| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Today's State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce is holding a briefing with reporters. | ||
| We'll have that live this afternoon on C-SPAN. | ||
| You can also watch on the free C-SPAN Now video app or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| And past president nomination. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
| This is a kangaroo court. | ||
| This fall, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity. | ||
| Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| Join political playbook chief correspondent and White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns as host of Ceasefire, bringing two leaders from opposite sides of the aisle into a dialogue to find common ground. | ||
| Cease fire this fall on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| And joining us now to talk about crime in the U.S. and the federal crackdown on D.C. 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. | ||
| 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, 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, 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 the 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 202-748-8000. | ||
| 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-sized 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, but 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 D.C.'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 Piro 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 a 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 MBC 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 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 used 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 DC 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 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. | ||
| Hi, everyone. | ||
| Welcome aboard. | ||
| Oh, look at that front row. | ||
| Look at that second, third, and fourth, and fifth, and tenth row and 100th row. |