Loading summary
Transcript92 lines
- [00:00]
Jeff Asher
Auto theft was the first crime that had ever been recorded data back to 1960 that had a single digit clearance rate. In 2023, it had, I think it was a 9% clearance rate. And you go to some cities, New Orleans at 6%.
- [00:15]
Galen Druck
Yeah, I was looking at this data, the property crime data in particular, and I was like, I don't know how many people know about this data, but this is an advertisement to commit some property crime, right? Like, oh, things have gotten better in.
- [00:28]
Unknown Guest
2024 and it's still only 15% of.
- [00:32]
Galen Druck
Property crimes are solved. Hello and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druck.
- [00:48]
Unknown Guest
The last time I spoke with today's guest, it was late September of 2021. And I started the podcast by citing recent FBI crime data. Quote, the murder rate increased by 30% from 2019 to 2020, meaning that 4,900 more people were killed in homicides in 2020 than the year prior. That amounts to the largest single year.
- [01:12]
Galen Druck
Increase since records began in 1960, end quote.
- [01:16]
Unknown Guest
Okay, so that was then. The story today is quite different. Data from the first half of this year suggests that the US Is on track to have the largest one year drop in murder on record for the third straight year. The absolute numbers are also remarkable. Los Angeles, Baltimore and Detroit have all recorded the fewest murders at this point in the year. Since the mid-1960s, San Francisco has recorded the fewest murders ever and so has New York.
- [01:45]
Galen Druck
Spare one year 2017.
- [01:48]
Unknown Guest
Violent crime more broadly and property crime are also at or near historic lows. It's a major success story that has already attracted competing explanations and ideological debate. It's also gone largely unnoticed by Americans. 64% say there is more crime now than there was last year, although that's a noticeable drop from 2023 when 77%.
- [02:13]
Galen Druck
Said there was more crime.
- [02:14]
Unknown Guest
And it still leaves the majority of.
- [02:16]
Galen Druck
Americans with the wrong impression.
- [02:19]
Unknown Guest
Here with me to talk all about it is Jeff Asher. He's worked as a data analyst for the New Orleans Police Department and the CIA. He's also the co founder of H Datalytics and writes about crime data at.
- [02:29]
Galen Druck
Jeffalytics on substack1 of the podcast.
- [02:32]
Jeff Asher
Jeff, thanks for having me.
- [02:34]
Galen Druck
So are you surprised that the murder and violent crime rates have continued to drop this quickly for now a third year in a row?
- [02:43]
Jeff Asher
I'd like to say no and then ask nobody to go read my substack starting in early January when I let out forecasts for 2025 and definitely said I thought that these trends would start to peter out. And then 2025 started, and everything got much more accelerated. And so it's, of course, surprising. You study these things. Typically they go up or down by a couple of percentage points in a given year. And. And so anytime you get something that's historic, anytime you get something that's really big, you're. You're surprised. And so my prior is, okay, we're seeing a historic decline this year. Next year we're not going to do that next year. We're going to see it go back to normal. And that's not at all what we've seen.
- [03:27]
Galen Druck
We're only halfway through the year, though. Your latest analysis was pretty confident that the trend will hold. Why is that?
- [03:33]
Jeff Asher
Because historically, the trend tends to hold this late in the year. Usually once you get past kind of the first four months of the year, your trend is not set in stone, but the general direction is. And if you think about it, right now, about half of the murders that are going to occur this year have already occurred. We're generally seeing the same trend we've seen for two and a half years. So it's not just like we've seen five, six months of data this year. That stands in contrast to what we saw last year, which stands in contrast to the year before, where we're seeing a continuation of the trend. And it's like a cruise ship or, you know, a big ship. It takes a while for these things to turn around. So the data through this point in the year is typically actually pretty predictive of the end of the year. And the data that we have available is typically pretty good at predicting what the FBI official stats will show.
- [04:28]
Galen Druck
I cited some of the murder numbers in particular, but did all types of crime spike around 2020, 2021? And is all crime falling now?
- [04:40]
Jeff Asher
The answer, the first question is no. The in general, violent crime, I wouldn't say spiked. It rose a couple of percentage points in 2020. Murder spiked. Murder went up 30%. But murder makes up a tiny portion of overall crime. It's the property crime that did the opposite. You know, you think of the pandemic. If there's no tourists on Bourbon street, you can't really have many pickpockets. So we saw in most cities this huge decline in property crime starting in 2020, with the exception of auto theft. And in general, property crime kind of returned to normal through 2022 and then has been falling the last few years. Whenever we would do these conversations back in 2020 and 2021, people would talk about surging crime in America. And the caveat in me would always rise that, well, of course, crime is not surging. Murder is surging. But now a violent crime was down a lot, property crime is down a lot, and murder fell even faster. There is strong evidence, if you kind of do the back of the napkin math, that will have the lowest murder rate ever recorded in 2025, which is just incredible to think about. Based on kind of your. Your opener, where we talked about September 2021, where things stood, do we have.
- [05:58]
Galen Druck
An agreed upon understanding of why violent crime and in particular murder went up in the first place?
- [06:05]
Jeff Asher
There's a bunch of theories. There are some ideas that are, I think, better than others. But in general, there's no, certainly no common understanding of why things went up or down. It frequently becomes a political talking point, and I don't think that's helpful for anybody. But I think that the ultimate answer probably lies with a whole bunch of little things rather than one single thing that caused it. And the metaphor I give is that, like, if you gave me the world's greatest chocolate cake recipe and you said, here are the ingredients, go make the cake. I couldn't do that. Similarly, we kind of have an understanding of what some of the ingredients were. But it's a very difficult cake debate because we don't necessarily know exactly what order they went in, how much, what was the most important, what was the least important, things like that.
- [06:54]
Galen Druck
Okay, so can we try to hone in on some of those ingredients? Like, are there particular explanations that have strong ties to data or evidence?
- [07:05]
Jeff Asher
The answers that I tend to prefer are ones that explain why it was national and the rise and subsequent fall of murder is the. The greatest, you know, success has many fathers, failures, and orphan issue in that I'm aware of. Because there's no city in America saying it's because of X, Y and Z. That we did. And every city in America now is saying it's going down because of X, Y and Z. That we're doing. So the strongest explanations need to explain the fact that it was national. They need to explain the fact that it really started the May, June 2020 timeframe. So it wasn't snap. There was a pandemic, and then we saw this big increase. The explanation that I prefer, basically, is that, you know, the murder of George Floyd happens in late May, and people react to that. And the reaction is a large drop in this idea of police legitimacy. So if you don't think that the police are going to bring legitimacy to this case, they're not going to solve this case. It creates cycles of violence. It creates retribution, killings. It leads to people feeling less safe carrying guns more often. At the same time, you've got the protests against police. You have police in a lot of cities pulling back, both because of the protests and because of just general Covid responses. And so you definitely see a lot less happening. I'm not someone that believes that, you know, that there's some magic switch for policing, that they turn it off, then all of a sudden people start killing each other, and then they can turn it back on when they feel respected and people stop killing each other. But do think that you definitely saw less policing, you saw less huge drop in clearance rates. So lots of stuff that you wouldn't necessarily want to see in society. You. You started to see. And then you have this issue of all of these guns that we know that there was this huge surge in firearm purchases in the start of 2020. And Rob Arthur and I, we did an analysis that looked at the share of arrests that were leading to a firearm arrest in stops, with the idea being that assuming that police hadn't changed who they were stopping and they hadn't suddenly become very good at figuring out which car had a firearm in it, the percentage of those should be relatively stable. And for the most part, for years, they were stable. The start of 2020, you saw started to see this big increase in the share of stops that was leading to a firearm being found. And so that suggests that people were carrying all of these firearms, which by itself did not cause the increase, but kind of acted as this accelerant on all of this other stuff that was happening. And then you throw on top of that that all of the programs, all of the city services that we would have relied on to interrupt these cycles of violence, community violence, interrupters, all of this stuff was not useful or was much more limited in its use thanks to the pandemic. And so once this surge began, we had fewer tools in the tool ch respond to it. That is, I think, the most compelling story for why we saw an increase. Obviously, I'm telling the story that I find the most compelling. I'm not saying that there are not other people with. With other good ideas that are also potentially compelling, but I think that that helps to explain why it was national, why the timing was where it was, and why it got so badly out of control.
- [10:32]
Galen Druck
Are there any explanations that you didn't mention that you think are worth considering in baking the cake, even if they're not the best connected to the data that you have.
- [10:42]
Jeff Asher
I think the explanation that I would like to see tested in data that as far as I know is not, is that the court system basically shut down post Covid trials stopped happening. And when you don't have the threat of a trial, Galen, you're, you're been arrested, you're in, in jail for armed robbery. We're going to bring you to trial and if you don't plead to this lesser charge that carries a slightly lesser sentence, we're going to convict you and throw the book at you. Without that threat, basically the criminal justice system shuts down. And so you saw a lot of cases that, where one, they had no way of moving the cases forward. And so a lot of people that were incarcerated either stayed there or they were out. And there was no, no ability to move forward in the entirety of the criminal justice system. A lot of these cases ended up, and a lot of them were good cases against people that had legitimately committed violent crimes and they ended up getting thrown out because a year or two years later, when you finally have the ability to move forward, you've lost witnesses, you've lost momentum, you've already got a huge backlog of current cases. So we see this in a numerous district attorney's offices, numerous prosecutor offices. I don't know the effect that this had. I know that it existed, that people talk about it as an idea for why we saw increased crime and why it sort of persisted for two years. The degree to which it's true, the degree to which it had an effect, I would love to see tested. I don't know how you do that, but I think that it's, you know, I'd hate to run another quasi experiment and see if it's naturally happens the next time we have a pandemic. But it's something that I think is an interesting explanation.
- [12:26]
Galen Druck
So there are a few different numbers here that I want to dig into that might have some explanations during this time. And I'm looking at your data in particular, response times for the police appear to be going up across the country. So in your city of New Orleans in 2019, the average response time for the police was about 50 minutes.
- [12:44]
Unknown Guest
By 2022, that almost triples. It goes up to almost 150 minutes. In New York, it was an 18 minute response time. In 2019, it also roughly doubles.
- [12:54]
Galen Druck
So by, you know, 2022, 2023, it' and 40 minutes in places like Portland, we see similarly it's doubling by 2022, 2023. In Seattle, the same story even in little Boise, Idaho.
- [13:10]
Unknown Guest
So what's going on there?
- [13:12]
Galen Druck
Why is it taking police so much longer to respond to calls?
- [13:17]
Jeff Asher
It's really a staffing issue. And we know that almost every large police department and medium sized Police Department between 2019 and 2022 lost officers. There was huge drops. My city, New Orleans went from about 1200 officers and recruits in 2019 to about 940 today. And Seattle, huge losses. San Francisco, huge losses. NYPD didn't have huge losses, but they had considerable losses. Chicago lost. Go agency by agency, and you could come up with numbers that are in some cases, eye popping. And so with fewer officers, you have to respond to the same number of 911 calls. And you do it in a way where you're still triaging it. So you don't do it by who comes in first, you do it. Okay, there was a murder. We're, we're all responding to that. We're responding to that as quickly as we can. And the impact is that it has somewhat, somewhat of a perverse impact on crime. Because if you have a situation where your car is broken into, you're leaving your buddy's house, it's midnight, you notice that it's broken into, you call the police, they say, we'll send out an officer, whatever we can, but we're overburdened. And it'll be several hours. You go home, you fall asleep, you turn your phone on, do not disturb. The officer gets there at 5 in the morning, sees nobody's there, calls your phone, you don't answer because you're sleeping. And he writes it down as unable to locate or gone on arrival or unfounded, whatever your answer is. And it happens incident over incident. And we can see the data that shows you scatter plot the time it takes to respond versus the percentage of calls that essentially are considered unfounded. And they go up together. So you've got that issue caused by longer response times. You've also got, in general, shorter response times means you have witnesses on the scene, you have a higher chance of clearing cases. You also have higher citizen satisfaction. This issue of police legitimacy, trust in police is badly exacerbated. This decline is badly exacerbated by the fact that police were really struggling. Some of it was, we saw depolicing in the wake of George Floyd. That was a, you know, apparently a conscious choice. A lot of it, though most of it, I would argue, is, is police staffing went down. And most police departments were not quick to recognize this problem and respond to this problem in a way that Acknowledges the reality that this was not the 90s, when you could fire half your police department and then hire, you know, a fresh batch of recruits the next year. So it was a very difficult situation for a lot of police departments.
- [16:05]
Galen Druck
And this is because officers are retiring or quitting because of low morale in response to the protests or because of something else that had to do with COVID Why is staffing going down, other than maybe conscious deep leasing?
- [16:18]
Jeff Asher
The prevailing theory is that people did not leave the profession. They generally went to smaller departments, probably an easier job, probably less scrutiny on the work that was being done, and probably just an easier lifestyle during the pandemic. And so places like New York City saw declines in officers. The surrounding sheriff's offices and small police departments did not see nearly as big of a decline. Many of them saw increases. And so in general, yes, there were retirements, but in general, people didn't leave policing. They generally went and found departments that were less stressful. At one of the most stressful times in American history to be doing this.
- [17:05]
Galen Druck
Profession, you mentioned this, but you also see during this time, clearance rates go down, which is the percent of crimes that actually end up getting solved. I'm looking at your data again, and honestly, I had no idea how few crimes get solved in America. Right. So during the depths of COVID it's.
- [17:27]
Unknown Guest
Like half of murders nationwide are being.
- [17:31]
Galen Druck
Solved, and something like 37% of violent crimes are being solved.
- [17:38]
Unknown Guest
That's really low.
- [17:39]
Galen Druck
But even if you look throughout the 20 teens, when crime rates were pretty low, it's still say, you know, 65% of murders are getting solved or 45% of violent crimes are getting solved. What dynamic does this create? The fact that so few murders are. I mean, well, I don't know relatively how that compares to other countries, but that compared to my expectation or even compared to the past, you know, in the 1960s, it was like 90% of murders being solved.
- [18:09]
Unknown Guest
What dynamics does that create?
- [18:11]
Jeff Asher
So we definitely don't trust those numbers from the 1960s.
- [18:14]
Galen Druck
Okay.
- [18:14]
Jeff Asher
But by recent historical standards, it was low. And the other aspect of it is that there's generally a lot less trust. Things like the response times play a role. And murder. We're talking about murder as it's bad. And, you know, even 60% of murders being cleared is not great. Murder's the most solved crime that there is. You mentioned violent crime, property crime. It. It's usually in the teens. Auto theft was the first crime that had ever been recorded data back to 1960 that had a single Digigit clearance rate. In 2023 it had, I think it was a 9% clearance rate. And you go to some cities. New Orleans at 6%. Rapes in New Orleans are cleared at 8%. Oakland, it's like 2%. So we have horrific clearance rates for certain crimes, which makes it very difficult to build community trust. And the greatest tool for deterrence is known to be the likelihood and speed with which somebody is arrested. So if you're solving 8% of auto thefts, your ability to deter future auto thefts is virtually nil.
- [19:17]
Galen Druck
Yeah, I was looking at this data, the property crime data in particular, and I was like, I don't know how many people know about this data, but I was like, this is an advertisement to commit some property crime, right? Like, oh, things have gotten better in.
- [19:31]
Unknown Guest
2024 and it's still only 15% of.
- [19:35]
Galen Druck
Property crimes are solved. So what's going on here? Like, why are the police or detectives so bad at solving crime in America? And like, how does this compare to other countries?
- [19:48]
Jeff Asher
Just to sort of take that one step further, if we know that a quarter of thefts are reported and 15% of them have a clearance, I don't even know what 15% of 25 is. But we're talking about this tiny share of the overall crimes that occur actually get a clearance. Given how few of them are reported, it's hard to say. I think the, the issue is generally that police and law enforcement in America prioritize murder and violent crime. And we see this, there was a study in Boston of fatal versus non fatal shootings. And they looked at the share of these shootings that were solved over time. And what they found is that for the first two days, the fatal and the non fatal shootings both got the same amount of resources, the same amount of detectives doing the same amount of work, work in these cases, trying to solve them. After two days, the detectives on the non fatal shootings started to work different cases. They had a new shooting, they're working that case, they're going back to other cases. So the resources being dedicated to the non fatal shootings goes down significantly, while the fatal shootings have the exact same resources dedicated for much longer. And so the share of their fatal shootings that are solved is much, much higher than the share of non fatal shootings. And the cause is just that, the resources being dedicated were significantly more, and this is shootings which get obviously way more resources than a shoplifting or then a vehicle burglary or something like that. In general, vehicle burglaries, you're Absolutely right. It's an Advertisement for vehicle burglaries. 3, 4% of those are solved in a lot of major cities, to say nothing of the fact that probably, you know, a quarter of them are. The 75% aren't reported. So it's a very difficult thing to be able to fix because the resources dedicated to stuff that's not murder is usually pales in comparison to Will we dedicate to murder? As far as international, I have no idea. But in general, I would imagine that places that generally have much lower murder rates, our murder rate, especially in cities, is much higher than it is in European counterparts. That probably produces significantly higher clearance rates in international cities, especially like in Europe and comparable cities like that today's podcast.
- [22:09]
Galen Druck
Is brought to you by GiveWell.
- [22:12]
Unknown Guest
This year's cuts to US foreign aid have made headlines. They've also raised concerns about the future of people in some of the world's poorest communities. But it's hard to know what's actually happening or how to help. GiveWell doesn't claim to have all the answers, but over the past 18 years, the Independent nonprofit research organization has helped guide More than 135,000 donors and two and a half billion dollars to highly cost effective aid. Its researchers are analyzing the impact of USAID funding cuts in real time and sharing what they're learning with everyone for free through research updates, grant write ups and podcast conversations. GiveWell has already committed tens of millions of dollars to directly address needs emerging from this year's cuts and its researchers are working to forecast, find and fund the next highly cost effective ways to help. For trusted evidence backed insights and information about how you can help, follow along@givewell.org.
- [23:12]
Galen Druck
USAID okay, so during the pandemic, during the time when the murder rate is going up, response times are increasing, clearance rates are falling, the number of police officers working in these big city police departments is falling. This all sounds like an argument for more police. Resolving the issue of murder and violent crime is that relationship one to one that like the more police you have on the force, the fewer violent crime or murders you're going to experience.
- [23:48]
Jeff Asher
Research tells us that yes, there is a relationship between adding more police and fewer homicides. It also you have to remember that if you add more police, it also leads to more arrests for low level offenses that tend to target African Americans more than anyone else. So that's what the research tells us. It also tells us that the murder victims that tend to when you have fewer of them because you have more police, tend to be African American as well. So one, it's a trade off according to the research. And I'm not coming down on either side of the the argument. I'm just saying that's what the research shows. The problem is that police departments are not able to hire more officers. It is not something that departments are successfully doing despite throwing tens of millions of dollars at it. New Orleans in 2022 started a program January 1, 2023. They passed it in 2022, throwing $81 million at improving police hiring to grow the department by 200 officers. There are 20 fewer officers and recruits now than when that program started. So you see that in Seattle, you see that in all sorts of places that had these enormous hiring bonuses, enormous retention bonuses, trying to raise salaries, things like that. These departments are not growing. And so you can turn it into an argument of do we need more police? Should we want more police? Is policing the answer? And in my opinion at least it doesn't matter where you come down on that argument from a practical standpoint, because you're not going to hire more officers. So if you want to free up police resources, because that's the whole point of having more police, is that you can then free up resources to do things like investigate murders, investigate armed robberies. You have to find other means that aren't throwing money at hiring more officers because it's just not happening.
- [25:44]
Galen Druck
What are those other means?
- [25:46]
Jeff Asher
I hate to keep coming back to New Orleans, but New Orleans, you talked about the 140 minute response time. New Orleans is like the great example of everything that went wrong in 2020 to 2022 and everything that's going right right now. So in April 2023, New Orleans had a 180 minute response time average. So three hours was your average response time to 911 calls. Obviously emergencies were faster, but they were also very bad compared to their historical average. One other thing happened in April 2023 is that they hired a contractor to respond to non injury traffic accidents. They also, throughout 2023, starting in sort of that January February timeframe, hired 100 civilians within the police department to respond to non emergency calls, to take calls over the phone, to take calls over the Internet, to be civilian investigators. And these two steps in concert led the response time from 180 minutes on average in April to to around 50 minutes on average by the middle of 2024. So enormous success. And so I think this concept of civilianizing, of finding ways that people that are not police officers can respond to civilian complaints, can respond to things that we've asked police departments to do is the best way to match this gap between what we expect our police department to do and to do quickly and what the police departments are actually capable of doing given their lower staffer staffing numbers.
- [27:16]
Galen Druck
Well, and that issue has become politically controversial. Right. You hear folks talk about adding civilians to the police force, and that gets interpreted as like defunding the police using, you know, other kinds of professionals as opposed to police officers. Is that a simplistic view of what using civilians in the police force mean?
- [27:37]
Jeff Asher
I think it is. I think that civilians on the police force are not about defunding the police because you have to pay for it. You're still adding the budget of what you are paying for hiring civilians or for hiring contractors to do things like they've done in New Orleans. But what you're doing is meeting reality. And so it's not a moral stance. It's a, do you want us to do this successfully? Do you want us to respond successfully, or do you want us to keep throwing money at something that's not getting better and probably isn't going to get better anytime soon? So I haven't actually seen it really as a political argument. I think that it's been one that hasn't necessarily reached the forefront of the discussion of what should we actually be doing with policing. But it's a lot easier to hire civilians. It's a lot easier to hire a contractor than to hire a police officer. Put them through six months of training and then six months of field training and. And then potentially having them walk out in two or three years. And, you know, you've got higher salary, you've got higher insurance, you've got to pay into their pension. All of these things that make it much more difficult. The idea is not, you know, hey, I'm being robbed. Send, send me.
- [28:51]
Galen Druck
Send a podcast.
- [28:51]
Jeff Asher
Right, Right. To interview you while you're being robbed. The idea is that police officers don't need to be answering calls on the phone. You can do that. You can follow a script and get somebody to. Because my car is broken into. I want to show you. Send. Send my DVR tape somewhere of the. My surveillance camera and tell you what happened. And if there was somebody on footage, maybe it'll help, maybe it won't. But at least I've done my job, my civic duty, and reported the incident. You can take all that down. I could take all that down. The other. There's really interesting research. It started, I believe, in Madison, Wisconsin. It's been researched in a small Town, town or I guess a medium sized town in England. But the idea is basically to do Zoom for 911 calls. So you call the 911 center and they say, hey, would you participate in this pilot program? We'll send you a link. You click on the link and download the software and it will basically set up a zoom call between you and an officer who will take down all of your information and it'll be like, I was there. You can show me whatever you want to show me. But especially for an incident that you don't physically need a response, but you want an officer to hear you out and to get your case information, there's this research, they did this program, it had one. It significantly reduced the amount of time that officers spent on these issues. It reduced response time significantly. It led to higher arrests and it led to higher citizen satisfaction with the police department. So, you know, these are RCT tested programs that have immense potential. If you can sort of scale that up at mass in a major American city that is struggling with its staffing levels, you could potentially have a really important story on your hands of success.
- [30:42]
Galen Druck
Well, there's also this conundrum of police departments are still generally smaller than they were pre pandemic. For anyone who paid attention to the New York mayoral race debates this year, one of the hot topics was what to do about the police force and how the numbers had declined and to increase it and the likes. So one thing that's going on here is there are fewer cops today, but we're also seeing record lows in terms of murder rates. It doesn't seem like at least there's just a one to one relationship between the number of police on a force and the number of murders that are committed. So now that murder rates have come down, there are also competing explanations. You know, one is that the pandemic faded. All of the social problems that accompanied the pandemic have been well resolved to some degree and life can go back to normal. There's also folks who will say, well, a lot of these cities, after some decrease in morale and some efforts to de police and the like, got tough on crime again. And so that brought the crime rate down. I'm sure there are also other explanations for why the murder rate has fallen. What do you find the most compelling?
- [31:51]
Jeff Asher
I don't find any of that compelling.
- [31:53]
Galen Druck
Okay, all right.
- [31:54]
Jeff Asher
Probably doesn't shock you. So here's the challenge with trying to explain the drop in murder that we're seeing right now. There's several different things that have to be True in your explanation for it to explain be like an explainer rather than, oh, this is maybe one of the side causes. So one, it's everywhere, it's falling everywhere. Places that are in blue cities, big cities, red towns, red counties, crime is falling. The same things that are happening in New York City and in Los Angeles are happening everywhere. Two is that as you said, we have fewer officers now than we had three years ago when murder started falling, to say nothing of what we had five or six years ago. So, and that's true mostly in big cities and medium sized cities and in big and medium sized departments. So the answer is not we hired a bunch of cops. In general, we don't see what you might call proactive policing. We don't see data that supports the idea that there's been this sort of return to pre pandemic levels of proactive policing. Because that can't happen, considering the previous point that they have fewer officers, even if they wanted to be more, quote, unquote, proactive. It's not something that most departments are in a position to do because they have fewer officers now. So that's the second point, the third. And, and I should say I should have prefaced this. None of this fits neatly on a left right political narrative, which is probably why I like the explanations that I think are most compelling because the factors that we have to explain are not easily explainable by the left and they're not easily explainable by the right. So the third one I'd point to is that in general, the root causes of crime that we talk about, you know, hey, let's solve, we have to solve poverty before we solve crime, we have to solve education before we solve crime. We haven't fixed, I would argue, the root causes of crime in the US and you know, things have, the stresses of the pandemic have gone away, but that wasn't necessarily the only root cause that we were dealing with then. The fourth issue is that the US Is awash and guns still that the, yes, the sales of firearms have come down a little bit from where they were kind of immediately post pandemic, but we're still seeing a lot more gun sales now than we saw pre pandemic. And so that kind of general upward trend in gun sales is, is still happening. And fifth, this started in 2023. We, we started this conversation off talking about how murder fell at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2023 and then did it again in 2024 and is probably going to do so. The explanations probably started in that 2021, 2022 timeframe, because this doesn't turn around quickly because we generally don't see changes in crime, all that, you know, sudden changes in crime all that often. It probably is stuff that took root even before we started to see the decline or at the very start of the decline. And so the answer that I find the most compelling is kind of, to put it crudely, we spent a lot of stuff, we threw a lot of stuff at the wall in terms of resources, and some of it probably had crime reduction benefits. So to that end, I think a lot of it comes from federal spending. And you look at the Inflation Reduction act, you look at the American Rescue plan, those are two major factors that one, for a lot of cities, it enabled them to basically stabilize their budgets. Coming back to New Orleans, New Orleans, half of their American Rescue plan money went to just stabilizing the budget, rehiring people, getting them out of the layoffs, getting them them out of the furloughs, enabling it so that they could basically return to government services in a way that they couldn't in 2020 and for much of 2021. So that was incredibly important. And you see that in the local and the state government hiring. We had this huge shock to local governments, and we got over it reasonably quickly. And that hiring came back to us. The second thing that it did, you're.
- [36:12]
Galen Druck
Saying that that's important because then people had jobs, so they weren't committing crimes, or that people had services so they weren't as desperate. And desperation leads to crime to some degree.
- [36:22]
Jeff Asher
The jobs, but mostly the services that providing services for the poor, providing gun violence programming, providing even the basic stuff like regular trash pickup, street repair construction is a big one. I would argue that both the ability to build stuff again and the funding that went into the state and local government infrastructure is an enormous benefit. And the examples I would give lighting, street lighting increased by 70% from the state and local government construction between 2021 and 2024. I believe those are the years spending on public safety. So construction on public safety, which is polices and fire and all of this stuff that you might categorize as public safety increased by 50% from state and local governments after the pandemic. You had street and highways increased by something like 40% construction after the pandemic, and neighborhood and social centers increased. Now, this isn't adjusted for inflation, but it increased by like 110% immediately after the pandemic. And so you had all of this construction that was happening. One, there's a lot of criminological evidence that improved lighting reduces crime and reduces violent crime. So if people can see better at night, it reduces the likelihood in that area that there's going to be crime. So you don't build new streets to fight crime, but it probably has at least some degree of crime fighting benefit to it. The other is the neighborhood and social centers. And Jen Doliak, who is this great economist that runs Arnold Ventures, Arnold Ventures Criminal Justice Portfolio, she has this great paper that talks about how curfews actually increase crime. Juvenile curfews increase crime because if you force all the juveniles inside, the ones that are going to commit crimes are more free to do so. And the pandemic kind of had a similar effect that if you and I are fighting and one of us is armed and there's nobody around, I may decide I'm going to make, you know, the heat of the moment, make a bad decision and shoot and kill you. So it could have been just a simple fight leads to a murder that if there were people around that could be kind of your guardians that could interrupt violence as it's occurring, literally as it's occurring, then the likelihood of that incident turning into something more serious goes down. And so I would also point to the social and, and neighborhood centers and all of this increased construction that just enabled. Not only did the pandemic go away, enabled people to get together, we spent a lot of money on the stuff that we would expect to have an effect on people being able to get together and make it easier for people to get together. And then there was a big increase in DOJ grants that kind of fell off a cliff in 2021 to communities through the Department of Justice. It was like a billion or a billion and a half dollars more spent in 2023 than in 2021. And in New Orleans, for example, they got grant through the Office of Justice programs within the DOJ that enabled New Orleans to pilot a unique community violence interruption program in response to what had been surging violence in New Orleans. The I think it was like a two and a half million dollar grant. So it's a sizable grant for starting this program. They ran the program and then because the city's funds had been stabilized, the city was able to invest $5 million of its own in order to significantly expand the program once they had decided that, hey, this is successful and we want to be in this business. So a lot of stuff like that, to the degree that, you know, you can't point to one thing that one city did, because every city has approached this differently. But it's the fact that we were all able to do all of this stuff and all of that came from the federal government intervention and support that I think is leading to what we're seeing. Not just going to the level of violence that we're at pre Covid, but really exceeding it right now.
- [40:29]
Galen Druck
So there's a lot in there. I mean, one of the pieces of that does sound like more funds for law enforcement and then also the pandemic going away. But then there's also a lot of money spent on public goods and services. And so maybe it's difficult to disentangle, like how much of it was the pandemic. The social pressures of the pandemic going away and people spending time together again and going back to school versus how much of it was law enforcement being better funded versus all of the other things that decreased the unemployment rate significantly and provided more services to people from the government.
- [41:10]
Unknown Guest
Like, is there any way for us.
- [41:11]
Galen Druck
To disentangle all that?
- [41:13]
Jeff Asher
Not really. And when I talk about the causes of both 2020 and today, it's important to note that we don't know why crime fell in the 90s. I think we have some. Some ideas, some ideas that have been tested and have some research behind them. But the overarching huge decline for eight straight years in the 90s, we. We don't really know exactly why that occurred. So I think it's very early to be able to disentangle those things, given the staffing constraints that police departments are under and have been under. You know, I'm certainly a skeptic that more funding for police really caused all of this. I think that there are examples where it probably helped. Again, going back to New Orleans, a fair share of the ARPA money went to allowing this hiring retention program, that $81 million that hasn't resulted in more officers, but what it has done is it enabled the city to hang on to the officers that it had before. So their attrition rate of officers has fallen significantly, which is how the. The city has only 20 fewer officers now, as opposed to 200 fewer officers now than they had three years ago. So there have been some successes there. Certainly. I know that there's technology, there's infrastructure for policing, there's probably better cameras that have been been spent. Things that we know generally tend to have a crime reduction benefit, but I don't know that we necessarily see that everywhere. And because what Baltimore has done is very different from what New Orleans has done and that's very different from what Philly has done where, you know, the same progressive DA has been in charge through the rise and now the fall. So, you know, it's not necessarily an easy story to tell because everybody's doing something different. And I don't know that it's necessarily just, oh, we invested in police. That's, I think, an easy answer, but I don't know how satisfying it is to explain kind of all of those factors that we have to be able to explain.
- [43:11]
Galen Druck
So the clearest answer you can point to is we spent a lot of money on people.
- [43:16]
Jeff Asher
Yeah, we did a lot. We've tried a lot. And some of it undoubtedly had some of it for, no, not at all associated with crime or criminal justice reduction, but had crime or criminal justice benefits and doing a lot of stuff everywhere has led to this situation where we're generally seeing declines everywhere.
- [43:36]
Galen Druck
Let's talk about the perception gap that I mentioned at the top, which is that despite all of this, a majority of Americans still think that crime is rising.
- [43:47]
Unknown Guest
And on one hand, it may be.
- [43:48]
Galen Druck
True in certain parts of the country that crime is rising. I mean, murder is dropping almost everywhere. I think the places where it's not dropping are like Kansas City, Milwaukee and Fort Worth, at least amongst the big cities. Those examples are too specific to be the cause of this perception gap nationally. Why do Americans believe that crime is still rising despite the fact that it's some of this violent crime and even property crime are actually near record lows.
- [44:16]
Jeff Asher
Yeah, all the cities that you named named have seen big declines since 2022. They just happen to be up a little bit in 2025. So even the cities that are seeing increases have generally fallen significantly since their post pandemic highs. I think that the perception issue is very difficult. We were talking about how I'm planning to launch a podcast that's entirely driven by this idea of the perceptions are different from reality. And it. It's a real big challenge. You mentioned the 77% in 2023, despite the fact that murder fell at the fastest rate ever, recorded 64% last year, despite the fact that violent crime was down a lot, property crime is down a lot, and murder fell even faster. And if you go back every year since 2002, a majority of Americans have told Gallup that crime is rising in the last year. And in general, crime has fallen a lot since 2002. It's. The murder rate is roughly the same, but it's gone on a journey. It fell from 2002 through kind of 2014 relatively steadily, and it rose a little bit afterwards, and now it's falling again. Violent crime has fallen considerably and it's been more of a steady drumbeat. Property crime is plunging and has plunged for almost every year of the last 30 years. So the perceptions persist, and it's a very difficult thing to kind of tease out. I wrote a piece December 2023 looking when the that 77% Gallup poll came out, looking at why I thought the perception gap persisted. The most compelling reasons generally, as I see it, are one, there's that old saying that the media doesn't cover the planes that land. It's rare to get stories that, hey, nobody was murdered yesterday. There were no robberies yesterday. Things that didn't happen don't get covered as frequently as sort of things that do happen, especially when they go viral. So that's one of the explanations. Another is that the crime data is bad. The FBI won't release its 2024 figures until September. So if you were to guess who won the super bowl last year just based on vibes, if you hadn't watched it, if you'd only watched the regular season, you might have a hard time guessing it was the Eagles. Maybe not, but you certainly wouldn't have intuitively perceived exactly who the winner was. And so if you aren't being fed a statistic that is being coming from some sort of official source, it makes it harder for people to not use anecdote to figure things out. I think that the, the rise of, of software like Nextdoor and Ring cameras and oh, here's somebody stealing a package from my porch. I'm going to put the video on an app. My neighbors are going to look at it. Maybe six months from now, someone else is going to say, hey, here's this same guy stealing something from my porch. And we're going to say, oh, we have this, you know, infestation of porch bandits. And the reality might be that we've gone from two packages stolen out of 10,000 delivered in my neighborhood. But all of a sudden, your perception of crime is being built on the fact that you can see it, somebody's doing something illegal. And then finally there's, there's partisanship. Normally it's a small issue. Under the first Trump administration, Democrats thought crime was rising and Republicans generally thought they were falling under the Obama administration. That flipped. Under the Clinton administration or under the Bush administration, it, it flipped. So generally there is a gap where the party that's not in power, people tend to think more frequently now that partisanship has just broken 28. I think percent of Democrats said in that Gallup poll that they thought crime had risen in the last year versus like 90% of Republicans. And so it's never been this hyper partisan. And part of it is sort of egging on by politicians. And part of it is that in the absence of constantly being told what the the actual trend is and being told sort of authoritatively what the trend is, people have decided to listen to whoever is telling them what the trend is. And that happens to be politicians with a perceived interest in generally and it looking like it's gone up.
- [48:43]
Galen Druck
And that data that you mentioned was from 2024, when Biden was still president.
- [48:49]
Jeff Asher
The data November 2024 is when that came out.
- [48:53]
Galen Druck
Where do you think things go from here? You know, you were an analyst for the CIA. You were an analyst on the New Orleans Police Department. If you had to do a report of what happens next in this sort of saga that we've been through over the past five years, what would you say?
- [49:10]
Jeff Asher
It won't keep falling forever. We're not going to get to zero murders.
- [49:14]
Unknown Guest
So although you know what, in looking.
- [49:16]
Galen Druck
At your data, you know what we did get to zero on murders related to bank robberies. Like the story of the decline of bank robberies in the United States is incredible, which is also a good example of like why sometimes explanations are more complex than just policing or whatever it may be. We have almost no bank robberies in America anymore. But your conclusion was that it has to do with E commerce as opposed to us getting really good at solving bank robberies.
- [49:47]
Jeff Asher
Yeah, that is to zero. No murders during a bank robbery, no deaths during a bank robbery in the last reported year. So that's the first time, I think in quite a while. And I think it's fascinating that we have this data we can collect, but other data sources, like on carjackings, we are doing it formally until very recently, or shootings, we're not still not doing formally collecting data on shootings, which is obviously quite problematic as far as where it goes from here. At some point this trend is going to stop and the down slope is going to. It's going to slowly, I think, start to peter out and then it's going to become either a continued small decline, a small increase, or kind of a leveling off. That's been my assumption. I don't know if that's going to happen in six months or if it's going to happen in three years. The challenge is because we don't know. We don't know why, what's driving it, and we don't know if that happened in 2021 and 2022 that maybe tipped it over the edge and got things going down is also the stuff that's got it continuing to go down. So because there's a lot of questions there, we can't really say the degree to which this will continue or why it might stop. And so I think it's a very difficult thing to be able to forecast. And I think that no matter what, you're probably going to be wrong. I think at some point it'll stop is like the length of my forecast.
- [51:16]
Galen Druck
All right, well, we're going to leave things there for today. Jeff, thanks so much for joining me.
- [51:20]
Jeff Asher
Thanks for having me.
- [51:21]
Galen Druck
My name is Galen Drouck.
- [51:23]
Unknown Guest
Remember to become a subscriber to this podcast@gdpolitics.com and wherever you get your podcasts. Paid subscribers get about twice the number.
- [51:30]
Galen Druck
Of episodes and access to the video for the podcast. You can also join our paid subscriber.
- [51:35]
Unknown Guest
Chat and pass along questions for us.
- [51:37]
Galen Druck
To discuss on the show.
- [51:38]
Unknown Guest
And most importantly, you ensure that we.
- [51:40]
Galen Druck
Keep making this podcast.
- [51:43]
Unknown Guest
Also, be a friend of the podcast and give us a five star rating. Maybe even tell a friend about us.
- [51:47]
Galen Druck
Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.