The Jeff-alytics Podcast

AH Datalytics
  • 4.8 (12)
  • Documentary

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. Sep 29

    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

  2. Sep 23

    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

  3. Sep 16

    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

  4. Sep 9

    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

  5. Sep 2

    Rebuilding a Police Department in Free Fall with Brian O'Hara

    Minneapolis recorded more shooting victims than it had sworn police officers in 2021. At that time, a huge chunk of the department had walked out the door just as gun violence had surged and the city council was publicly vowing to reorganize what remained. Someone still had to show up and run the thing. That someone was Chief Brian O’Hara. A career law enforcement officer who started as a beat cop in Newark in 2001, Brian rose to become that city’s public safety director before taking on what may have been the hardest job in American policing: rebuilding the Minneapolis Police Department from near-collapse while simultaneously trying to win back a traumatized community. Brian O’Hara was the 54th Chief of the Minneapolis Police Department, taking over in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. He previously served as Deputy Mayor and Public Safety Director in Newark, New Jersey, and is the founder of the O’Hara Leadership Group, LLC.

    Rebuilding a Police Department in Free Fall with Brian O'Hara

  6. Aug 26

    How The Federal Data Landscape Is Changing With Denice Ross

    Every crime rate, every per capita statistic, every trend line in American public safety depends on something most people have never thought about: the data infrastructure underneath it. You only notice it when it starts to break down. Today’s guest, Denice Ross, has seen this breakdown firsthand and it has informed her career ever since. Denice has served as the Chief Data Scientist of the United States under the Biden Administration, built the Police Data Initiative – an open data effort for police departments to voluntarily publish data – under the Obama Administration, and now runs the Data Policy Institute at the Federation of American Scientists. In this conversation, we get into what data has actually changed under the current administration. We also talk about the Census as the denominator for everything, declining survey response rates, and how Denice got a group of police chiefs to open up their records over cupcakes at the White House. Denice Ross is the Director of the new Data Policy Institute at the Federation of American Scientists, and the former Chief Data Scientist of the United States. In the Obama Administration, she co-led the Police Data Initiative which catalyzed law enforcement agencies to be more accountable by opening data about things like police use of force and citizen complaints.  Denice worked in New Orleans (where we first met) for many years, before and after Katrina, first for a nonprofit data intermediary and then serving in the Landrieu administration, where she established the city's open data initiative. For more of Denice's work, check out http://dataindex.us/ and http://essentialdata.us/

    How The Federal Data Landscape Is Changing With Denice Ross

  7. Aug 19

    Stitching Together America’s Criminal Justice Data with Mike Mueller-Smith

    The criminal justice system is big, it is complicated, and it is expensive. But how do we know what parts of it, if any, are working?  Enter Mike Mueller-Smith. A decade ago, Mike started building the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS) a data infrastructure project that links criminal justice records across 40 states to employment outcomes, health data, and more. It is the kind of tool that makes you wonder why it didn’t exist sooner. In this episode, we get into why criminal justice data is so fragmented, what it takes to stitch it together, and what researchers keep finding once they can actually see the full picture. We also talk about Mike’s Justice Outcome Explorer, one of my favorite criminal justice data sites out there – a public dashboard built to help average Joes make sense of complex and sensitive criminal justice data. Mike Mueller-Smith is the Co-Founder and Director of the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS for short), a data infrastructure platform that is modernizing American research and statistical reporting capacity. He also is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan and does research on the multi-faceted determinants of crime in the U.S. and the broad-ranging consequences of our criminal justice policy.

    Stitching Together America’s Criminal Justice Data with Mike Mueller-Smith

  8. Aug 12

    Guns, Data, and the Law with Thomas Chittum

    Every time a gun is recovered at a crime scene in America, a quiet process begins. The gun is traced backward through manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers to find out where it came from and how it got to the scene. Most people have no idea this system exists, let alone what it entails. Tom Chittum has spent 25 years inside it. He's a former associate deputy director of the ATF and has spent his career at the intersection of federal law enforcement, firearms law, and the technology used to connect guns to crimes. In this episode, we get into how the legal landscape around gun ownership is shifting in ways most people haven't followed. We talk about how firearms tracing actually works, why the data is so hard to get and even harder to interpret,  and what the future of the law surrounding firearms might look like.  Tom Chittum was a career federal agent and retired from ATF as Associate Deputy Director. After leaving government service, he was Senior Vice President of Forensic Services at SoundThinking, the maker of the gunshot detection system, ShotSpotter. He is an adjunct law professor at UNLV’s Boyd School of Law, where he teaches ‘Firearms Law and the Second Amendment.’ He also works as a private attorney, representing federal law enforcement officers and advising on matters of firearms and explosives law.

    Guns, Data, and the Law with Thomas Chittum
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4.8
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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
    51
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Jeff-alytics Podcast
  • Show Website
    The Jeff-alytics Podcast

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