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Dan Semenza is a criminologist and director of research at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University’s School of Public Health — a position that puts him deliberately at the intersection of two fields (sociology and public health) that don’t always talk to each other. That instinct has taken his research in directions most people wouldn’t think to look, including a recent study on whether GLP-1 medications might reduce violent behavior, a paper that went unexpectedly viral – at least as much as academic research papers ever go viral. His forthcoming book pulls the bigger picture together — what gun violence costs America in health and community stability, and what a serious, evidence-based strategy to reduce it would actually look like. In this episode, we talk about working across disciplines, what his GLP-1 findings actually show, and the growing problem of 3D-printed firearms. Dr. Dan Semenza is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban-Global Public Health at the School of Public Health at Rutgers University. He is the Director of Research at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and the treasurer of the Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms. His first book, The Toll It Takes: How Gun Violence Makes America Sick, will be released with Princeton University Press on February 2, 2027.

Gun violence is not a one-size-fits-all concern. It can be a different issue depending on where you live and whether it is an urban or rural community. And that makes the problem genuinely hard to address at scale. Austin Davis has been working on this since he was 16 years old, when gun violence happened on his block in McKeesport and he walked into a city council meeting looking for answers. That experience set the course for everything that followed. He's now the (newly re-elected) Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania and chair of the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, which has directed over a billion dollars in grants into communities across the Commonwealth since he and Governor Shapiro took office. In this episode, we talk about what's behind the historic crime drops in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, a brand new law he championed to help law enforcement solve cold cases for families still waiting on justice, and how Pennsylvania has managed to keep gun violence reduction genuinely bipartisan. Lt. Gov. Austin A. Davis is the youngest Lieutenant Governor in the country and the first Black Lieutenant Governor in Commonwealth history. Inspired by the history-makers who came before—leaders like Pennsylvania House Speaker K. Leroy Irvis and State Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Nix Jr.—Austin is determined to motivate a new generation of public servants to break even more barriers. As Lieutenant Governor, Austin presides over the Pennsylvania Senate, chairs the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons, leads the Local Government Advisory Committee and serves on the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Council. Gov. Josh Shapiro has also appointed Austin to chair the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.

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.

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.