The Jeff-alytics Podcast

AH Datalytics
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Can data uncover the real story of crime and justice in America?  Jeff Asher—nationally recognized crime data analyst, co-founder of AH Datalytics, co-creator of the Real Time Crime Index, and author of the Jeff-alytics Substack—sits down with policymakers, academics, journalists, and everyday people to reveal what the numbers actually show. Each episode challenges the myths we believe, exposes the gap between headlines and reality, and asks: what happens when we finally see crime clearly?  New episodes drop every other week! Visit ahdatalytics.com to learn more.

  1. 4 days ago

    Policing the Big Easy with New Orleans Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick

    It takes a certain kind of leader to see a city deemed the country's "murder capital" and actually want to take on that problem.  Chief Ann Kirkpatrick has spent 44 years working in some of the most challenging departments in the country. She's led five police departments, worked in cities from Memphis to Chicago to Oakland, and built a reputation as someone brought in when an agency needs to change direction. Three years ago, she came to New Orleans, my hometown, and took on the almost impossible task of turning things around.  In this episode, we talk about what it takes to turn strategy into results, how to communicate honestly about crime trends without being defensive, and where technology fits into policing when the guardrails aren't always able to keep up the pace. Finally, I ask Chief Kirkpatrick the hardest question I could think of – is Mardi Gras a fun or terrifying time to be the Chief of Police in the City of New Orleans.  Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick is a nationally respected law enforcement leader with more than 43 years of experience in policing, including 23 years as a police chief, and in 2023 became the first woman to permanently lead the New Orleans Police Department. Her career has been defined by reform-minded leadership, constitutional policing, and an emphasis on integrity and accountability. Today, she is focused on reducing crime, strengthening recruitment and community trust, and building a culture of excellence within NOPD.

    Policing the Big Easy with New Orleans Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick

  2. 21 Oct

    How Cities Succeed and Fail in Public Safety Policy with Gloria Gong

    One of the hardest questions facing any mayor – and a question that most mayor’s struggle to answer fully – is how you actually know if what you’re doing is working. Gloria Gong co-founded the Government Performance Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School twelve years ago to help cities bridge the gap between policy and implementation. Her work sits at the intersection of data, delivery, and the very pragmatic question of why good ideas so often fail to translate into real-world results. In this episode, we get into why crime statistics alone don't capture whether people actually feel safe, what it looks like when a city gets its structure right, and why the mayor's police chief is often the wrong person to be leading the public safety agenda. Gloria Gong is the Executive Director of the Government Performance Lab at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she leads the GPL’s efforts to accelerate the pace of change on serious social problems by improving state and local government. Before joining the Government Performance Lab, Gloria worked on a variety of state and national governance and legal programs including serving as the lead evaluator for the Connecticut Judicial Branch on an evaluation of its mortgage foreclosure mediation program, in the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care on the agency’s early education initiatives, and in China at the Yale China Law Center on rule of law projects including criminal justice and judicial reform. Gloria received her Juris Doctorate from Yale Law School, where she was a Public Policy Fellow at the Institute for Social and Policy Studies. She holds a BA magna cum laude from Brigham Young University.

    How Cities Succeed and Fail in Public Safety Policy with Gloria Gong

  3. 14 Oct

    Smarter Ways To Think About Reducing Gun Violence with Shani Buggs

    Most of what we think we know about gun violence comes from policing data. Dr. Shani Buggs thinks that’s part of the problem. An associate professor at UC Davis’s Violence Prevention Research Program, Dr Buggs came to this work through public health — studying gun violence the way epidemiologists study disease, tracing risk factors, mapping patterns, and asking what conditions make communities more or less vulnerable. She’s spent the last fifteen years trying to build the evidence base for what actually works. In this episode, we get into what a public health approach to gun violence actually means in practice, why community violence intervention has been so hard to study rigorously, and what the data does and doesn’t tell us about the historic crime drop of the last few years. The current moment may be making the research harder just as the field was starting to hit its stride, but there is still a ton to learn and do to reduce gun violence. Dr. Shani Buggs, PhD, MPH, is an Associate Professor with the Centers for Violence Prevention at the University of California, Davis. Her public health and health policy expertise includes structural and social drivers of violence and safety, firearm violence prevention, community-level violence intervention and prevention, transformative first response strategies, and comprehensive community safety. Dr. Buggs is also the co-founder and Advisory Committee Chair of The Black & Brown Collective for Community Solutions to Gun Violence, a multidisciplinary network organization committed to rigorous and equitable research in service of the prosperity of communities disproportionately harmed by violence.

    Smarter Ways To Think About Reducing Gun Violence with Shani Buggs

  4. 7 Oct

    Fiction as a Data Communication Tool with David Heska Wanbli Weiden

    Most Americans have never heard of the Major Crimes Act. Passed in 1885, it stripped Native American nations of the right to prosecute felony crimes on their own land and handed that authority to the federal government where it has stayed ever since. David Heska Wanbli Weiden has spent his career trying to address that.  An enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation, David was raised in a working-class Denver neighborhood, became the first in his family to earn a college degree and then a PhD, spent decades as a professor, and eventually began writing novels to put these issues in front of millions of people who would never read a law review article.  His debut novel, Winter Counts, became a national bestseller and his newest novel, Wisdom Corner, is out now. In this episode, we get into how a 140-year-old law shapes criminal justice on reservations today, why private vigilante justice exists where the formal system falls short, and how fiction can be a powerful data communication tool.

    Fiction as a Data Communication Tool with David Heska Wanbli Weiden

  5. 29 Sept

    Deciphering The American Way Of Killing with Malcolm Gladwell

    The 50th episode of the Jeff-alytics podcast called for a special guest and this episode delivers. Today's guest, Malcolm Gladwell, has a new book out today titled The American Way Of Killing and he was kind enough to come on the show to talk about it.  The American Way Of Killing is an attempt to diagnose why America can't have an honest conversation about gun violence and what we're missing because of it. In this episode, we get into why improvements in trauma medicine may be quietly masking the true scale of gun violence, the Second Amendment's actual origins, and why work done in Boston thirty years ago should speak to us about how to reduce gun violence today.  This was a terrific, engaging conversation on what we know and don't know about gun violence in the United States.  Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist, a speaker, host of the hit podcast Revisionist History, and the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Tipping Point, Outliers, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers, and The Bomber Mafia. His forthcoming book, The American Way of Killing (out September 29, 2026), is an incisive investigation into gun violence, America’s deadliest and most polarizing crisis.

    Deciphering The American Way Of Killing with Malcolm Gladwell

  6. 23 Sept

    Reducing Crime Through Environmental Design with Megan Grable

    Most efforts to reduce crime focus on who is committing it. Megan Grable's work focuses on where. She's a neighborhood planner with the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the unlikely champion of something called CPTED or Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. CPTED is a field based around the idea that the built environment shapes behavior, and that better streetlights, smarter landscaping, and stronger social ties can meaningfully reduce crime.  In this episode, we get into what CPTED actually is, how Fort Wayne's High Street went from one of the city's highest-crime corridors to an award-winning case study in evidence-based urban design, and how to achieve an enormous drop in crime by layering street trees, murals, crosswalks, and pedestrian lighting on top of each other.  Megan Grable is an Urban Planner with Fort Wayne’s Department of Neighborhoods, using data-driven strategies and deep community relationships to deliver transformative urban solutions. She leads the award-winning CPTED Pilot, revitalizes neighborhood associations, and applies global perspectives to advance evidence-based approaches that reshape how cities design for safety and impact.

    Reducing Crime Through Environmental Design with Megan Grable

  7. 16 Sept

    What Good Policing Should Look Like with Mo McGough

    Mo McGough is a former DOJ attorney and self-described cop’s kid who has spent her career trying to improve how police operate. Mo helped build an NIJ program called Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science (LEADS), which identifies and develops law enforcement officers committed to evidence-based practice. She also co-founded 30 by 30, a national movement to improve the representation and experiences of women in policing, which is now active in over 400 agencies across the country. In this episode, we get into what it actually takes to move a profession that’s slow to change and the enormous untapped opportunity in better understanding how police departments hire and promote. Few people that I’ve talked to have moved policing along as a profession more than Mo and her insights into what the future of policing might look like are invaluable.

    What Good Policing Should Look Like with Mo McGough

  8. 9 Sept

    Running DOJ's Criminal Division with Kenneth Polite

    The Department of Justice encompasses nearly a hundred U.S. attorney’s offices, employs thousands of prosecutors, and touches basically every dimension of public safety in America, but most people have no idea how any of it actually works. Today’s guest, Kenneth Polite, does. A native New Orleanian who lost his brother to gun violence on the city’s streets in 2004, Ken spent the next two decades inside DOJ — from assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York to U.S. attorney in New Orleans to assistant attorney general heading the entire criminal division, overseeing 1,400 people across 17 sections and operations in over 70 countries. In this episode, he talks about what that vantage point actually reveals: how data moves through the department, where it breaks down, and why prosecutors so rarely communicate the full scope of what they do. We also get into consent decrees, the politics of DOJ independence, and why restoring the department’s credibility is going to require more than just a change in administration. Kenneth Polite is a global co-leader of Sidley’s White Collar Defense and Investigations practice. He previously served as the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), where he led over 1,400 attorneys and staff in handling criminal cases, including securities fraud, healthcare fraud, and cybercrime. Kenneth also served as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. Kenneth has extensive experience in government service and compliance, having been the chief compliance officer at a Fortune 500 company. At the DOJ, he oversaw significant changes to corporate compliance policies and enforcement guidelines. In private practice, Kenneth represents corporations in government enforcement matters and conducts internal investigations, particularly in the energy, financial, healthcare, life sciences, and technology sectors.

    Running DOJ's Criminal Division with Kenneth Polite
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About

Can data uncover the real story of crime and justice in America?  Jeff Asher—nationally recognized crime data analyst, co-founder of AH Datalytics, co-creator of the Real Time Crime Index, and author of the Jeff-alytics Substack—sits down with policymakers, academics, journalists, and everyday people to reveal what the numbers actually show. Each episode challenges the myths we believe, exposes the gap between headlines and reality, and asks: what happens when we finally see crime clearly?  New episodes drop every other week! Visit ahdatalytics.com to learn more.

Information

  • Creator
    AH Datalytics
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    55
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Jeff-alytics Podcast
  • Show Website
    The Jeff-alytics Podcast

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