| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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It's just unimaginable that people will accept claims that are unsubstantiated. | |
| If we would do that, we would take a big step towards making this society more honest. | ||
| And that really is what we need. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And after the break, we'll talk to nationally recognized crime analyst Jeff Asher. | ||
| He'll join us to talk about crime trends in the U.S. and the president's federal takeover of Washington, D.C.'s police force. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
|
unidentified
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We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Washington Journal continues. | |
| And joining us now to talk about crime in the U.S. and the federal crackdown on DC crime is Jeff Asher. | ||
| He's a crime analyst and consultant and also co-founder of AH Data Lytics. | ||
| Jeff, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thanks for having me. | |
| So can you tell us about your data analysis firm, AH Data Lytics? | ||
| It's a little bit difficult. | ||
| What you do there and your background in crime statistics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so we do data analytics for organizations serving the public good. | |
| That's frequently in the criminal justice space, but we've worked with education organizations, nonprofits, business organizations, things like that. | ||
| We provide data analytics, so whether that's data support, just understanding your data better, helping clean, helping visualize, helping to understand, or helping to collect better data. | ||
| So I want to show you a portion of President Trump's press conference from yesterday and he talked about crime, the problems of crime in other cities. | ||
| Take a look and then we'll talk about it. | ||
| This issue directly impacts the functioning of the federal government and is a threat to America. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's a threat to our country. | ||
| We have other cities also that are bad, very bad. | ||
| You look at Chicago, how bad it is. | ||
| You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. | ||
| We have other cities that are very bad. | ||
| New York has a problem. | ||
| And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. | ||
| We don't even mention that anymore. | ||
| They're so far gone. | ||
| We're not going to let it happen. | ||
| We're not going to lose our cities over this. | ||
| And this will go further. | ||
| We're starting very strongly with D.C. and we're going to clean it up real quick, very quickly, as they say. | ||
| So Jeff He mentioned crime in several cities. | ||
| Does the FBI data bear that out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think you have to differentiate. | |
| One, do we have crime in cities? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Does murder exist? | ||
| You could even argue that Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, the cities that he mentioned, Washington, D.C., that the rates of murder are too high for what we should accept. | ||
| You have to put that on one side with the other side of the coin is, are these problems getting worse? | ||
| And the answer is clearly a no from the available data. | ||
| Los Angeles had the fewest murders since 1966 through June. | ||
| New York had the fewest shootings, I think, that they've ever recorded. | ||
| I was just reading an article talking about the Baltimore miracle in terms of gun violence and murder falling in Baltimore. | ||
| And then D.C., you know, obviously D.C. has a high murder rate, too high of a murder rate, but it's fallen significantly in the last 19 to 20 months. | ||
| It's, I think, down 34% through July this year compared to through July 2023. | ||
| So yes, we can acknowledge that these are problems, problems that we should address, but we should also acknowledge that these are problems that are getting better. | ||
| And so we should understand why they're getting better and not say these are the worst problems ever. | ||
| They're getting much worse when in fact the data points to the opposite trend. | ||
| So I want to ask you about the data specifically and crime statistics. | ||
| How accurate are crime statistics? | ||
| I mean, are we, is there an understanding across the board as to what these numbers mean and can we be confident in those numbers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think probably the answer to all my questions to your questions today is going to be it depends. | |
| When we talk about murder, the crime with the highest cost to society, it's also the crime that we measure by far the best. | ||
| So we know what our murder statistics look like. | ||
| We know that maybe we're missing one or two murders a year that are not getting reported, are getting reported as something else and are actually a criminal homicide. | ||
| But for the vast majority of murders, we're collecting that data. | ||
| And so we feel very confident that we're reasonably accurately measuring murder. | ||
| Other crimes like carjacking, we feel decently well that those are getting reported with pretty good certainty. | ||
| Auto thefts, we know, will get reported because people need insurance claims. | ||
| So something like 80% of auto thefts get reported every year. | ||
| We feel decently confident in that data. | ||
| On the other end of the spectrum, we know things like shoplifting and theft, like rape and sexual assault, are systemically underreported. | ||
| And so maybe we feel okay that we're measuring the trend over time, but we don't feel like we have an accurate gauge of exactly how many of those crimes are occurring in a given year. | ||
| So it really depends on what crime you want to measure and the data source as well. | ||
| Some places publish really good, high-quality, daily data. | ||
| Other places have long delays on quarterly or semi-annual or annual data and are much more difficult to measure. | ||
| Now, the president mentioned in that press conference that you can watch if you'd like the whole thing on C-SPAN.org, but he blamed the prevalence of cashless bail. | ||
| Can you explain what that is and how that could play into crime rates? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, in general, it's the idea that whether or not somebody is incarcerated shouldn't be based on their ability to pay, that really we should be holding people in jail for crimes that are violent, that represent threats to our community, and letting out people, giving second chances to people that are not threats to community, that we shouldn't be judging people on their worst day. | |
| That's kind of the concept. | ||
| It makes, I think, an easy boogeyman, but there's not really any evidence, especially in Washington, D.C., that the implementation of cashless bail is the thing that is causing an increase in crime, because of course we're seeing a decrease in crime in Washington, D.C. and everywhere. | ||
| Chicago is another example of a place that has implemented bail reform and is seeing right now really large declines in murder, really large declines in gun violence in Chicago. | ||
| If you'd like to join our conversation with Jeff Asher and talk about crime statistics and crime in general, you can. | ||
| The numbers are going to be regional this time. | ||
| So if you're in the eastern or central time zones, it's 202748-8000. | ||
| If you're in Mountain or Pacific, it's 202-748-8001. | ||
| You can start calling in now. | ||
| Jeff, regarding what works with crime, what have you seen and what is the data showing about policies that actually do work to reduce crime? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's really a challenge right now to explain what is leading to this reduction in crime, this reduction in murder that we're seeing nationally. | |
| It's hard because, one, it doesn't fit neatly on a left-right political narrative. | ||
| The factors that you have to explain in order to explain why murder is falling right now. | ||
| One, this started in 2023. | ||
| So, and we know that crime tends to move slowly. | ||
| It tends to change slowly. | ||
| So the factors that led to these declines probably started in 2022, 2023 at the latest. | ||
| So really the stuff that's driving it is not stuff that's happening now or even last year. | ||
| Second, most medium and large size police departments lost officers. | ||
| They've lost officers in the last two or three years. | ||
| They've certainly lost officers since before the pandemic. | ||
| And so you're not seeing like in the 90s, oh, we hired a ton of officers that came onto the force and that helped to reduce our crime rates. | ||
| There's lots of research that shows that, yes, more officers does lead to less crime, but it also creates more arrests for lower level offenses. | ||
| So it's a trade-off. | ||
| It's not necessarily a one-to-one, let's hire more officers, let's reduce crime. | ||
| And at any point, we haven't been able to hire more officers. | ||
| We're seeing this in spite of the fact that these agencies have fewer officers. | ||
| But sorry, I know you wanted to continue. | ||
| But in this case, let's say the case of Washington, D.C., National Guard is being deployed. | ||
| 800 people are being deployed in D.C. There's already FBI agents on the street. | ||
| What do we know about how that influx, right? | ||
| So essentially a flood of more law enforcement would affect crime in a given city. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I guess I'm a skeptic. | |
| I think that you look at DC's police department, it has 3,200 officers. | ||
| It has the highest per capita police force of any police force in the country, which doesn't even get to, you mentioned the FBI, all of the other, the Marshal Service, the Secret Service, all of the other federal law enforcement that exists in the city. | ||
| Most of the crime is probably not occurring in the areas where the National Guard will necessarily be. | ||
| And I think that they're not law enforcement. | ||
| This is not necessarily building community trust. | ||
| It's not necessarily doing the things that I think are probably going to be most effective at reducing crime. | ||
| You'll certainly see stories about things that happen, anecdotes, but as far as changing the crime trend, right now the crime trend is going down. | ||
| I don't know necessarily that adding in, what is that, like a 20% more National Guardsmen all of a sudden is necessarily going to change that trend in any meaningful way. | ||
| What about imposing harsher penalties and harsher punishments? | ||
| The Janine Piero has been talking about charging as low as 14-year-olds as adults. | ||
| What kind of impact do you think that would have on juvenile delinquents and also just in general on the adult population? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Probably very little. | |
| We know from a lot of research that the greatest deterrent to crime is the swiftness and the certainty of getting caught, not the degree of the punishment. | ||
| A 14 or 15 or a 16 year old making a very bad choice is probably not going to be aware that the punishment is all of a sudden harsher. | ||
| And you've got crimes like auto theft that tend to have a higher degree of juveniles committing them. | ||
| Auto theft nationally had like an 8.5% clearance rate last year. | ||
| So an 8.5% or less of those crimes were solved, meaning that the thing that is the biggest deterrent, people getting caught, is maybe a one in 10 chance rather than a harsher punishment. | ||
| In DC specifically, about 92% of the people that are arrested each year are adults. | ||
| So you're not looking at an enormous juvenile population getting arrested in the first place. | ||
| And I think that the way that you could actually reduce or add deterrence to juveniles committing crimes is to make the crimes a higher chance of getting caught rather than changing the punishment and focusing on things that increase your clearance rates rather than things that increase your punishment and your length of incarceration. | ||
| All right, let's talk to callers. | ||
| We'll start with Susan in Portsmouth, Virginia. | ||
| Good morning, Susan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Just one or two things. | ||
| The DC police commander placed on leave over deliberately falsifying crime reports. | ||
| So we can't really depend on crown statistics. | ||
| I think it's every day, how people live every day. | ||
| And all you have to do is get on the internet and see the reports about repeat offenders and how they're let out on this cashless bail stuff. | ||
| But anyway, that's my comment. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And Jeff, before you answer that, let me just make sure people know what she's talking about. | ||
| This is from the NBC local affiliate in Washington. | ||
| DC police commander suspended, accused of changing crime statistics. | ||
| And the police union says the directive to change offense classifications comes from command staff. | ||
| So Jeff, this is, if you're aware, you're probably aware of it, but it's the idea of changing the classification of crimes so that it seems less serious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and so this largely revolves around DC's assaults with a dangerous weapon, which is the category of crime that their publicly available data set goes is published on. | |
| So I have a couple of thoughts on this. | ||
| One, it obviously has nothing to do with murder. | ||
| We're seeing huge decline in murder. | ||
| We're seeing it through the DC Police Department data. | ||
| We see it through places like the Gun Violence Archive. | ||
| DC has a hospital gunshot victimization visit dashboard that they keep, the health department, and that's down, I think, 22% this year compared to last year, or 24% through the first half of this year compared to last year. | ||
| So all of these independent sources are telling us, yes, this decline in murder and gun violence is very real and trustworthy. | ||
| As to the second point, I did an analysis in my newsletter this week on DC crime trends, and I actually agree that there's something that doesn't quite add up in the statistics that are coming through, especially with the assaults with a dangerous weapon that are on DC Police Department's publicly available website. | ||
| If they are trying to cook the books completely internally, they're doing a bad job of it because last year they reported a 4% increase in aggravated assaults to the FBI. | ||
| So I do think that the data that's coming online, especially with respect to assaults, is not inherently trustworthy. | ||
| As to whether that's because there's some sort of effort being done to change offense types, I would argue that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and we don't necessarily have that yet. | ||
| So it's possible, it's plausible. | ||
| I certainly wouldn't lead it out completely, but we can evaluate DC's crime trends in carjackings and murders and crimes that are not being affected by this in ways that are trustworthy and still see that we're seeing the decline and trust the decline, even if we don't want to dismiss out of hand what can potentially be correct. | ||
| But I don't also want to slander a commander without extraordinary evidence to show that as well. | ||
| So I would say wait and see on that. | ||
| Concentrate on the things that we have more confidence in. | ||
| Kristen in Portland, Maine says this on text. | ||
| She says, in Maine, a fairly safe state, we had 17 people killed in one tragic hour. | ||
| And look at what happened in Vegas and other mass shootings. | ||
| How about we deal with the almost 400 million guns and mental health issues across this country? | ||
| What do you think of that, Jeff, as far as the gun laws and also mental health issues? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I certainly think that if, you know, certainly a different approach to gun laws is possible. | |
| I don't know necessarily in this political environment that we're going to get anywhere with that. | ||
| And I think that when you look at the factors that we're seeing this huge decline in murder, we're doing it without gun control. | ||
| We're doing it while the country is still awash in guns. | ||
| So I don't know that impacting gun control, affecting gun control is a prerequisite or needs to be a prerequisite for seeing a large decline in gun violence, which is what we're essentially seeing now. | ||
| Obviously, the Vegas shooting, the mass killing in Maine, those are terrible tragedies. | ||
| We are seeing, as well as the sort of decline in everyday gun violence, we're seeing a large decline in mass shootings as well nationally. | ||
| So there are ways that we can approach this problem that don't rely on a different political environment that enables gun control. | ||
| The headline of your Substack article was, murder officially plunged in 2024. | ||
| You use the word plunged. | ||
| Is that a put that in historical perspective for us? | ||
| How big of a difference was that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So between 1960, when the FBI official stats start and 2022, the largest one-year decline in terms of percent change was a 9% drop in 1996. | |
| In 2023, it fell about 10%. | ||
| And in 2024, the FBI data shows it fell about 15%. | ||
| So it's by far the largest one-year decline ever recorded. | ||
| And I'll add, my company has a project called the Real-Time Crime Index, which gathers data from, right now we're at 421 agencies nationwide, covering 100 million people. | ||
| It shows murder is down 20% this year compared to last. | ||
| So we had a 10% drop in 2023, probably in the 14 to 15% range in 2024. | ||
| And now we're seeing an even bigger drop so far in 2025. | ||
| So it's enormous. | ||
| Here's John in Beaverton, Oregon. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning, Mr. Asher. | ||
| I've been listening with bated breath to what you're talking about. | ||
| I was in D.C. with my wife two weeks ago. | ||
| And I think the only crime that I potentially was part of was my wife's cousin was driving us around, parked us in front of the Capitol building, and we were told to move on. | ||
| And we did. | ||
| But getting a little bit more serious, I worked with the homeless for 10 years in Portland, Oregon. | ||
| And what Donald Trump is doing is criminalization of homelessness, which aligns with what happened in Germany in the 1930s. | ||
| This phraseology is the exact same. | ||
| Not exactly, but the spirit is the same. | ||
| All right, let's get a response on homelessness, Jeff. | ||
| And I mean, clearing that and the criminalization. | ||
| Is it illegal to sleep on the streets? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm certainly not an expert in homelessness or homelessness policy. | |
| I do think that when I read or listen to the experts, very similar to kind of what should we do about crime, the answers are not necessarily more enforcement, harsher enforcement, that there's other means of addressing this issue that can be more effective, especially in the long run, rather than sort of sweeping the problem aside and or being more harsh and criminalizing it. | ||
| You know, the president has talked a lot about beautification efforts in D.C., getting rid of graffiti and things like that. | ||
| Does that have an impact on crime when you beautify the city and get rid of the graffiti? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know necessarily that graffiti removal is the thing that would necessarily do it, but to the degree that improvements in housing, removing blighted houses, blighted situations, that we know from a lot of research that improving street lighting can have a direct impact on crime and violent crime. | |
| We know that giving people places to go, so building neighborhood centers and social centers and building an environment where there's lots of people around and people are encouraged to sort of communicate and be together, these are means of reducing crime and can be effective at reducing crime. | ||
| So there's certainly some truth to that. | ||
| I don't think that necessarily just painting over a graffiti doesn't, X doesn't lead to Y necessarily, but there are means of applying beautification that can also have crime fighting benefits. | ||
| We got a post for you from X that says, what states have the highest crime, red or blue states? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I think that's a difficult question because I'm in Louisiana. | |
| Louisiana's had the nation's highest murder rate for umpteen years, a long time, the 30-something years. | ||
| It's had, it's been up there at the top. | ||
| So Louisiana used to be a blue state, used to have a Democratic governor, now has is a red state, although until 2023, it had a Democratic governor. | ||
| It obviously voted for President Trump, but the majority, not all, but the majority of Louisiana's high murder rate comes from two blue cities in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. | ||
| So given how local crime is, I don't think the crime is higher in red states than blue states necessarily hits the complexity of the issue, which is that there's no, if you want to blame Democrats or Republicans for high crime, I don't think that there's a clear party to blame. | ||
| I think that you could say that there are things that Louisiana's state legislator has done that have not helped, and there are things that New Orleans has done politically and economically and from a crime fighting standpoint that have not necessarily helped. | ||
| I will point out New Orleans is on pace to have the lowest number of murders since 1970 so far this year. | ||
| So things are getting better in New Orleans. | ||
| Is that a blue success or is that a red success? | ||
| I think it's very difficult to say and I don't like that necessarily binary attribution. | ||
| Here's Rhonda in Georgia. | ||
| Good morning, Rhonda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| And good morning, Mr. Jeff Asher. | ||
| I just want to say that hearing you today, it kind of like put a little upset inside of me because I know you're saying that a lot of people just upset that they get caught with crime. | ||
| That Amir was talking about 13, 14, 15, and 16, and 17 year olds being tried as an adult. | ||
| And even when adults do wrong, when it comes to children, it's like you never know what that child is facing. | ||
| Because my question is why the parents don't know where their 13 and 14 years old is. | ||
| But that's not, I'm not going to get on that topic. | ||
| I just want to address you that it's not always sometimes, and especially when we're talking about children, it's something that has to be done with that. | ||
| And I appreciate that last caller before me when he said that kids have to go somewhere where they have something positive to do and places they can try to get away from certain situations that they're in. | ||
| There are people who are in very bad situations at their home. | ||
| And my question is, you know, where are the parents with these 13, 14, 12-year-olds? | ||
| And for you to say, you know, well, and like that lady, that mayor in D.C. was calling them a hooligan, calling them babies, calling the babies if the moth, they're not their children. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Jeff, any comment on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. | |
| I think that kids making a poor decision at 14 because their brains aren't fully formed, their decision-making is not strong. | ||
| I mean, I see the decision-making of my kids, and it's frequently terrible. | ||
| And you add into that potentially, as the caller said, a bad situation where for whatever reason, the child has maybe not had the love and support that every kid deserves. | ||
| You can get a situation where they're making a bad decision, and there are probably not aware of what the punishment is. | ||
| And so, when I'm responding to, I think, the initial question, which is, will added punishment be a deterrent for kids committing crimes? | ||
| And I don't think that that's necessarily the case. | ||
| I absolutely think that 14, 15, 16-year-olds, they're just kids. | ||
| And to the degree that we're able to give kids second chances that make a bad decision, I think we should do it, while also acknowledging that there are times when the crime is severe enough that I think that it probably does make sense to try some kids as adults. | ||
| I think for the vast majority of cases, I don't think it necessarily makes sense. | ||
| We've got a post from Jay Sanders on X who says, Are perpetrator crime rates by race an off-limit subject for you? | ||
| I couldn't find anything on that on your Substack site. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's hard because I was talking about auto theft. | |
| The auto theft clearance rate is 8%. | ||
| The murder clearance rate is 50 to 60%. | ||
| It's not something that we necessarily keep good data on. | ||
| And I don't know that it's necessarily something that frequently when I talk about crime, I'm talking about crime trends. | ||
| It's not necessarily a subject that tends to lead to changing trends or news or anything like that, from my perspective at least. | ||
| So it's not necessarily a subject that I find a ton of value in covering. | ||
| And so that's probably why it's not there that much. | ||
| All right, Steve in New Jersey, you're on with Jeff Asher. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How is everyone? | ||
| You know, I'm always amazed that when we have a news story like this about crime and about Trump trying to solve what's going on in D.C. | ||
| And we know D.C. is out of control, and we throw out statistics. | ||
| And I just have to ask: have you ever been mugged? | ||
| Have you ever had a gun put to your face? | ||
| Do you know a friend who was murdered? | ||
| Do you know a woman who was raped? | ||
| I mean, when it comes to crime, it's just like to throw statistics out on an issue that changes people's lives forever is absurd. | ||
| I mean, he's putting the National Guard guard on the streets. | ||
| Is it going to stop every crime? | ||
| No. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| Will it stop one murder, two murders, three murders? | ||
| Will it stop some rapes? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So what are we pearl clutching about? | ||
| Why do we argue over 80-20 issues like this? | ||
| The streets are out of control. | ||
| I live in New York City, and I can tell you it is out of control. | ||
| And what's out of control is what things used to be crimes are no longer crimes. | ||
| Subway turnstile jumping. | ||
| I come home, I take the trains, I hear about someone who was thrown on the tracks. | ||
| I come home, I watch the news, it's not even on the news anymore. | ||
| That's how engrossed in crime we are. | ||
| And the answer we have from people is, oh, well, look at these statistics. | ||
| It's a lot better this year than last year. | ||
| All right. | ||
| What do you think, Jeff? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think in New York City, they've reported the fewest shooting victims that they've ever recorded so far through July. | |
| So we can acknowledge the tragedy of crime and the seriousness of the issue while also taking a data-centered approach to reducing it. | ||
| The goal is not to highlight how terrible every murder, every rape, every robbery is. | ||
| The goal is to reduce them. | ||
| And so to take an approach that maybe removes necessarily the emotion of victimization while also acknowledging how important that is, but tries to evaluate what is working, what's not working, and what can we do to make things better. | ||
| And so I think that that's the real issue. | ||
| Will the National Guard deploying the National Guard reduce crime in DC that's increasing? | ||
| And the answer is no. | ||
| One, we're not seeing increasing crime. | ||
| And the degree to which deploying the National Guard in a city will reduce everyday crime is certainly not a slam dunk. | ||
| And so I don't know that the answer is necessarily, I wouldn't say that this is an 80-20 issue at all. | ||
| I think that there's a lot more nuance and there's obviously a role for data and measuring the effectiveness of our interventions to play in any type of governance. | ||
| The FBI report, though, notes that a violent crime will occur every 26 seconds in America, which sounds like a lot. | ||
| So should the general public be concerned about crime, do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think should we be concerned about the existence of crime? | |
| Yeah, I think that we should always be concerned about it. | ||
| And until we get to zero crime, America's crime rate is too high. | ||
| Our murder rate is too high. | ||
| Our violent crime rate is too high. | ||
| We're much higher than if you look at European countries. | ||
| So this should be an issue of concern. | ||
| It should be an issue that we try to do better at. | ||
| The question is, are we currently, what direction are we currently going? | ||
| And should we be leaning into more enforcement? | ||
| Or should we be leaning into figuring out what is leading to over the last few years these reductions and trying to jump on those and to continue those reductions? | ||
| And so the data shows us that we're not seeing a rise in crime. | ||
| And we can acknowledge that these are issues that are important that we still need to deal with while also trying to figure out how can we deal with these in a way that's responsible and that continues the reductions. | ||
| Let's talk to Bob in Raleigh, North Carolina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Bob. | |
| Hey, Nami. | ||
| Hey, Jeff. | ||
| A while back, you guys, Tucker Carlson went to Moscow and interviewed Putin and came back on his podcast and just went on and on about how crime-free Moscow was and how beautiful Moscow was and how clean it was. | ||
| And I really think one of the main reasons that Trump is centering on cleaning up the homeless and all that in D.C. is because it got under his egotistical skin. | ||
| I really believe that. | ||
| And I think that's the main impetus for all this is what Tucker has a lot of viewers and a lot of people heard him talking about that. | ||
| And I think that's one of the main reasons Trump, it affected his ego. | ||
| And I really think that's one of the major factors. | ||
| What do you think, Jeff? | ||
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unidentified
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I can't speak to the president's ego and thinking, but if you think Moscow is a clean, crime-free city, I have a bridge to sell you. | |
| So I think that. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| But don't authoritarian countries, though, in general, Jeff, do tend to have less crime? | ||
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unidentified
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They probably tend to measure it less. | |
| I think not necessarily. | ||
| See certainly a lot more black market crime in authoritarian countries. | ||
| When you have a visitor coming from out of town that sees, you know, I'm sure Tucker Carlson had a minder with him and you see what they want you to see. | ||
| And I don't know that you necessarily have less crime, although a visitor may see less crime. | ||
| Whenever you have a visitor, you're not going to say, we're going to take you to the places where all the crime is. | ||
| We're going to show you the nice clean parts. | ||
| You're not going to go around all the dingy parts. | ||
| Here's James in Sacramento, California. | ||
| Hi, James. | ||
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unidentified
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Hi, Gloria. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I was going to address some of the things, some of the issue about juvenile crime, which we all know is running rampant. | ||
| And we all know here in California, where we have a pretty big, I would say, our gang problem is it might be far worse than in some parts, especially the rural areas in the country. | ||
| But it's a known fact that, for example, with, well, let's just use the Crips and the Bloods, which are really dominant in like the Los Angeles area, that they utilize the juveniles to carry weapons and to carry out crimes. | ||
| And when they get caught, they always tend to have, they're always the ones that have the weapons on them. | ||
| And everybody knows why, because the penalties and so on have been so lessened. | ||
| And for all these things, I won't reiterate all the things that necessarily were said earlier. | ||
| It's like, you know, the consequences and the recidivation is unbelievable with youth crime. | ||
| And whether or not those numbers are reflected in the stats when it comes to adult crime or juvenile crime, I think that people are skeptical about that because we're always skeptical about the numbers that were being said. | ||
| And one other brief note, I just heard about how in authoritarian nations, obviously, yeah, if you were able to actually be in North Korea or in the Soviet Union or other places of that nature, yeah, they're going to show you the nice parts. | ||
| But I can tell you that here in San Francisco, for example, everybody remembered, it was all over the news here, how we had an attéche coming in from China, and the homeless problem in San Francisco is unbelievable. | ||
| And I live in Sacramento, that they cleaned up the streets in a matter of a week. | ||
| They took away all the homeless. | ||
| They painted down all the graffiti. | ||
| I mean, it was documented everywhere. | ||
| And just as a showing with Governor Newsom, just to come in here and look how great we're doing. | ||
| And it's a total mess two weeks later. | ||
| So, you know, we're not sure. | ||
| I just feel like a lot of people are really skeptical about figures, whether it's the economy or whether it's violence or just crime in general. | ||
| So thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Jeff. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think, obviously, to his sort of his first point on the juvenile crime being an issue, it's certainly a challenge, and it's a challenge in a lot of places. | ||
| At the same time, we're seeing a big decline in crime. | ||
| You look at DC, the number of juveniles being arrested for carjackings has plummeted since really peaking in 2023, along with the rest of carjackings. | ||
| So you're seeing a big decline. | ||
| That said, you still see these incidents. | ||
| Obviously, the most recent high-profile incident of juveniles that assaulted and carjacked the member of the Trump administration, that's an enormous tragedy. | ||
| And it's certainly something that we should avoid. | ||
| The question is not whether these incidents occur. | ||
| They occur, they occur too far often. | ||
| It's what can we do about it. | ||
| And I think that the argument that I would make is that throwing the book at juveniles is not necessarily, in every situation, is not necessarily going to be something that produces your best results. | ||
| You have something called the real-time crime index. | ||
| And that gives you insights without having to wait until the yearly reports. | ||
| Can you explain how you collect that data and why you find that helpful? | ||
|
unidentified
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So what we do is we go out and we collect as many cities of 50,000 or more or counties of 100,000 or more getting their monthly data. | |
| And so we do it on a 45-ish day lag. | ||
| The June data will come out next week sometime. | ||
| And the goal is that by sampling enough agencies, if you sample a couple hundred agencies of data, you're in a position to know what the national trends are going to be much faster than having to wait for the FBI's annual report that just came out last week. | ||
| And that was very fast for the FBI to be able to do that. | ||
| The other thing that we're doing is we're going through, we're auditing data, we're removing agencies that are obviously underreporting in certain categories. | ||
| We're making sure that the information that's being collected is being updated. | ||
| So an agency has until April of the following year to publish data to the FBI. | ||
| We go back the last 12 months and take their data and update it if they've reported older incidents so that we're constantly having basically this living understandment of what the nation's crime trends are. | ||
| And it enables us to know what these trends are, usually within one or two percentage points of what the FBI will report when they do their final year-end report, probably later sometime fall 2026. | ||
| Let's talk to Joe in Columbia, South Carolina. | ||
| Hi, Joe. | ||
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unidentified
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Hello. | |
| This is not about children committing crime. | ||
| This whole thing is about the color of your skin. | ||
| If this was a bunch of white kids that were looting and doing all this carjacking and all this stuff, the liberals would be outraged. | ||
| They would be saying, put them in jail and throw away the key. | ||
| I said, this is a total racial issue, especially in Washington, D.C. That's pretty much what I have to say. | ||
| All right, let's go to Rowena in Towson, Maryland. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Thank you so much for taking my call. | ||
| I believe that this administration is just full of many of narcissistic people acting like kings and princes. | ||
| I mean, the fact that this young 19-year-old, and God knows he's probably a very inexperienced person who's lived a very sheltered life, goes to live in the city, 19, and it's horrible he was carjacked, you know. | ||
| But I've lived in New York City, I've lived in Baltimore, I've lived in Washington, D.C. I've, of course, been a victim of crime, of being mugged. | ||
| My nephew was carjacked in San Francisco. | ||
| Do we say, oh, we got to go and round up all the homeless people? | ||
| Being poor, being mentally ill is not a crime. | ||
| Being impoverished is not a crime. | ||
| There is no compassion shown by this administration. | ||
| And they are simply doing this, Donald Trump, to detract, or distract from the Epstein talk, but also just to fulfill their narcissism. | ||
| And they've never lived in the real world where you have to walk to your car at night alone or you have to get your own job. | ||
| And you have to, they don't understand how difficult it is to operate as a regular human being in a city, in a county, wherever. | ||
| And I just leave. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Jeff Asher, any comment there? | ||
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unidentified
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I certainly would not shame or blame the victim in any way. | |
| And, you know, certainly it's a terrible thing that happened regardless of his age or his experience or, you know, number of jobs he'd had or time he lived in the big city or anything like that. | ||
|
unidentified
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I do think at the same time, it's important not to take a single anecdote, a single terrible incident, and suggest that the trend we're seeing is not the trend we're seeing, or that we need to do something completely different if we're currently seeing a decline that potentially upsets that. | |
| So I think it's a very delicate balance. | ||
| Absolutely don't want to suggest that the victim deserves anything or that the victim has any blame in the situation. | ||
| I think it's a very tough situation. | ||
| I just think that avoiding the one-on anecdote whenever we respond to any crime problem is very important. | ||
| Paula in Pensacola, Florida. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're on with Jeff Asher. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Yeah, I would like to make two points. | ||
| One is I don't think Trump even cares about the crime. | ||
| I think all those cities that he mentioned are all blue cities. | ||
| I think they didn't vote for him, so he wants to make his presence known in those cities. | ||
| And also, I'm wondering what his hate rhetoric towards the other senators and that, like Schiff and Nancy Pelosi, like when her husband was attacked by that lunatic over rhetoric from Trump. | ||
| You know, if that has an influence on if he thinks that they have the influence on the crime rate or what his opinion is. | ||
| Go ahead, Jeff. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think that's hard to say. | |
| We obviously had a very large increase in crime in May 2020 when he was president. | ||
| The degree to which his rhetoric or any type of actions from the White House contributed to that specifically, I don't know. | ||
| I think that that's a very difficult thing to measure. | ||
| For the most part, I'm usually skeptical that the person in federal government, the party leading the federal government, has a ton of impact on crime just because crime trends tend to be very local. | ||
| We're also at the same time entering a timeframe where we are seeing more fast national rises in crime. | ||
| Obviously, the murder spike in 2020. | ||
| In 2022, somebody put a video on TikTok how to steal certain bottles of Kia's and Hyundai's, and it led to a national surge in these types of things. | ||
| So it's certainly possible that one event can lead to national changes in crime in a way that they haven't been before, but I don't know that it's necessarily something that we can easily measure and understand. | ||
| Michael in New Jersey, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
| I think the Trump derangement syndrome is so out of whack, it's incredible. | ||
| Who cares who puts the National Guard out, where they go? | ||
| People want to be able to walk down the street, not be robbed, raped, or murdered, and then with these, again, blue states that let the people out the next day is insane. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think this is the best thing Trump could have ever done. | |
| I hope he does it in every state. | ||
| I'd like to see National Guard on every street corner that I could walk out with my family and not have to worry about our lives. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And that and I wanted to ask you specifically about juvenile crime. | ||
| If juvenile crime has increased, or is it just being covered more? | ||
| Or where do you see those trends? | ||
|
unidentified
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I think like adult crime, we're almost certainly seeing drops in juvenile crimes. | |
| And the challenge, the real challenge with understanding juvenile and adult crime is that you only know the age of the perpetrator if you make an arrest in the vast majority of cases. | ||
| And so when you get crime types where a third of them are being reported to police and a tenth of those that do get reported have an arrest, you're really flailing at understanding what the trends are. | ||
| So we can measure crime. | ||
| We can guesstimate probably about a third of car thefts and carjackings are going to be committed by juveniles. | ||
| Maybe one in every 20 thefts is going to be committed by a juvenile. |