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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

My guest today is Andrew Papachristos, one of the smartest people (though he is a Bears fan) thinking through how to use data to reduce gun violence. Andy has spent his career trying to read networks more systematically. He’s a professor at Northwestern University who studies how social ties and relationships shape who becomes a victim and who doesn’t and how that knowledge can be put to use before the next shooting, not just after. In this episode, we get into what network science actually is, how cities are using it to reach people at the highest risk, and why the same principles hold whether you're looking at Boston, New Haven, Newark, or Chicago. We also talk about what it actually looks like when violence intervention workers use this research well and what the current historic crime decline might be obscuring. Andrew Papachristos is the John G. Searle Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, where he directs the Institute for Policy Research and CORNERS—the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research & Science. His (insert adjective :P ) research uses network science and multi-method approaches to understand gun violence, gun markets, street gangs, and policing. He is one of the country's leading experts on how network dynamics shape gun violence and public safety.

My guest today is Insha Rahman, the president of the Vera Institute of Justice, the oldest and largest justice reform organization in the country. Insha has spent the past ten years building out everything from bail reform research to a 501c4 focused squarely on the politics of public safety and brings a fascinating perspective to the conversation around making perceptions of crime and safety more responsive to what the data says is actually happening. In this episode, we get into why the data behind reforms like bail reform rarely matches the political story told about them, what cities like Camden, NJ got right during their first homicide-free summer in fifty years, and why Insha thinks the gap between crime perception and crime reality might finally be starting to close. Insha Rahman is the president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice, the oldest and largest criminal justice reform organization in the country. Insha is also the president and director of Vera Action, an independent 501(c)(4) organization. Insha is the first woman, immigrant, and Muslim to lead both organizations. Insha previously served as Vera’s vice president for Advocacy and Partnerships and the director of Vera Action since 2020. Insha got her start in this work as a public defender in the Bronx.

Crime is falling fast in America , and, as the many different opinions on the podcast can attest, almost nobody can agree on why. My guest today has spent thirty years inside the question of America’s changing crime trends, first as a researcher at the Urban Institute, now as director of the Center on Public Safety at NORC. John Roman has a theory about what actually drove the violence spike of 2020, and an even more specific theory about what’s driving the decline now, one that has less to do with new policing tactics and a lot more to do with $300 billion in pandemic relief money that quietly rebuilt the social infrastructure we lost. In this episode, we talk about why the usual explanations for crime trends –  more cops, more task forces, more local initiatives, don’t hold up against the data. We get into the role police legitimacy potentially played after George Floyd, why the decline has lasted so long, and what the future might look like. John K. Roman, Ph.D. is a senior fellow in the Economics, Justice, and Society Department and directs the Center for Public Safety and Justice at NORC at the University of Chicago.  His research focuses on the economics of innovative crime and justice policies and programs, cost-benefit methodology, and systems reforms, including justice system interactions with substance abuse, public health, adolescent development, housing, workforce development, and education. Dr. Roman has conducted research on behalf of numerous state and local governments, foundations, and federal agencies.

Today's guest is Andy Wheeler, a renowned criminologist, data scientist, and founder of Crime Decoder. Andy is a terrific voice for understanding the role of technology in analyzing and decreasing crime. We talk through Andy’s work with police departments, including crime trend monitoring,  predictive analytics, focused deterrence, and the challenge of turning data into useful operational decisions. We also discuss the practical realities of artificial intelligence in criminal justice. Rather than focusing on the hype around AI replacing workers or transforming society overnight, Andy walks through how these tools are actually being used today: helping analysts write code, automate repetitive work, build dashboards, and make better use of messy public safety data. This is a great conversation about how the future of criminal justice analysis is already here. Andrew P. Wheeler, PhD and founder of CRIME De-Coder, collaborates with police departments across the United States on custom software and data analytics. His work focuses on predictive analytics, operations research, and policy analysis. See his firm and other resources at https://crimede-coder.com/. Andy also has a recent book, *Large Language Models for Mortals: A Practical Guide for Analysts with Python*, https://crimede-coder.com/blogposts/2026/LLMsForMortals