Crime, Policy, and What Has Changed with Charles Fain Lehman

I'm Jeff Asher and this is the Jeffalittics podcast. Answering the why of crime trends is frequently much harder than answering the what. The same data inevitably leads to very different explanations depending on how you interpret them and what you think is driving them. This trend shows up clearly in conversations about what's happening over the last few years with crime. Crime went up sharply, then it came down. The numbers are fairly clear. The reasons behind that are not. My guess today is Charles Fane-Lamen, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who focuses on crime, disorder, and what he describes as the public policy of anti-social behavior. In this episode, we talk through the differences in how we can explain what's happening now, the role of policing in social factors, and how concepts like disorder shape, how people experience safety in ways that don't always show up in traditional metrics. Let's dive in. Charles, thank you so much for joining me. Absolutely happy to be here. So let's start with your background. How did you get to be here? Gosh, that's a great question. The answer is that I used to be a journalist. I worked for a publication called The Washington Free Beacon for about five years, and there I developed a data-driven policy-focused beat. A lot of my work focused on crime and social policy, although not exclusively, but part of how I differentiated myself. I should say, I work for a right-of-center think tank. The Free Beacon's a right-of-center publication. Part of how I differentiated myself, particularly among the sort of right-of-center world, was trying to answer questions with numbers, trying to not just sort of report what people told me, but really dig into the data and teaching myself the skills to do that. And then at some point, that evolved into my work at Think Tank, the Manhattan Institute, where I now am, where much of my, you know, my focus very broadly is on what I like to talk about as the public policy of anti-social behavior. What I mean by that is a lot of policy questions are concerned with coordination. We have fixed resources. We have infinite wants. How do we divide things up? Healthcare policy is a great example. What's my interest in policy questions about when people do things that are harmful to themselves or others? How can you stop them from doing those things? How can you do that in responsible and functional fashion? Kinds a natural component of that? I'll be disorder, which I think we're going to talk about today. I think you use any social issues, why do you use the policy? And I try to comment those from an evidence informed and a data driven perspective to sort of bring a little more nuance to those conversations. All right. So I like to start these interviews off and start with sort of the easy softball questions and get harder as we go along. So why is murder falling? Great question. That's a very, that's a very straightforward one. You know, look, the responsible answers we don't know. And I'm sure I'm not the first guest on your show to say that. And I got off my way to offer that caveat because I'll then all from my theories, but they are just theories. And in some senses, obviously we can't estimate the counterfactual world in which the set of things I talk about don't happen. We don't know. As a general though, the way that I have tended to think about the decline over the past couple of years is that, you know, it is not like the big increase in decrease in murder in the 1960s to the 1990s that sort of the big, the great crime wave and then its retreat. They are, I tend to think that the demographic structural factors helps a lot. The big part of the story I like to say, the big thing I like to highlight is that's when the baby boom generation ages into and out of crime. Frank Zimmering, the criminal just estimates that's about half of the increase in decrease is the baby is the age structure of the population. Here we don't see that sort of same long term demographic trends. It's just like up in the down. And I think that, you know, the structural level, we should expect crime rates to be low. The population is graying. We're all more obese than we used to be. Although that's maybe turning around a little bit. We're way more surveilled than we used to be. Like all the factors that sort of determine the equilibrium crime level point towards like lower crime. And then we saw the sort of sharp upwards deviation and then a return almost as sharply over a brief period of time. And so I tend to think it's like that tells me there's some kind of shock. There's an exhaustion shocked that otherwise equilibrium level. And I tend to say, look, there are two sides to that story. One is the COVID-19 pandemic. It clearly has to be part of that story. There's sort of an immediate and durable change in the level of social control. Provided by both full and informal institutions, we closed all the jail. We closed many jails. We shut down courts for a long time. Schools were closed. Places of work, like the places that you go to be socially surveilled, those stopped operating for a while. That clearly is a big part of story. That can't be the whole story. A, because other nations did not experience the same increase that we did, even though they were treated by code as well. B, because there's basically like a negative correlation between COVID compliance and being willing to commit crimes. IE, the sort of people who murder each other, most probably were not following social distancing rules. They are the kind of people on average who are likely to do that, which means I also think that a big part of the story is the drawdown in police activity in the immediate aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the defund the police movement. You see this across a number of different sources in your own work, in particular, the decline in staffing in big city departments, where we've seen not a decline in the overall police staffing level, but I think you see officers flowing to departments where there is less crime and so you've less access to those resources. There are some measures by which you see declines in police activity or police pro activity, cops are doing for your stops, for your arrests. In many places, those have rebounded. So you know, I tend to think like basically that problem has gotten better, at least to some degree or not, absolutely. The COVID problem has obviously gotten a lot better. And there's also just like there's a natural burnout where like the people who are victims of murder are often also the people who commit murder and to be morbid, like those people eventually are no longer in the supply of murderers because they themselves have been murdered and so you end up getting a burnout effect. And so all those factors, I think basically you saw this big shock in 2020, murder goes up, but it wasn't a demographic structural change. It wasn't a change to the equilibrium level of violence. So I'm not surprised that we eventually came back down. Those very long. I think we get to that. I mean, that's a sink to as I've ever put it. So it's certainly a very difficult question. One that I hate trying to answer, which is why I guess I'm trying to get you to answer it as simply as possible here. Are there explanations that sort of for more towards the more recent decline in crime that are sort of out there? I know you mentioned the weight gain, but not really. We're actually losing weight thanks to GLP ones. I've heard that bandied about are there explanations like that that you think they're like, this is a crazy explanation, but it also maybe helps to explain a little bit. Oh, you mean, and specifically since 2020? Yeah, specifically since 2020. I mean, you could even things that are sort of changing the equilibrium, you know, well, yeah, I mean, I think like, you know, there are clearly are some longer run factors. Like, we seem to keep we increasingly get more and more surveilled every year in a way that like clearly is going to matter at least in the medium term. You know, I don't I have my disagreements with John Rowan, when I guess on this podcast. No, yeah, he said that. He's already listening and he's yeah, he's on the list. Hi, John. I'm very natural guest. And I think he has leaned very heavily into this model of like, basically, there was all of this recovery, I'm covered recovery money that was flowing around to state. And the government's that yielded increases in state and local employment in the sort of like carrying sectors. I think there's like not nothing to that argument. And I can kind of tell a story that jives with my priors there. But I'm like, I think he puts way too much emphasis on that explanation and very little emphasis on all other explanations. So you know, there, I think that's a little bit off the wall. I wouldn't give it 90%. I might give it five to 10%. I think about other examples of like off the wall explanations for the decline. But I mean, I do tend to think it's just like a story about violence went up and there was no reason for violence to stay up. And so what goes up must eventually come down in the absence of some reason for it to, you know, remind me not. Do you find an explanation between, you know, we've got falling opioid deaths that are falling like a rock, traffic accident deaths that are falling at a decent clip, alcohol-related deaths that are falling and then murder. And they all tell the same story in such a way that it, they have to be connected. Well, I just, I mean, like maybe, or do you worry of that right? So like I think about this as the deaths of despair. I think this is my analogy, the deaths of despair concept, which is like basically you can lump together drug or do deaths and suicide deaths and alcohol associate like sources of liver deaths. And there's all sort of a curve among the same populations. And they all sort of like you can conceptually link them in your head. And so it's like these, these are clearly together except I need some work on this several years ago. Like they actually don't, if you should have looked under the hood, they really aren't related at all. Like the trends are different, the sub-population to the happening are different. And I think the same thing is true here. Like you could sort of describe like a, like a uniform factor of recklessness that explains a bunch of these phenomena. Like you could say car crash deaths and opioid deaths and drug deaths. There is clearly some overlap in the associated population and you know, some of the associated like impulsive behavior. But like the people who do murders are different from the people who are overdosing on drugs. I also think it's just like in several of those cases, we'll talk about car crash deaths. But in the case of opioids, I didn't think it's actually, there's clearly something totally exogenous and hard to explain that's happening there. I do think it's possible that you're going to be able to do that. you see, part of that is a similar burnout phenomenon. We're like, you saw a very large increase in overdose deaths in 2020. And the people who died from overdose in 2020 weren't available to die in 2023, 2024. There is some sort of dividend that isn't really a dividend in that regard, because we don't want them to die at all optimally. That would be better if people didn't die ever against that. But so, you know, I do you can see a similar analogy, but it is like a different, it's a different population, right? It's like the people who were committing the overall majority of conhomicides are disproportionately young men in close social circumstances with other young men and they have guns and they have low systems social control. The people who dig into opioids and who are overdressing in them are sometimes that population, but like, overwhelmingly not that population and/or often in different social contexts in the population. So you could like imagine a social force pressing down on both of them, but I tend to prefer like I am secretly varying materialists, in my understanding of the world, like I'm always very wary of sort of big social forces up there. I'm much more prone to being like something changed in the opioid supply, or we turned up the social control variable, something things got better, or you know, like a bunch of people died and nothing else, and there was no more dying available to do. So I guess I'm going to sort of echo on their hone in on this concept of something changed, societally, which I guess is an analyst is like it's easier to say, yeah, something changed. I don't know what it was. It's like magic thing is the analyst I'm just describing the trend. It's done. But when we look at crimes that are specifically where the offenders are tend to disproportionately be used, I'm thinking about carjacquins, vehicle barberies, autofefs. I think the autofefs trend is a lot easier to explain as like all the key as in Hyundai's we're stolen and now it's falling. But we've seen this enormous decline in carjacquins, an enormous decline in vehicle barberies. Could it plausibly be just like some sort of societal, the kids are all right is kind of conceptually in my head how I think about it, or can you think of of more specific controls or things that have changed even the last two years that have caused these trends to shift? Yeah, I mean there I look at specifically things like rates of currency where like that can't be all of it because so turns you really did spike in 2020-2021, the malchist A.E.I. has done good work on that. And then it was coming back down pretty slowly and it's kind of stalled out recently. But when you talk about teenagers, to me the story is just as much about basically A, the transaction cost as you've written about the transaction cost associated with carjacking went down because there was knowledge about how to do a carjacking, that knowledge diffused, people got it through TikTok, which was cool for them, bad for everyone to come onto Kia, or a Hyundai, and then like there were some physical patches and so it became harder to do that stuff. But then it was also just like, you know, I'm able to say this and you be able to agree because we were both presumably once young men and young men are like dumb and impulsive and you know, young dumb and impulsive men are sometimes it's women but it's disproportionately men. We'll sort of go, this seems like a good idea and then do it if they are not subject to some arrangement of like, I'd be using this phrase sometimes social control, which just means like somebody is looking out for them, somebody's like, hey, you need to be in a place at a time, you need to be following the rules and that somebody can be the government, but it can also be like a teacher or a parent or somebody else in the community. It can be an informal system or social control and so when I look at like, you know, when I look at the carjacking thing, my response is basically like, where were the teens? What are the, what are the risks associated with carjacking? Because those went up because a bunch of cities said we're going to focus on this as a serious issue. What are the benefits, you know, how easy is the carjacking? It got way easier for a while and now it's probably harder again. And then just like, what are the potential carjacking offenders doing with their time at the margins? Many of them were not in school previously and some of them were in black and school, which is like, is good in my opinion, both from a crime prevention perspective and also because like kids should go to school. So even there like, like I tend to look for what are the, what are the like big structural factors of, you know, it was not like, like I'm, you know, what are the, not not so much the vibe factors as like, what are the routine activities for you? What is the like, what are the opportunities? Is there a capable guardian? Is there a motivated offender? Like how can, you know, do we have the arrangement of variables to make crime happen versus not? So if you were sort of the, the czar of crime reduction policy nationally locally, stay away, whatever you want to imagine yourself, what would you do to sort of sustain these declines now that we've seen them? Again, you started with all the really easy questions. So I've, you know, I've done about to work on this topic of what I talk about as like, like the, I've tried variously a criminal justice modernization and the capacity of the criminal justice system. When my argument is essentially, you know, we tend to think about like, is the criminal justice system too punitive? Is it not punitive enough? We should sort of move that variable up and down. Whereas I didn't think about like, does the criminal justice system have the capacity to solve the problems that are in front of it? Does it have enough swing officers? Does it have enough jail cells? Does it have enough judges? Does it have enough prosecutors? Does it have enough defense attorneys? Like, there's a, you know, there's, there's, there's for there's a certain level of like demand for the criminal justice system. And, you know, because it's not a market provided good, like we determine what the supply of criminal justice is. AmeriCorps has been that on many margins, we don't have an adequate supply of criminal justice. The police to population ratio, the number of officers per American or per thousand Americans, has actually been declining to the great recession. We, we like, stop spending money around then because there was state and local austerity. And it's just sort of like continuously decline. Also, the 94 violent crime bill that way, the officers started retiring. And so like that ratio went down. Courts moved this great report on this from I think the National Center for State Courts. Courts moved way slower than they did 30 years ago. For like extremely basic reasons of just like they've gotten worse at case processing. The judges just don't know how to do it as quickly. And jail capacity has declined. Our prison infrastructure is aging. We've gotten way worse at data. And, or actually, we've remained about as bad at data as we were. We've got like, no, like, you know, I'm doing Jeff Ashers show. So I can say to journalists sometimes, I'm like, the best crime data in the country comes from this guy named Jeff. And we all like Jeff very much. But it's kind of ridiculous that the good crime data comes from Jeff. Like that's that's not a reasonable situation. My wife would give at me when I would be like explaining the situation in national courts. I'd be like, it's weird that this random guy on Twitter is like the source for all of this. But that is the situation, right? Like the New York Times. Like we're going to get our data from Jeff. And it's like, okay, or the CCJ is now doing the Council on Justice is now doing it. But that's crazy. And that's a capacity problem. It's like average citizens should not be able to outperform the government at the provision of these basic services. And my last favorite statistic on this is I did some math for this report. The National Institute of Justice, which is the major grant making body of the Department of Justice spends less per year, about equivalent per year in research grants as the National Institute of I Health, which I believe crime is a greater social problem than I health. I mean, I health is a reasonable problem. I don't want to minimize the suffering of people. But like, I think crime is a bigger problem than I health. And so that's crazy to me. And so my consummate answer is like, you know, both from a crime prevention perspective, from a quality of the criminal justice system perspective, from a fairness perspective, everything that everybody left and right cares about. Like ultimately, those are resource constraints or to the extent that they are not as good as they could be. That is ultimately a resource constraint. And so my answer to the original question is just like look for easy opportunities to turn up the available resources and then try to do that wherever possible. Because like, that's how I think about the problem. It's not about punitivity. It's not about like, you know, the sort of cultural baggage. It's all just like, do we have the supply to meet the demand? So moving along, I want to talk about a disorder. Because you mentioned that. I'm guessing this is probably the area that we maybe disagree the most about in this conversation. But I'm just curious, can you sum up like the role specifically that disorder might play first off? What is disorder? And second, the role that you think it plays in how people perceive what's happening versus what's actually happening or measuring happening. Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, my, my interest in this is a topic came in large part from the like mismatch between the constant mismatch between what was showing up in major crime figures and what people's perceptions report as important perceptions of crime are where this is just phenomenon of like, everybody thinks crime is getting worse all the time. And we live in a really crime-driven society. And then I should go, well, the statistics show that things are actually getting much better and people go, well, the statistics are all fake. And you have this real problem of, you know, a sense of credibility. When you show people the major crime numbers and say, you know, look, things really are improving. I find myself now in arguments with people on the right all the time where they insist that, you know, the numbers are faked by source prosecutors or whatever. And I'm like, I had this argument with people on the left five years ago. It's not, it's not actually productive to do this on either side. Like the numbers are almost certainly not the exact level, but they're probably decently correlated with reality and the least worse available resources to stop, you know, stop inventing conspiracy theories. My argument isn't has been that part of specifically over the past couple of years, part of what explains the mismatch between the increase in the decrease in crime and people's perceptions of crime is that there's a separate increase in sort of, uh. more petty anti-social behavior, some of which is criminal and some of which is not, whichever referred to as disorder. The definition of disorder that I offered a while back when I was sort of first talking about this is that disorder is the domination of public space for private purposes, which is like that can refer to uncharted homelessness and public camping, it can refer to public drug use, it can refer to graffiti, it can refer to people playing new music too loudly, it can refer to the guy on public transit, it can refer to the guy who's like letting his dog run out of control in the public park. It's like, are people being respectful of the comments? Are they acknowledging that this is a thing that we need to share or are they not? And my argument was, and I have to think of, I think the numbers have changed a little bit since I first started running about this, but my argument was basically like a lot of what people are perceiving when they say, when they talk about crime, a lot of what people are actually responding to is that perception of public disorder around them, that like mostly, most people will not, we'll go through their entire lives, never witnessing a murder or shooting, and so like your personal perception is probably not fundamentally about what the current shooting rate is. It's much more about like, is the stuff that I see around me that feels crime like, is that how prevalent is that? And my argument was like, at least in some places, people's perceptions of crimes were accurately mapping to what the limited available data said was going on with public disorder. So that's the top line of what is disorder, and then also like what, you know, where, how I think that explains part of that mismatch, which is what originally motivated me. So I guess my, a disagreement is probably too strong a word, but my qualm with that is that we're really bad at measuring pretty much everything but murder and maybe out of theft, we're especially bad at measuring disorder. And so are you familiar with like really solid ways of measuring these things? Like shoplifting is often the one that gets bandied about, and it's like, well, yes shoplifting is up, but also maybe Target just started reporting it, you know, yes shoplifting is down, but Target just closed their store. So yeah, no, I think this is completely reasonable and it, you know, it, it, like there are no national indices of this. Part of what launched my work on this was spending some time in Chattanooga, and I promised I'm coming back to answer your question. We're like, what I, you know, I, I went to Chattanooga because I knew some people were there who were interested in crime in the city, and what became apparent to me is like, all the people thought that crime is a serious issue, and they're just clearly, clearly wasn't a serious issue in Chattanooga. Like, basically the police department had done everything it was supposed to be doing to deal with violent crime and it like followed all the evidence-based guidelines, and they had mostly worked like they, they saw what everyone else, you know, they saw an increase and then crime went down. But, you know, from talking to people, they cited the same sources of concerns, public drug use, unchild of homelessness, and they said, okay, I can't, there is no one index. Let me go look at a bunch of different measures that are like plausibly our proxies. What are the, what does the homeless sense say? What do through-one-one calls say? What do arrests for petty offenses say? I like through-one calls as a resource. The data source is going to vary across cities, and like, you know, usually you sort of have to, like does the department of public works publish anything? So, you know, it is, it is pretty imprecise. I think that's a totally reasonable criticism, and I think the least worst available tool is just like, you have to look at a bunch of different data sources and say, what's the, you know, what's the impulse here? What's the like, like, can you do the dimension reduction on this? What does it appear to look like? And in at least some places, and at sometimes it seems to match, you know, measures like sanitation reports, measures like through-one complaints, measures like, you know, the measures that correspond to these, not necessarily the criminal behaviors, seem to point in one direction. I agree that it's like, it is, it is hard to measure the thing. Shoplifting is a great example. A lot of the time it's a measurement error. We did a report, we had been having a student report from John Hall about exactly this problem in New York City, but like, you can sometimes get some signal out of the noise, and I think the best thing you can do is basically to say, like, what is the you know, what is the underlying factor here? So, I guess summing all of this up, I mean, both of us have kind of this similar mission of the perceptions of don't match reality. We want to tell people what the reality is. How do we, how do you and I as like, essentially data communicators, research communicators? How do we do a better job of communicating this? Even if it's not a better, like, how can we be more effective in this? Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. It's a really hard question. Part of what motivates me in talking about disorders and issue is that it's really hard to tell people that their perceptions are wrong. And I'm sure you've had this experience. And like, sometimes you have to say, your perceptions of reality are wrong. Like, the thing you think is going up is going down. But I try to believe where possible that people are often perceiving real phenomena, even if they don't give the right names to it. The argument that major crime is up when it is measured to be down usually doesn't hold a lot of water with me. But I tend to believe that people are responding to something real when they say it feels less safe than it previously did. There's something going on there that it is like, incumbent on us as data communicators, people talk about crime to say, what is that something? Like, what is the, what is the thing that you are actually talking about there that you are associating with serious violent crime? Is it, is it that you're seeing what people who make you feel uncomfortable? Is it that you're seeing more acts? Is it that you feel, you talk to it, you know, more of a vehicle crashes. And we have decent data on that. That was the other data source I was thinking about. Right? Like, we know what people are doing. You know, we love it, we know it deaths on the highway. We know about crashes. We have independent data sources for that. Are you, do you feel like the world is less safe because people are driving more irresponsibly? That's like a thing that we can measure. And so, you know, I think my immediate response is you have to give some explanation. You have to be able to offer some explanation for why people's percent, what, where people's processes are reality are coming from. And the second point or, you know, some point is like, that explanation can't be basically like, you've been propagandized. Right? There is, there is rigorous research that shows media portrayals of crime has an impact on people's perceptions of crime. That's real. But it does not explain the like, overwhelming majority of perception and explain some variance. It's going to all the variance. And it also just, like, it doesn't work to be like, well, you just need to turn off the TV, the local news, and then you'll stop worrying about crime like that. That does not persuade people. So yeah, I mean, it's like, like, my idea is basically like, you have to, you know, you, you're not going to be successful. If you tell people, you think you're unsafe, but you're wrong, but you can be successful if you're like, the thing that you think is causing this is not actually the thing that's causing it. But it could be this other thing. And let's try to understand what this other thing is. So we can have a more informed conversation because like, it's actually pretty reasonable for people to want to feel safe in their communities. You know, it's, it's not reasonable for them to like, take starts feeling more safety and create bad policy. But like, we should prioritize that desire in our communication with them and like recognize that there's a reasonable desire. You mentioned the media. I really struggle with this because the, the statement that I always think to come to is that, that the media doesn't cover the planes that land. And it's, I think, irrational to expect the local news to cover the fact that there were no robberies last week. Like they, they do a story when stuff happens. Is there a way on this issue maybe large to get the media to be better than every six months? They're going to cover CCJs reports or a media, you know, your eye might get an interview after a monthly report comes out like, how do we do better at getting the people that are actually able to reach the large audiences to do better at this? Yeah. I mean, the unfortunate answer is it's like, it's really hard because in some senses, the explanation for crime can either be, you know, everything is better than it was in the 90s. Therefore, there's no problem. And it also can't be, there was a crime last week. Therefore, you need to like hide and, you know, shelter your children, ed fleets and wherever. It has to be like nuanced, right? It has to be like, well, this is up and this is down and it's things are better compared to a but worse compared to be. And here is the national trend, but here's the local trend. And that's like seven data points, which is way more, you know, I totally reasonable practice. And I don't, I'm not criticizing this person, but I had a, you know, I was interviewed by a fairly prominent publication about crime trends. And I had like a 20 minute conversation and, you know, one snippet of one thing I said in the piece. That is completely standard journalistic practice. Nothing wrong with doing that. I've no objection to this. But it is like very challenging, you know, the snippet of me that ended up in the piece was just like a very small part of everything that I thought was going on. That's just like a feature of the medium. So, you know, I think I, I think in some senses, here's, that's my like pessimistic take. My out of this to take is that like there is more demand for information than ever and more ways delivering information than ever. Like I do actually think that people want nuance. People watch like four hour podcasts for some reason. I don't understand it. Like they will watch. Showing another three and a half hours. Yeah, I know. It's crazy. Yeah, this is it. You know, we're going to get right. The answer is we're going to get Jeff Asher on Joe Rogan. No, V, no, V, that, V, I would watch that. I think that would go well. Like, like, you know, I think that you have to sort of say you have to demand nuance and then you have to be clear that your nuance is like, like, nuance actually can't be an additional, you know, to a different simplistic take. You have to be like, really, there is nuance here. And then often, you know, when people claim to be offering nuance, what they are actually doing is just sort of saying, well, if you put this in another perspective, then it's advantageous to my political team. Like, no, you have to actually demand nuance, which is really hard. And I don't have a good solution for getting people to care about it. But I like, you know, as a, as, as like a good American patriot, believe that actually people sometimes want it. And you can just sort of like keep lasting out that maybe they'll get it. Hopefully. I mean, I'm the same in like, that's, that's where this podcast came from. It's where the sub-sac comes out of it. It's just if we talk about it, maybe somebody will hear it and that will help. And it's, I don't know, shouting at the ocean or something. But yeah, well, you know, I like, like, on the other hand, I think there's, you know, the fact that as we lived through earlier, major publications are going and being like, we need this data. There's clearly a lacuna, right? There's clearly, there's clearly a lack there that is being filled. So I try to be an optimist about these things. I try to say like, people want, don't just want, they had line, people really don't just want to be told like, you know, the, the, the, the simple story is correct. The dumb explanation is correct. People, you know, people can't sustain 10 data points, like they just can't cognitively do it on average if this isn't what they think about all day, but they can take three, they can do four, and that's better than one, which is nice. So, and then probably the easiest question I have for you, which is, how do we detangle politics from perceptions of crime? And Gallup has their poll that shows, it's not just a republic, it's become more of a Republican thing than a Democrat thing in the last eight years, but it's always been that the party in power, a higher percentage or lower percentage thinks crime is rising than the party out of power. Is there a way to do this? To sort of disengage the two? No, probably not. I think it would be great if we could, but like, the reality is that crime prevention is a fundamental government service, right? It's something, it's something, it is the thing that almost everyone agrees the government should do. People don't agree about basically everything else, but they agree that like the government should keep us safe, and there should probably be an army. There are exceptions to this rule, but like mostly that's something people agree on. And so, I think it is extraordinarily hard to do politicize that, or to get people to shift on that. My, you know, my, my standard advice, and look, this is ultimately advice to Democrats, because like Republicans only issue, is that just like Democrats can be weaker or stronger on this. They can like, they make this more or less of a, more or less of a like, you know, of a time bomb for them, of an issue for themselves, right? They can, they can disarm the GOP more or less on this, which doesn't mean you have to like capitulate to crazy talking points. You don't have to be like, yes, Donald Trump did bring down the homicide rate somehow using that, like that, you know, cash per tell did it with his, with his magic FBI sneakers. So you don't have to do that. But you can be like, you know, like a number of exactly, big cities, exacts have been, like they kind of tried to do with the tail end of the Biden administration, but I think not that persuasively, like say, we don't consider, like we consider law enforcement a legitimate issue for the Democratic Party. I mean, this argument on that Eglaceus is sub-stacks, low boring. I wrote a piece for him about this, and which I said, look, every, until the Biden administration, every 30 years, a Democratic administration and a Democratic Congress would pass a major federal overhaul to criminal justice system. It happened under FDR, it happened under LBJ, it happened under Clinton. This is like, and this was totally normal for Democrats. It's just like we are the party of good government. We believe that government should provide services, criminal justice is a service, therefore we should provide it better, totally reasonable. So like, I mean, that, you know, that, that's very, that's advice that's targeted at the Democratic Party. But I think it's like the best answer I have for depoliticizing it is just like, if you don't allow Republicans to own the issue, if you're like Democrats can be going on this too in a credible way, then I think it because it's plausibly depoliticized, at least a little bit, because it's not like so obviously partisan valence. Is it still going to be that way? Yeah, totally. I mean, it's just like, you can't, you can't change people's, I can't fix polarization. Maybe you can, I can't do it. But I think like if you sort of find the reasonable middle ground, then you don't at least allow one party to so obviously run away with it in public reception. So speaking to the, I guess we're going to have theme music play here that's going to say, guest does job of host for him or something like that. I really do want to attack this issue from all sides. This is why I wanted to have you on the show. Are there other voices? It felt very lonely in 2023 and 2024, not from the left, but definitely from the right to be saying, this is what the data looks like, which as you mentioned was the exact opposite of what happened in 2020. And you know, you may not have felt it, you may not be as exposed to the left, but I certainly remember getting yelled at by the left when talking about the fact that it was rising. So are there ways or are there people that you think on the right on this sort of conservative end that would be good to talk to about this that aren't going to bring the like the crazy, just the crazy talking points, but legitimately move this conversation forward. And if so, who would you suggest? Yeah, I mean, some senses you're covering your bases, you know, my colleague, Raffelman, Wall would be a little weird to have two of my guys on, although I think they have complimentary functions, Ralph and Ralph were a great book on crime and criminal justice policy that I highly recommend to your audience. But is I think a, it tries very hard to be a silver voice in this space who's not just interested in, you know, throwing, throwing partisan bombs and talking about stories, prosecutors and whatever. I mean, you know, very bluntly, I think that there are any of a number of folks in the broader, rather than world who don't do this very well. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to pick those fights, but, you know, the other place that I look where these guys aren't necessarily on the right, but they aren't like definitively on the left, or sort of the whole universe of epidemics. You had Ian Adams on the show very recently, and Ian's great, when I won't describe sort of right wingness to Ian, he can do that or not himself, but like Ian used to be a cop, and that puts him at odds with many of his ac- you know, it's not even necessarily that he's on the right so much as like many of his very own left. Criminal justice colleagues think that like he's a fascist. I don't think he is a fascist. But there are other folks, Scott Morcos, who's a colleague of his from Ushayuta, they often work with Justin Nix, who's at Omaha, Barry Latzer, who's a meriticit cutie, and Barry is very much a friend, I think we call this off on the right as a friend of Citigrinal Manhattan Institute, who's also I think generally pretty sober, and has written a bunch of stuff on long run trends in crime that I recommend. I have to think of other rightist into names, but those are the- -We could take that offline, yeah, that's great. I appreciate that. Good list. So again, getting more broadly, two quick topics, I know we don't have a ton of time, but two quick topics I want to talk about that are only tangentially related to crime, you've written about this. I think we're probably on the same page, but is there a way to get- talking about sports gambling. Is there a way to get that genie back in the bottle? And again, I'm just asking because I'm interested in about this. I think I went to a Pelicans game recently, and like these 220-something sat next to me, and they're only cheered for- I'm saying with my kids, they only cheered for like, you know, trademark fee to hit a three, and like otherwise they weren't watching the game. It drove me way- -The roads. We kicked Hopkins to the great piece of the Atlantic about his last time. I had multi-month experiment with sports gambling, which I thought was quite good. Yeah, I mean, look, you know, the most important thing is just not to have political pessimism about this stuff. Like, your unease is, I think, the modal position in America currently. There's lots of pulling. Americans still don't want to- -Band, I have made the public arguments that actually we should just ban it, but that's like a prudential argument, because I'm skeptical of our ability to sort of regulate away the problems, but there were lots of regulations you could implement that would make it much sooner. You could just- I mean, you could ban the advert and buzzer buzzer advertising bands. You could ban some of the more absurd forms of bets like Parles or In Game Prop Bats. You can have deposit limits. You can force corporate- -forced the- -the sports books to more aggressively police problem users. There's lots of stuff you can do. That's like all very practical. The trick is just like- At this point is just having the political will to actually try some of this stuff. I think everybody does use this analogy of like- -you know, the genius out of the bottle. You can't put the toothpaste pack on the tube. I'm like, you can totally do that. Like, we banned Sports Gabling nationwide in 1992. Like, that's not that long ago. Like, I was born in 1994, so it's my entire lifetime ago. But it's like- -it's objectively speaking, you know, Sports Gabling was illegal in 2017 in everywhere but Nevada essentially. That's just not that long ago. It was totally possible for us to sustain that. By the way, it's a totally functional arrangement in American life for that- -to be the status quo. You know, I think- -I think the trick is like- -at this point is looking at places where you can turn that popular- -you can coalesce that popular sentiment into real action. I've been saying, you know, privately, and I'll say this probably- -if you happen to have $50 million to run an Allen initiative, I don't- -I see what you do. If you have $50 million for the ballot initiative, the thing I would do is I would get a ban on prop bets on the ballot in Ohio. Because I think it would win. I think the governor would endorse it. I think the state legislature would endorse it. I think they would ban prop bets in Ohio in 2026 if it gave them the opportunity to do so. You just got to spend the money to do the signatures. But there were lots of opportunities like that. There's been money in Massachusetts. You do it at the federal level. There are ideas floating around. I just think that like- -there are very simple regulatory solutions that we could conceivably. implement. I think that there are problems with that at like, you know, a public policy math level, but like, I would be very happy if we got closer to that arrangement. But like doing that requires at this point, just political will and everybody knowing that everybody else is uncomfortable with what's going on. And then just like, you know, putting putting some political paddles in the middle. Like, that's totally doable. We can do it. We've done it historically. It's been done. Like we can do it again. So as soon as we're done, I'll go downstairs and look in the couch cushions and see if I get at least a couple of them, you get me closer to the goal of 15 million. So my last question, and we were talking about this before we started recording, but how do you think AI changes our jobs, our approaches in the future? And then sort of an add on, it seems like half the battle is like just changing perceptions on AI adoption and how it can be used. And in ways that's not, it's going to hallucinate answers about your medical condition. So, you know, any thoughts on sort of changing how people think of what these tools can do? Yeah. I mean, and you know, I am, I am a, I let's say I'm like, uh, fiscally bearish, socially bullish on AI, which is, you know, and I'll get into the socially bullish thing, which is just like, I won't get into that very much to just say like, I think it is going to be hugely socially disruptive in certain harmful ways. But like, from my, from my just like doing my, doing my job, perspective AI is great. And doing your job, like AI is great. You know, I would talk to you in this beforehand, like, like for somebody who's really in our sweet spot, of like wants to use data to tell stories, the amount of friction that it reduces is great. I think getting people, everyone is super, everyone is super pessimistic about AI right now. Everyone is very negative about it. Look at the polling. And to a first approximation, I have argued that this is because the people who are celiac are doing a really terrible job of celiac. Like, yeah, like AI is going to take all of your jobs. And oh, by the way, it might kill everybody. And you should let us do it. I'm like, what? So I, I mean, I've argued that at the very least the first thing is probably not going to happen that like the sort of, you know, the economics really does militate towards an increase in human productivity, making us all richer and more employed and like, you know, more productive and not like mass disemployment. I don't think that's going to happen. But I actually just think like you have to change the messaging around the stuff. And in particular, you have to understand like AI is going to be for many people, not everybody, but for many people, AI is much more likely to be a compliment than it is a substitute, right? And like AI is a compliment for me, AI is a compliment for you. It's because more efficient of what we do, we can do more than we used to humans of, you know, economics, humans have infinite wants and finite means to achieve those ones. If we increase our productivity, we will come up with new things to do with it. I will do things with the several hours that I get back by using AI that will be great. Like, we're not just going to, you know, we're not just going to stagnate. There is an alarm of labor. But I think people have to, you know, people really have to be like, concretely, here is how AI is going to make your life better. I can say that. The people who are trying to sell AI really need to say that. I think it's like mostly true bracketing some social concerns that I have. But like certainly from an economic perspective, I think it is going to make our lives better. I think it will make us richer and more productive and like give us more leisure time. That's great. I'm in favor of those things. You have to actually sell it that way as opposed to selling it to our own name. It's been weird that like, you know, like you say, AI, the thousand people that we need to do this job, we only need 200 people now. So we can either use the other 800 people we already have hired to do more for the company and like build or we can fire everybody and do the exact same job. It'd be, you know, similarly productive. And it's weird to think that like the former is how they're selling it. Right. Well, you know, I think, I mean, I think there's been, like, there have been these layoffs. And I'm feeling like I think that's pretextual. I think it's like they hired all these people when interest rates were low and those people weren't doing anything and now they're, yeah, they're using AI as a pretext. No, I'm a bit like, yeah, that's like fundamentally most technological, technological innovation has not yet led to mass unemployment. There was an interesting argument that this could lead to mass unemployment that, but I don't actually think that that's like the standard case. And I think the standard case is that like if you are freed from doing treasury by AI, you get to use your otherwise limited time for higher uses. And that's good. I like that. That's great. Well, this has been wide-ranging and I really appreciate it Charles. What is next for you and where can people find you? Okay. What is next for me? I'm working on a handful of projects. I'm actually, I need to do some more work and maybe we talk with this, but I'm reporting a piece on why crime went down in Baltimore that we'll see. We'll see where that ends up. A bunch of other things. I encourage people to check me out. I'm on Substack. I get lots of referrals from Jeff Ashren in Substack, but it's the causal fallacy, CAU, SAL, not casual causal. It's a really nerdy reference to James Q Wilson. I kind of regret it because people can never spell it. And I'm also I'm on Twitter/X. I'm @CharlesFleeman. People want to find me there. That's great. And by the time this is out, we will have just had Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott on the podcast. So yeah, I highly recommend that as well as I'm sure. I'm really happy to have you out. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me. Appreciate it. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to the Jeffalitics podcast. Be sure to subscribe and to learn more, head on over to aahdatalitics.com for more information and previous episodes. If you like what you heard, please leave a glowing review which will help others to discover the show. Until next time, I'm Jeff Ashren.