about crime policy are framed as a choice. You’re either tough on crime or you’re not. You focus on enforcement or prevention. And the answers tend to sound simple.

But once you move from talking about crime to actually trying to reduce it, things get more complicated, requiring nuanced solutions to complex problems.

My guest today is Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and a l...

What actually drives change on an issue like gun violence? Is it policy? Culture? Policing? Or something harder to measure?

To help answer that question I’m turning to Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. Senator Murphy has been one of Washington’s leading voices on gun violence reduction, a passion that was shaped by his experience in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, where he spent time with families and saw firsthand the i...

Answering the why of crime trends is frequently much harder than answering the what. The same data inevitably leads to very different explanations depending on how you interpret them and what you think is driving them, and there are rarely “right” answers.

The numbers are fairly clear, the reasons behind that are not. To get at some of the reasons why crime has trended as it as I’m turning to Charles Fain Lehman, a...

Sometimes the hardest part about a crime isn't figuring out what happened — it's revisiting what's already been decided. Once a case is closed and a conclusion settles in, changing that can be just as difficult as investigating it was in the first place.

My guest today is Jill Collin Jefferson, a civil and human rights attorney and the founder of JULIAN, an organization focused on investigating modern-day lynchings. JULIAN...

What happens when the people shaping national crime policy don’t actually have the data they need?

In this episode, I sit down with Rachel Harmon, law professor at the University of Virginia who previously served as a senior policy adviser for criminal justice for the White House Domestic Policy Council. 

Rachel provides a rare inside look at how crime policy really gets made, breaking down  what it’s like worki...

Ken Dilanian is a seasoned journalist covering the Justice Department and FBI,  and in this episode he shares his insights on the evolving landscape of covering those agencies. We talk about crime data, the challenges of media coverage in 2026, the impact of political shifts on justice institutions, and a whole lot more in this jam-packed conversation.  

There are few journalists in the country with a better front row seat...

New Orleans has had one of the nation's highest murder rates every year for decades. Since 2023, however, violent crime has dropped sharply — and in this episode, I talk with Mayor Helena Moreno about crime and criminal justice in New Orleans. We discuss the city's difficulties, like a severe budget crisis and the ongoing challenge of abysmally low sexual assault clearance rates, as well as the city's successes. 

Mayor Mo...

I talk a lot about crime analysis and analyzing crime data, but I realized that I’ve never actually talked to a crime analyst yet. To correct this, I’m talking with Carlee Ruiz, a former crime analyst and policing researcher, discussing how she bridges the gap between academic research and real-world law enforcement through her platform, Police Research Hub.

Carlee highlights how valuable evidence-based insights are ofte...

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

For this conversation, we talk about why murder has fallen so dramatically over the last few years, how you build a sustainable organiza...

Baltimore is typically seen as the poster child for high crime with the city consistently having one of the nation’s highest murder rates. Things have been changing in Baltimore in the last few years though as the city has had a nearly 60 percent reduction in murder 3since 2022. It is a remarkable story of solving gun violence using every tool in the toolkit. 

To understand this amazing turnaround , I talked to Ba...

I thought about doing this episode very soon after starting this podcast. Ferne Pearlstein and Bob Edwards made a documentary more than a decade ago called “The Last Laugh” which talked about how comedy can tackle a tragedy as immense as the Holocaust and what lessons that might suggest for effectively communicating about crime. They interviewed basically every comedy legend you could think of and it’s an incredib...

Have you heard about the police department in Utah where report drafting AI interpreted footage from an officer’s body camera of The Princess and the Frog playing in the background of an incident to mean the officer had morphed into a frog? 

AI has come a long way in the last few years but it still isn’t perfect. Within AI is the potential for revolutionary disruption of traditional processes, but there is also the ...

Today’s guest is Galen Druke, host of the GD Politics podcast and one of the smartest voices out there talking about the intersection of politics and data. This episode’s mission was simple: do the most terrifying thing imaginable for your intrepid podcast host and try to talk about the role of politics on how we talk about and perceive crime. 

There’s a national election coming up in November and we discuss w...