The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Is There An Immigrant Fueled Crimewave? With Analyst Jeff Asher

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Jeff Asher is a nationally recognized data analyst with expertise in evaluating criminal justice data. He is the co-founder of AH Datalytics and author of Jeff-alytics Substack.

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We are not in the studio today. We're all zooming in. This is Dan Natterman here with Noam Dorman, Periel Ashtonbrand, and Jeff Asher, a data analyst and consultant co-founder of AH DataLytics, author of Jeffalytics. That's his sub stack. And fine uh softball player as well so welcome everybody i i don't the reason i don't speak as loudly on the intro is because we're doing it by zoom and i'm in my apartment i'm self-conscious the people can hear so um i don't have the same uh i'm a little self-conscious but anyway so the intro is a little bit more subdued in any case here we are uh noam uh well first of all i want to say a greetings from uh wells maine uh this is my last podcast uh on the mainland and i'm i'm off to japan on saturday for two weeks to experience a different culture, which will in some way probably be interesting

given the conversation that we're going to talk to Jeff about. By the way, hi, Jeff. I didn't say hello. Hi, thank you. Nice to meet you. So you are an expert in crime rates, correct? More or less, yeah. Yeah, and there's a big issue now, and I really just want to get to the bottom of it because Donald Trump is saying that we are experiencing all this illegal immigration and it's a bunch of criminals and this is a threat to our safety because, and, you know, I saw that you wrote that it's not true. I hope it's not true. I'm not disposed to think it is true. So I figured, I haven't seen very many good conversations about it. So to give us your overview, it's not true and why? How do you know it's not true? So as with most things related to crime data, I wouldn't categorize it or frame it as true versus not true. Crime data is bad. We know that it's bad. We know that the crime data collection

system in the United States is particularly poorly set up to determine the citizenship status of offenders. So in order to evaluate the question, you kind of have to go through the steps to say, okay, if it were true, what are the things we would expect to see? Number one, if there was a migrant crime wave driving up crime across the country, we would expect crime to be going up across the country. And all of the evidence that we have shows that we're seeing pretty substantial declines for the better part of the last two, two and a half years in violent crime and especially murder. Murder is down in our sample of around 300 cities, about 17 percent or between 17 and 18 percent this year which just for for comparison's sake the largest one-year decline in murder ever recorded was nine percent in 96 last year a slightly smaller sample had murder down at around 11 or 12%. So all of the evidence we have is murders

declining the fastest it's ever declined after in 2020 and 2021 going up the fastest that it's ever gone up. Go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry. So then you can start to look at the specifics of it. You'd look at this, you'd look specifically on border counties. And if there were a large surge in immigrant-driven crime, you'd expect Texas to be seeing it. You'd certainly expect it to be happening along the border. And for the most part, the border counties are, one, in Texas, the crime rate is lower than Texas and lower than the national average. And two, it's not really changing. Over the last two or three, four years, the crime rate in those places has not changed. So if you're kind of coming back full circle, I'd say you can't say it's not true,

but you can say there's certainly no evidence for it. And the evidence that we do have suggests that the opposite is true. So, okay, a few things there. First of all, so as I understand, Texas is one of the only, by the way, is my audio good? Otherwise I can switch to a different- No, it's fine to me. Okay, so Texas is one of the only place apparently that gives the statistics of whether people were immigrants,

whether they were legal, whether they were illegal, and all that. You have to go out now, I'm on podcast. Close the door, close the door and go out. Close the door. Close the door. Go out now. This is the illegal border crossing, out, out.

This is, close the door, Mila. All right, that's my own border control. That was my two kids, all right. So, Texas is one of the only places that gives the statistics. Right. Like New York doesn't report how many of its crimes are by immigrants, illegal or otherwise. Correct. Correct. No, Texas doesn't do it either. Nobody does it. They. So the problem is that you can. I thought you wrote something about it. Didn't you write something about a special thing about Texas? So they have arrests by offender, by offender citizenship.

But if you think about it, you know, your theft clearance rate in some places is like 6%. Your auto theft clearance rate nationally is 9%. Your robbery clearance rate is typically 30 to 40%. So when you're only using arrests, oftentimes the the arrest figures just represent enforcement. They don't represent actual offending. So you go out and arrest every immigrant and you've got a surgeon or immigrant arrest. That doesn't mean that they were committing more crimes. It just means you went out and did something. Well, I mean, so I'm trying to get to the bottom of this. The way the Times wrote it, it seemed like you were more committed to the idea that it's not

true than I'm getting now. Let me just also add into the mix, as I was looking this up today, there's some study out there, Misuse of Texas Data Understates Illegal Immigrant Criminality by Sean Kennedy, Jason Richwine, and Stephen A. Camerata from 2022. And it says activists and academics have been misusing data from the Texas Department of Public Safety and studies claiming that illegal immigrants have relatively low crime rates. These studies do not appreciate that it can take years for Texas to identify convicts as illegal immigrants while they are in custody. As a result, the studies misclassify as native born a significant number of offenders who are later identified as illegal immigrants. You've probably seen that. Is that, you give that any credence, that study?

I haven't specifically seen that work or the critique of that study. I think that I'm familiar with the authors and I think that the authors have a tendency to take kind of the inconsistencies and the difficulties that we have with crime data and use that as a sort of hammer to say like, oh no, you can't possibly say anything conclusively because the data is not good. And so they point to things like that. I don't think arrest data is a good barometer of offending status regardless. So I think it's something that we probably shouldn't be using arrest data to figure out whether or not crime is being driven by immigrants. I certainly do not believe, my belief

is that there's no immigrant-driven crime wave because we would see it. I would say that it's most likely not true. I would also say that we don't necessarily have the data to concretely prove that it's not true. All right. Let me read one more thing that I read just as I was researching. And then we could talk more philosophically about it because I'm not sure how to feel about it. National Review is a conservative publication, but generally considered to be not a hack one. You know, they have intellectual standards. Criminal aliens are increasingly seeking to exploit the wide open southwest border. Since the start of fiscal year 2021, the Border Patrol has recorded 43,674 arrests of illegal aliens with criminal backgrounds, a 99 percent increase from the 2017 to 2020 combined. According to the border patrol chief, Jason Owens, hardened criminals often hide and smuggled migrant groups, trying to take advantage of the overwhelmed border patrol

agents. By October, 2023 agents were apprehending around 47 illegal aliens with serious criminal histories per day. There are now more than 617,000 criminal illegal aliens and it goes on. So, uh, so they they they was the last part with thousands of agents pulled off the border to process release illegal aliens or this is a couple years ago roughly two million aliens have entered the country on court so they they seem to think that it's true um like i said i i don't know what to make make of it i don't know i think that you're using a lot of poorly not you specifically the you're using a lot of poorly, not you specifically,

the authors are using a lot of poorly defined terms. Obviously, I've already mentioned, the number of immigrants or people that are crying across the border that you arrest, if you don't try to do any enforcement whatsoever, you arrest nobody, you can say, hey, we solved the problem. So it largely,

those numbers of the number of arrests largely reflect the resources and effort, as well as the flow of individuals crossing the border. I think that the, I would question, you know, you say, what is a criminal background? What is a serious criminal offense? Those aren't specific terms. Are they violations of the U.S. criminal code? Is the violation an immigration violation? A criminal immigration violation, is that what a criminal background is made of? It's really hard to say specifically what to make of something like that, given such vague language. And then I would point out that just because somebody is crossing the border does not mean that they are then coming to the United States and inherently committing crimes. There's certainly-

Luke Gromen, Ph.D.: No, it didn't say that. It didn't say that. David Sherman, Ph.D.: Yeah. So, absent that, it doesn't prove necessarily that what we're seeing nationally, which is a decline pretty much everywhere, is being driven, is fighting against a tide of illegal aliens that are coming into the country and committing crimes, committing violent crimes. OK, let's take it philosophically, then. The best case scenario that I've heard, I think I read you say this, that let's say that illegal immigrant crime rates are no worse than the average American citizen's crime rate.

Right. Let's say let's say illegals commit. No. If Americans could commit, what would be per capita? Four out of a thousand murders, people commit murder and four out of a thousand murders, people commit murder, and four out of a thousand illegal immigrants commit murder. So let's say that. Philosophically, if they're not supposed to be here, how do we treat those additional murders, even if they're not? How should we view those additional murders? Because they're real people dead,

even if they're not per capita, a population that has a higher crime rate, but they're still increasing the number of murders in the country. How do you see that? Well, fortunately, from a data perspective, we don't treat it because we can't measure it in a way. We just, crime victims are crime victims. We, I think with murder, where you sort of expect full reporting, it's not as much of an issue. I don't know that there's a lot of illegal immigrants getting murdered or going about murdering in the country that's not being reported.

But I think that you could point to other crimes where an illegal immigrant is the victim of a certain crime may afford it due to their immigration status. I don't know that we can sort of philosophically, at least in my line of work, it's not something that I have to consider because it's not something that we can necessarily prove or unprove with data or use data to assist in any way. And I tend not to operate in a world in any in a world where I can't make a point one way or another using available evidence. I mean, I don't know how to for instance, let's say we heard that illegal immigrants collected no more government benefits than American citizens. They still say, yeah, but those government benefits shouldn't be increased. It doesn't matter that per capita there's no more. I'm honestly struggling with how to think of it.

Well, let me ask you another question then, and then maybe Dan and Peril. When they say that they commit no more crimes than the average American, we know that American cohorts, population cohorts, have drastically different rates of crime. For instance, Asian people commit, I don't know, half of what white people do, and Hispanics commit twice what white people do, you know, four or five times that per capita. And then it all gets averaged into an average crime rate. Is it is it necessarily good enough that immigrants, illegal immigrants come in and are at the average rather than at the lowest rate

of crime. In other words, you understand what I'm saying? Like we can have a lot of crime, which skews our average. And then does that all of a sudden become some reason, a baseline that was, we're having a terrible crime rate. So therefore our average among citizens is higher now. So now that's the new baseline. So as long as the immigrant population is no higher than that, then we have no reason to complain. So we think that's already too high. Right. I mean, I certainly think that the U.S. crime rate is too high and we should be doing things to fix it. I think that the research shows not that illegal immigrants, or I guess the research just deals with immigrants. Immigrants tend to commit

crimes at lower rates than citizens is what at least the research shows. And I'm not an academic, I haven't done that research, so I can't speak to it. I can only sort of vaguely highlight the fact that that's the general consensus that exists. For the most part, my approach, my step is, what do we have data on? How can we understand what the data tells us? And how can we also caution against saying what the data doesn't tell us? So I'm here trying to more or less describe the trends and understand why they're happening. Go ahead. You're not necessarily advocating for a change in immigration policy. You're simply saying here are the crime statistics. We've been misinformed regarding the crime statistics we're not uh we've been misinformed regarding the crime

statistics this is what they are yeah i i'm my only advocacy is really advocating i want better data that helps us to answer questions um so okay well let's make arguments with data i try to be as neutral and unbiased as i can be we We all have biases. I think sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don't. But I think that I'm just in the middle of trying to describe and explain the data and explain what's wrong with it. And then no one is saying, well, what do we do with this information, I guess. Yeah. Well, I have one other question that I, I have more to say, I have one other question, which is that whatever the rate of crime among immigrants, you said immigrants, is, if that's X, I'm assuming because there's procedures to vet in some way

who comes in legally, number one. Number two, just the type of people who go through the trouble to come in legally, filling out the forms, waiting online, all that stuff, are probably less likely to be hardened criminals. I'm assuming that the illegal crime rate has got to be higher than the legal immigrant crime rate. Is that correct? I don't know.

And I don't know, at least because we aren't, one, because your clearance rates, your arrest rates are really low, especially for the crimes that were there. There's lots of them that people are more likely to be committing. And so you don't really have a solid baseline of offender status. We run into this problem with understanding whether or not juveniles are committing more crimes than adults. And you're like, oh, look at this huge surge in vehicle burglaries must be driven by juveniles. The police department's making an arrest in 3% of the cases. So how do you understand who the offenders are when you're making arrests in 3% of the cases? We have the same issue with every crime. And even if we were making 100% of the arrests, we're not collecting data

on immigration status. So it's not something that the US crime data analysis system is in a good position to answer that concretely one way or another. Well, I'm going to have to say that I'd be shocked that the illegal population didn't commit more crime than the legal population, just for the kind of common sense reasons I'm saying. Look, I was hoping to tee you up to knock the Trump argument out of the, I don't know what's the proper analogy, to bat it down. And because your data and your work has been used by the New York Times and such

to make the case that Trump was full of shit. But you're not here to make the case he's full of shit. I'm not here to make any case. I would say... No, no, but this is interesting on its face is that

if the Times is making the case that Trump is full of shit and is citing you as evidence, but you won't go as far as The Times has done in the way you represent your own evidence to me in this podcast, that to me indicates that you must think The Times is somehow taking more from your data

than they should have. I don't know if I'd go that far. I think on its surface, I probably agree with most of what they've written. But when I do analysis, I try to just stick to, and when I'm talking about the data and what the data actually shows, I try to stick very closely to what we can and can't prove and what we have and the strength of the evidence. And so if a journalist wants to take that evidence to build an argument, that's what it's there for. And and I see that to the left. And when murder went up in 2020, I got hammered on the left and was used on the right. The data was used on the right to talk about the crime trends. So for me, it's not a partisan endeavor. I think that I probably agree more than I'm coming across with sort of the argument that was made in the Times. But I also don't want my personal opinion to cloud what the data shows

when I'm answering questions and talking about it. Right. Well, I have to, I'm being honest, I'm not sure I understand the answer because if you agree with them, well, then I don't know what to make of that. What do you agree with? And then why why why why aren't you more forthcoming with it what do you agree with well so i i agree with the the idea that and i you know i would couch in analytic terms that almost certainly a uh increase in illegal immigration there's there's been no increase in illegal immigrants committing crimes there's been and certainly that illegal immigrants committing crimes is not driving a wave of crime within the united states because the that part does not exist so to the arguments that speak to that um i know the times has made a bunch of places have made

that argument i don't have the the times article in front of me, but I would agree with those statements. I don't think that there's any evidence that we're seeing an increase in crime, that our trend is going up, and that illegal immigrants specifically are a driver in that trend. That said, as a data analyst, I'm going to put the caveat on that, that we don't necessarily have 100 percent knowledge. It's not something that we can inherently, strongly, with full confidence behind it, say for certain. And so that's a level of my role. I see my role is providing that uncertainty, that awareness of the problems of the data that inherently exist, the journalists can take the argument a step further without having to worry about that.

And, you know, anybody familiar with American journalism. So in my in my experience. I don't think I ever knew any immigrants who were committing crimes, legal or illegal. But I guess, you know, but I said, but I would hear on the news about gangs and things like that. And but my gut has not been that it's a criminal population. I wish that we could make the case in an open and shut way to prove that it wasn't. We do hear from time to time, you know, some immigrant does something outrageous or you

hear these ridiculous cases of somebody getting arrested 20 times and not being sent back. And then finally they kill somebody, you know, and these are these are horrible stories. But, you know, in every system, there's always horrible stories and, you know, we should learn from them, but I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. But I will say this just in crime in general. Anecdotally, in New York City, we are seeing so much more crime. I have employees, multiple employees who've been mugged. We had two robberies at gunpoint in our neighborhood right before I left the town. The people who work for me tell me that the cops won't lift a finger for them anymore, that the streets are just hellish. People like my guys, security type people who used to be working outside for me for 15 years saying, I can't take this anymore.

I don't want to do it. Ever since COVID ended, it's just been a nightmare. The police don't care anymore. So, you know, at some point. Every piece of anecdotal evidence has a certain odds that you'll be the one to know that at a certain level of anecdotal evidence, it becomes like winning two or three lottery tickets in a row that it actually doesn't reflect more than just my anecdotal experience. I'm very, very confident, although I could be wrong, that crime is much worse and much less reported than the eggheads are telling us.

I just don't understand how things could be so different in my neighborhood, in Greenwich Village, different than they've been since the 90s. How I could have multiple employees being victims of violent crime when I went 10, 15 years without hearing a single incident. When I can have multiple people robbed at gunpoint in my neighborhood when I went 15, 20 years

without a single incident. I mean, I'm going on and on. But at some point, the statistics, the odds are just not possible. I'm sure you've heard this from other people, right? Yeah. I mean, you're speaking to a whole bunch of different points. One, that crime is under-reported. I do that, yeah.

Murder is murder we feel good about. Auto theft we generally feel good about. like 80% of those are being reported. Then you get down the ledger, rapes and sexual assault, something like 20 to 25% of those are being reported. Aggravated assaults, maybe 50%. Robberies, maybe 50 to 60%. So we know that crime is under reported. We know that a lot of police departments, including NYPD, have lost a fair number of officers since the pandemic.

New York is somewhat of an outlier in that New York had a big surge in murder, big surge in gun violence, just like lots of American cities in 2020, 2021, gun violence and shootings has largely returned to where it was pre-pandemic, but New York has had an increase in property crime and it's had an increase in violent crime driven by an increase in assaults. I think that it's something that's difficult to understand. I think that there's also, you know, towards the other end of that argument, you kind of started talking about this, the perception issue. I think people do, you kind of have both worlds. People do and they don't overplay the likelihood that they'll be the victim of a crime. You've got, there's this great saying that the media doesn't cover the planes that land. There's never been an article on, hey, there were no robberies yesterday.

Nobody got mugged. There were no shootings on Tuesday. So people are really bad at perceiving what the actual crime trends are. And they're especially bad at remembering what they were last year or 10 years ago or 25 years ago. So a place like New York, where you've had a really large decline in all of these crimes, even relative to today, you always hear, oh, but the 90s, the 90s were much worse. That doesn't really matter for most people. I think it's important historically. Most people are thinking two or three years ago, as you were saying, crime was much worse. Chicago is a good example. Chicago

has seen a big increase in robberies, but they've gone from like 2,500 to 3,000 robberies in a year in 2023. That's not good. That's a big increase. But then you look at 1992 or 1991, when they had 11,000, 12,000 robberies, you're still down 75%. That's pretty good. So I think that when you talk about the data, you kind of have to think about all of these points. And my only thought is that I agree with everything you're saying, that there are places where you're seeing increases, and that we shouldn't minimize those increases. We can acknowledge that in most places, especially big cities, New York, Chicago, New Orleans, where I am, crime has done a lot from where it was in the 90s during the worst parts of it. But that doesn't matter if it's up in your neighborhood.

We've seen declines through of nationally in violent crime and murder but there are outliers dc had a 90 100 increase in carjackings last year while robberies fell pretty much everywhere else so you can make the argument that crime was going down nationally and that's something that we should be applauding and thinking about how we're doing that while also acknowledging that, one, it's too high. And two, there are places that are outliers that we should understand and figure out what's wrong with that. I'll bring it back to Saints, which is how I relate with life. I'm a New Orleans native and a Saints fan growing up. And when you think about, like, how are the Saints doing this year?

First off, they're going to be terrible this year. But when you compare how they're doing, you don't say, well, the Saints are 6-11 this year and they went 1-15 in 1981. So they're doing great. You compare it to the Super Bowl year. You compare it to the year they won it all and say, we're not anywhere near close to that. And so if we if we want to improve, we want to see improvements, we have to think about how can we get to the best that we can be rather than just thinking about it was much worse at another point. I'm not sure if I addressed everything you were talking about, but there's a whole bunch of points in there and it really speaks to how we think about and how we interact with prime data and prime trends. When you're looking for the most comfortable underwear that's going to cradle your balls and make your package look awesome, sheath underwear is where it's at.

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And by the way, I just realized I'm wearing my Cornel West t-shirt. I'm not actually a Cornel West supporter. But he did give me this. He did an event with us and he did give me this t-shirt. And I'm a big fan of the man. So I'm happy to wear his t-shirt, but I was really wearing it just hanging around the house. It's not a statement on the, on the politics. Look, there's so many moving targets. There's the police arresting fewer people. There's the changes in the laws, like in shoplifting and where they read where they where they redefine misdemeanor and felony and blah blah that that's difficult to then keep consistent through through the data there is uh i imagine as there's and you say there's

fewer officers that means fewer crimes are going to get caught as the system gets overwhelmed more and more crimes are dismissed or pleaded down because obviously the courts can only get so clogged as you're spelling out as i'm thinking about it um there's it's it's a disgrace that we don't have better data considering that this is very most of this is much more knowable than we know. And by this is an American problem, just because during COVID, we were using Israeli data for

very many things, because the United States of America couldn't generate its own solid data on various things that had to do with COVID and with the vaccine. It's just not a great, yet again, another American institution falling short, right? Just our ability to,

we need to know this stuff so we can make intelligent decisions. Do we keep them out? Do we not keep them out? You know, are they better for us? Are they worse for us? Part of the reason we disagree is because we don't even, we can't even prove it one way or the other or we can't even make a compelling case regarding illegal immigrants we've already made the decision that we should keep them out because they're illegal that's the decision that we've made well no we haven't made the decision we have laws that are you know that go at various degrees degrees, to certain degrees of unenforced, certain degrees of enforced. Washington is dysfunctional. And to some degree, everybody

knows a certain number of this population is necessary to the functioning of the country. We need the labor. Nobody, very few people are so stupid as to think that we can really just deport all the illegal immigrants. The country would shut down. Then why are they illegal is the question. Why are the laws passed? Because Washington is too dysfunctional to agree on reasonable compromises on this stuff. They was close to it one time under the George W. Bush administration. And Bernie Sanders, of all people, was one of the people who filibustered it. And then it's come around again and it gets caught up in presidential politics. You know, it's just one of our one of our things. I've often thought that if the best way to solve it would be actually to shut the border down completely, get serious, build the wall so that America would feel. to many people, oh, well, we need this labor as opposed to this amorphous thing

where people aren't informed and they actually think, yeah, we don't need these immigrants. They have no idea how badly we need the immigrants. Trump, I suspect, despite his rhetoric, does understand that. But he's also a demagogue, so who knows? Anyway,

anything else you want to talk about? What else is on your mind, Jeff? What other issues are you hot on the collar about? What am I hot on the collar about? I don't know. My kids are downstairs after the first day of school, so I'm hopeful that I don't get barged in on like

you did. How old are they? I have an eight-year-old and six-year-old triplets. Oh, triplets! We're hoping that my mother-in-law is keeping them occupied on the TV or something. Are they identical triplets? No, they're fraternal.

That's cool, because identical triplets, it gets a little creepy at that point. That wasn't my main concern. It was more that there's three of them, but yeah. That is insane. Wow. I mean, maybe identical would be even better,

but any kind of triplets is like a statistician's dream. You can measure three in exactly the same environment, same age, different IQs. You know, you can do a whole nature versus nurture study all in your own home now. It's been very interesting because they're all very different. One of them is like picks up things rapid. You know, he's learning piano very quickly and and like memorizing songs and um then the my girl is really good at drawing and the other boys are um i won't insult them if they see this but they're not quite as talented with the artwork um and then uh the do they have anything going for them

well so and then my other one is really athletic and can do all the sports so i got one that can do sports with me um which is all i really needed because i you know i need to be a helicopter parent on something yeah i i think wild wow i i think a hundred years from now people will look back on this period of history and one of the things which we will look the dumbest about is that we just couldn't face that nature was basically everything that we had this faith in nurture which and no matter how many times scientific studies just smacked us in the nose it doesn't matter you could separate these these you know identical twins and triplets at birth raise them anyway anywhere in the world and they still have the same favorite color and the same favorite song and the same personality.

And it's really remarkable. But I, you know, I have three kids. Actually, I've raised four kids. I have a stepson also. And they have zero in common. Nothing I do changes them. My stepson is the best example. He never even knew his father barely until he was 12.

He doesn't have one thing in common with me, not a quirk, not an expression, not an interest, like nothing. He's exactly like his father who he never met. When he gets angry, he makes the same face as his father. He makes the same arguments as his father. I mean, it's just, it's just frigging remarkable. Anyway. So, so that's it. So what else? We can end, but we're basically past our time, but what other issues? I mean, this is a hot time in, in American history. Got to be something bothering you. Well, I mean, the, obviously the election is, is fascinating. I mean, the obviously the election is fascinating. I mean, the last month, I feel like we've lived a decade in the last month. It's it's a weird time for someone that writes about crime, because I've been doing this for

seven or eight years writing about it, almost nine years. And there was very little political interest except when in like kind of the minutia of the data until the last four or five months when the trends have become, the trends themselves have become so crystal clear and they're clearly declines for the most part nationally. And to have kind of, and these are things that we should be discussing. We can, this does not have to be a liberal win. It does not have to be a conservative loss. We can talk about like, you know, the San Francisco got rid of it, the DA, and then now San Francisco murder is down 50%. You know, you could, you could build a conservative case, a tough on crime case about successes in a place like San Francisco in reducing property crime, reducing murder.

You could build cases in places like Jacksonville where murder is down something 40 something percent. Texas, which is seeing dramatic declines in the rural areas and the urban areas. But it's been weird to see the response has not been, yes, these are the trends. We can all agree on the trends. Why is it happening? Here's why it supports my point of view. It's been, no, the trends are wrong.

The data's wrong. And so we've created kind of this ecosystem in crime where either crime is going up or the data is wrong. And that's not good for anybody because then we don't learn and we don't assess why we're having successes. And so that I think has been really interesting to look at these issues of the FBI switched crime reporting systems in 2021. I wrote about it, what a big mess it was making. And then I wrote about the next year, how they fixed it. And this switch that nobody

cared about. I mean, I got no traction whatsoever on this very in the weeds crime data collection issue. All of a sudden has become a right wing talking point about why the crime trends are going down because nobody's reporting, even though the FBI fixed the reporting mechanism, they backtrack on their changes. So it's been very, I think, illuminated to see a lot of these issues that I track that nobody cared about for a long time. It's kind of like being the CIA analyst on some random country. And then all of a sudden, there's a coup in that country. And you've been caring about this random spot in the middle of nowhere for years and nobody's cared.

And then all of a sudden you're briefing the president on it because you're the only person that's been following it. It's been, it's been very interesting and, and, and I guess fun from a data perspective to follow. So that's, that's what I got to. I'm sorry. That's what's been on my mind. Yeah. Where are you? I have three questions, but one may not, you may not, it's not expertise.

Where are you on the lead paint theory? Do you think lead paint was the reason we had a explosion in crime in the seventies and eighties? You know, this theory, right? That lead paint was making people violent. I think it might have been a reason. I don't think it was necessarily the reason, because I don't know that there was a the reason. Similar to what we're seeing now in terms of why things went up and why they're coming down. I don't know that you can point to just one factor.

Certainly can't with confidence. So I think it's certainly plausible that it played a role, but I don't know that it was the only reason or even the main reason. And why do you think, well, how can I ask this? If you were the mayor of New York, what would be the top few policies? If you had full attitude, the top few policies that you would implement to make the city safer. To make the city safer. Oh, that's a good question.

Based on everything you've learned, more police, longer jail sentences, less parole. What do you think is the, what would you do? So there's a lot of literature that points out that the duration of offending, the duration of sentencing, the strictness of the punishment is a far less effective deterrent than the swiftness and the certainty of getting caught. And so what I would do, and this is not just New York, but really any city, New York happens to have better clearance rates than most cities, especially with respect to murder. But I would work with officers, and that's why you see a low murder rate in New York, work with officers, work with academics, figure out ways of, especially for non-murder crimes,

how do you improve your clearance rates? Because catching people is a much stronger deterrent, even if they're let loose, even if they serve minimal jail sentences, people knowing that you're clearing a large percentage of offenses is a lot more effective than passing laws that say, hey, we're doubling the jail time for shoplifting, because people don't know that. The people that are shoplifting, one, they know that the likelihood of getting caught is really low. The likelihood of getting reported itself is really low. And they don't know, understand, oh, two years ago, the legislature changed this crime from a felony to a misdemeanor.

Most people that are doing these crimes don't understand necessarily that, but they intuitively know what the odds of getting caught are. So I think figuring out how and maybe it's just more detectives, more resources poured into solving these offenses. And then I think the smart cities are the ones that are investigating, investing in civilianization and contractors to take on roles that officers don't need to be doing. So New Orleans lost 30% of its strength, the police department from 1200 officers to now we're at like 895 from 2020, 2019 to present. That's a huge decline. Response times in New Orleans, the police response time went from 50 minutes on average to 180 minutes on average. So like your average call in last year had a three hour response time. So it's insane. And so the first much of all this was going up for like a year and a half, the city said, no, your methodology is wrong. Your data is wrong. This is not happening. People intuitively know. And it leads to fewer reports. It leads to all of these other negative consequences and leads to lower arrest rates. that take calls over the phone, that assist with investigations, that take calls over the internet,

and basically lower the load of your officers that are able to respond. And they hired a contractor to go out and respond to non-injury traffic accidents. So this contractor goes to 50% of the non-injury traffic accidents. All you need, two people got an offender bender, all they need is an item number so that they can file an insurance claim. They've cut the response times from 180 minutes back to 50 minutes on average, even though the number of officers is lower now than it was last year. So I think New York could certainly, New York has seen longer response times because of fewer officers. Seattle, Chicago, every city would benefit from thinking about how they're responding because quicker responses means more community

trust. It means higher clearance rates and arrest rates. And it means eventually a stronger deterrent against crime. So those are the steps that I would necessarily take. You might need more than the mayorship for that. Maybe like getting a suite in Yankee Stadium too. I think that would be nice. I very much agree with this. It's amazing how often common sense, when all is said and done common sense turns out to have been right all along. What would you do about the shop? These crazy shoplifting stories we're seeing around the country where everything is locked up now because nobody can be arrested.

Well, I think things are being locked up because that's an effective deterrent and because the, like the threat has risen. And this is one of the, I mean, it certainly stops me from shopping often, you know, razor blades and they're locked up and I can't get fine anybody. And then the person that comes 10 minutes later, doesn't have the right key. And I'm like, all right, whatever. I'll go to another store. I mean, so it's kind of a, which came first, the chicken or the egg. I think that it's not, you know, it's certainly, it's probably an effective deterrent and it's, it's just, there's more of this. And even if there's not more of this, that that stores think that there's more of it. It's something that I think is very difficult to measure because of reporting issues. And I think that the first step, and again, I'm a data person,

and when you have a hammer, everything's a nail. I think that finding ways to improve your data collection on shoplifting is critical, improving reporting rates. And then it's a really hard question. And I don't pretend to have an answer because if somebody shoplifts, you don't want to throw them in jail for the rest of their life. But at the same time, because of the quantity of the crime that exists, each individual shoplifting, who cares? But you put it all together and it's got a large societal impact. So it's the type of thing that I think we need to understand better. It doesn't help that a lot, a lot of times you'll see stores that will basically hide behind crime as an excuse.

Like we opened up a store in a neighborhood that isn't shopping there. And you know, there's, there's a very similar store, three doors down from, and it's like, we made a poor business decision. Now we're going to blame crime and get out of there. And, you know, there's, there's a very similar store three doors down from and it's like, we made a poor business decision. Now we're going to blame crime and get out of there. So it's kind of hard to figure out which of these instances of, hey, we're moving, are because of crime is an easy scapegoat, and which are, this is an actual problem the company's facing, and something that we need to figure out a solution that hopefully is not just making products harder to access

because I don't think anybody wins when that's the only solution. You know, I have a friend who has been a career prosecutor in Los Angeles for, I don't know, 40 years. And he insists that they've brought this problem on themselves, that they change the way they handle repeat offenses of shoplifting. So you could go in and basically do it every day now.

I might be exaggerating, but I think that's what I remember. They used to be second or third time, they would automatically become a more serious offense. I think they stopped doing that. This is from memory. And then, of course, they changed the dollar amounts and and then they just changed the amount of enforcement it gets. And, you know, I think that with a lot of these things, things don't turn on a dime. It takes a little while before people realize, oh, shit, we can get away with this now. Like, you know, and then once that tipping point comes then you see a drastic change because everybody gets the the the idea that you could just go in and take whatever you

want now and um we've never seen shoplift you've seen some of these videos right we're just throngs of people just go walking in and robbing places. This is crazy. Jeff, if the penalty for shoplifting were death by firing squad, but only one in 20,000 shoplifters were caught, do you think that would make a dent in shoplift? I mean, the literature tells us it wouldn't, because if people intuitively understand what those odds are, one, not every person is going to understand that the penalty is death by firing squad. I'm presupposing that everybody understands. It's very clear.

Those are public executions. I mean, unfortunately, I can't prove the counterexample, but everything that we have, everything that we know about deterrence theory says that the strictness of the punishment is not the driver. It's the swiftness and the odds of getting caught, that would likely have a bigger effect than, um, you know, we're going to have a public execution the next day of everybody that we catch. Um, now we don't typically do that draconian punishment, uh, especially for minor offenses. So I think it's something that you could possibly say that, hey, this is going to be a, you know, this is a counterexample, an obvious over-the-top punishment that is very public and very fast. We don't really have the

ability to study that because it doesn't exist in the criminal literature examples of that. Our criminal justice system is so slow and certainly so problematic. Just to be accurate, I was seeking from memory, but I actually found the email from that prosecutor I know. So I'll just read it to you just so I don't have any false impressions left. in Precious Left. The increase in dollar amount you can steal to be charged with a felony is often incorrectly cited as the cause for the theft epidemic. The point, this is where he referred to the point that the reporter referred to as nuance, is the crux of the insane change made by Proposition 47. California eliminated the felony crime of petty theft with a prior.

This means that you can get convicted of misdemeanor theft with minimal consequences an infinite number of times and never, ever face a felony charge with prison consequences. So this is what he just that's what he says firsthand has been a game changer there. All right. Well, this is all- Wait, can I back? I want you all to guess, what do you think the clearance rate that LAPD reported in the most recent year we have, 2022, for theft? You're using a term- 5%. Daniel, what do you think? You're using a term I've literally never heard in my life, clearance. So clearance rate is basically, it's an attempt to measure the arrest

rate, the share of incidents that rendered an arrest for a crime. They caught the guy and they arrested him. More or less. So what was your question? I guess it's the clearance rate for what? For theft in Los Angeles. Zero.

Yeah, it would have to be like one in 1,000 or something. It was 4%. I said 5. Yeah. So you went over, so we're doing Price is Right rules here. Daniel's our winner at, no, I guess. I'm over.

You're our winner at 0%. Either way, we're talking about something where the law, this legal change is so insignificant compared to the 4% of it. The share of arrests is so small that, yeah, it's not great that you have necessarily repeat offenders getting out. But the vast, vast, vast majority of offenders aren't ever being arrested in the first place. So that is the bigger issue. Maybe. I mean, the guy who told me this is very, very smart, very smart. I'm also very smart though. No, no, no, no, no, of course. You know, I didn't mean that. I know you're kidding, but, but I'm saying he's, and he's also dealing with it hands on every day. And he's been there for 30 years. And so he I.

You know, things are not always what they appear. I understand what you're saying, but I could just off the top of my head say yes. But, you know, it progressed to that as as people got wind of the fact that you could commit these crimes an infinite number of times without becoming a felony and then of course this the crimes overwhelm the system so the clearance rate gets worse and worse and worse and then it just takes on you know it starts snowballing but um i mean he what he's saying is is closer to what you were saying before, that people need to get arrested and do some time. All right, listen, this is endlessly fascinating.

Hopefully there'll be another horrible crime and we can have you on. I would love that. But I just, just to say, oh, did you see that? This is the thing that's on my mind. This is not to do with crime, at least tangentially to the crime.

Trump was a liar. I get it. I get he's a liar. And I've never liked his lying. But this most recent thing where he claimed that there was nobody at the Kamala Harris appearance on the tarmac and that the crowds were, are AI, which I think he just means CGI. Or maybe, maybe it means AI. It's such a deranged lie. I don't know what to make of it. And it's, I just, you guys all know what I'm referring to? Have you heard about this? I saw you tweeted, you tweeted it.

You quote tweeted Brett Weinstein. Oh, oh yeah. Well, Brett Weinstein was saying, we don't know. I was, I was, you know, pissing all over Brett Weinstein, but I just. Well, in case the listeners didn't catch it trump uh on truth social said i hope you know that this crowd's the kamala harris thing there was nobody there the entire thing is ai there was it was an you know that he said there's nobody there that entire thing is ai now i understand election denial as a lie. It's sinister. But I also understand

how you could calculate that it's in your interest in an amoral way. I'll inject this. Nobody can really prove whether it happened or didn't happen. Of course, there's always a certain number of falsified ballots. There's always enough I can hang my hat on. Nobody can get into the software. I can say the software is not reliable. I get that. That's like generic bad faith lying. Telling a lie like this, which is instantly and easily falsifiable, where you have video everywhere, not a single person could possibly believe that this is true. This is, you know, only people with conditions,

like with derangements do stuff like this, in my experience, kind of like compulsive liars. And I don't know. I don't know what to make of it. Like, I don't think he's deranged in that way. He's totally a compulsive liar. He always has been. But he never told a lie like this.

This is what I'm saying. Like, this is something this is something all his other lies were clever in some way. And then some of his other lies, like they'd been spying on me, you know, they were called lies and they turned out not really to be lies. I mean, you could argue about, you know, if he was, it was hyperbole or not, but, but like, you know, this, he did lie when he first took over in 2016 that I had the biggest crowd size ever. And that was sort of verifiable to be untrue. But this is well beyond that. He actually says that the photographs that we're seeing of the crowds, that these are not real people. Like it didn't happen. It was actually empty. What's the old Jewish joke

where the guy's reading all the conspiracy newspapers and he's saying, this one says we run the TV stations. This one says we run the banks. And the guy is like, why are you reading all this trash? He's like, well, I read this because this makes me feel good about all the things the Jewish people are doing. We're running the banks and the media and everything.

It's like, that's great. AI is that advanced that it can make up those crowds and all of those videos like that look really, really real. We've got a technology that can do something here, if that's true. I don't know. I think Trump's going to lose. I thought we'd get through a whole episode without jewing it up. But I also mentioned my vodka recipe. I should I should say that I made a killer vodka the other day. So that's right right. I promised Jeff he could tell us about his babka. But I'd like to keep my word for that.

Noam, I want to say that, you know, I think Trump has proved numerous times that he'll say anything. It doesn't matter. He doesn't care whether it's verifiable or not. No, no. In my opinion, I can't think of anything quite like this. This is not a good election.

And, you know, the press, Kamala Harris did not run for office, never had to face a candidate, you know, never had to debate, never had to tell us a single position she's held or explain it. Now we're getting press releases that she's changed her position on a number of things and she's not going to do a single interview until after the convention like this. And the press is like, well, you know, they would be screaming bloody murder if Donald Trump dropped out and Vance just became inaugurated as the new candidate, you know, through no process whatsoever.

And then Vance never did an interview for six weeks. Can you imagine how the press would react to that? So, you know, you can't give either side a pass. It's just, this is the lowest point of politics in my lifetime. I've never seen anything like this. All right. Jeff, you've been a pleasure. And, you know, yeah. That looks exactly like Tim Doner. If we could get a picture of Tim. All right.

I'm going to go. And Seth Gondel. I have a plate of nine dollar lobsters waiting for me because lobsters are dirt cheap here. So I'm going to go. You can enjoy your babka. I know you guys are doing another episode. Have fun with that. We're doing 645. I'll log back in at 645.

No, don't leave after we say goodbye here because we'll do the ads. I will see you all. I will be in Japan. Maybe I'll be able to check in. Hopefully the plane won't crash. I won't die. Whatever.

I get very superstitious now about traveling anywhere, but not superstitious, just nervous. But I imagine I'll be fine. Okay. Bye everybody. All things to be nervous about. Bye Jeff. Thank you.

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