Crime Is Falling. Can Public Perception Catch Up? with Insha Rahman

My guest today is Insha Rahman, the president of the Vera Institute of Justice, the oldest and largest justice reform organization in the country. Insha has spent the past ten years building out everything from bail reform research to a 501c4 focused squarely on the politics of public safety and brings a fascinating perspective to the conversation around making perceptions of crime and safety more responsive to what the data says is actually happening.

In this episode, we get into why the data behind reforms like bail reform rarely matches the political story told about them, what cities like Camden, NJ got right during their first homicide-free summer in fifty years, and why Insha thinks the gap between crime perception and crime reality might finally be starting to close.

Insha Rahman is the president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice, the oldest and largest criminal justice reform organization in the country. Insha is also the president and director of Vera Action, an independent 501(c)(4) organization. Insha is the first woman, immigrant, and Muslim to lead both organizations. Insha previously served as Vera’s vice president for Advocacy and Partnerships and the director of Vera Action since 2020. Insha got her start in this work as a public defender in the Bronx.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I'm Jeff Asher, and this is the Jeffalytics Podcast. Almost two million people are behind bars in America right now. And Incha Rachman has spent two decades trying to figure out how to make that number smaller without making anyone less safe. Now, she's the president of the Very Institute of Justice, the oldest and largest justice reform organization in the country, where she's spent the past 10 years building out everything from bail reform research to a 501c4 focused squarely on the politics of public safety. In this episode, we get into why the data behind reforms like bail reform rarely match the political story told about them. What cities like Camden, New Jersey got right during their first homicide free summer in 50 years, and why Inshaa thinks the gap between crime perception and crime reality might finally be starting to close. Let's get started. Did I say that correctly?

SPEAKER_00 0:52

You did. You nailed it.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

That's all. Alright, good. Well, I've I've done all I set out to do in the interview. I'm excited to do that.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Yep, my day.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Yes. You have no idea how nerve nerve-wracking it is. So, Insha, now that I've already taken this interview completely off the rails, you come to us from Vera. What is your background? How did you end up in this position?

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Well, so first of all, it's great to be here. And as I said to you, Jeff, before we started chatting, I'm just a huge fan of your work and the crime index is something that I and so many people at Vera look at literally every day. It's just such an important resource for our field. So I come to criminal justice reform on both the professional and personal level. Professionally, I've been working in justice reform for over two decades. The very first time I stepped into a prison was when I was 18 years old. I did an incredible college and prison class where I took religion and sociology classes with incarcerated men at Greenhaven Maximum Security Facility in upstate New York. And as a college student who had never really thought about the criminal justice system, the courts, it was just eye-opening. It's one of those experiences where you see something and you can't look away because it makes you question fundamentally the origins of crime, punishment, what we do with human potential, and the choices we make about second chances and retribution. And I have worked on alternatives to incarceration. I was a public defender for six years in the Bronx, which is perhaps the most formative experience I've had in terms of the work I do. And then I've been at Vera for over a decade and now lead the organization. I'm in week seven of my tenure as president. And so this work I said is also personal to me. I'm an immigrant to this country. And for my Muslim South Asian family, there was life before 9-11 and life after. I was in college when 9-11 happened. And the mosques that my family went to were surveilled. I had cousins and friends and family members who were, you know, questioned by the FBI. And suddenly, sort of what I'd seen in college and learned in at Greenhaven of sort of these questions of surveillance, oppression, suddenly were impacting my community. And we had never really thought about it before. And suddenly it was right there, front and center for us. So that's what drives sort of my commitment to this work. I love doing this work. I think we've seen a lot of progress on both becoming safer and thinking about justice reform differently in this country. And I think we've got a lot of work ahead.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

So what is Vera? Sort of big picture starting off there. What is your objective here, leading it? You know, you're seven weeks in. I'm sure you've made massive changes and have completely figured out everything that you need to do. But what so what is the organization and what is your hopes for it going forward?

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Well, in week seven, here's what I can say. And this is after a decade of being in the organization in a number of different roles. Vera is the largest and oldest justice reform organization in the country. We were founded in 1961, back in the days where we actually had a lot less information about what works to deliver safety and what makes our system more just. And also in at an era where, in fact, America was incarcerating people at the same rate as our Western peers. We had a similar incarceration rate to Britain and France and Germany. And it was in the 1970s. And for folks listening, this is not new news. Uh, you know, we had a real sort of tough-on-crime era where there were laws and policies passed that made us diverge from our Western peers. And suddenly, you know, we reached a point in the 1990s where mass incarceration was a real thing. We had over 2 million people behind bars. Today we're right under 2 million. We've still, again, got a lot of work to do, but we've made real progress. And Vera has existed in that 65 years to essentially help to pilot, test, and scale what works to end mass incarceration and help build safe, thriving communities. And we do that by working with government and community on the ground to actually pilot solutions. Here's a problem in the justice system and the operation of justice. Here's potential solution. Does it work? We do a lot of research. A lot of people know us for our research reports and our findings. And then importantly, and over the past decade, we've really worked to scale up advocacy because you can work with one prosecutor's office or you can work with one corrections department or one police department, but unless you actually make change at scale through changing policy, legislation, sort of that work is so quickly eroded when there's a change of guard or the political windshift. And so the big sort of next 65 years for Vera, and maybe it won't take that long, but maybe it will, is to really think about the progress that we've made. How do we make it stick? How do we make it durable? And one of the things that I have done led at Vera over the past five years is to set up Vera Action, which is our 501. We're unique for a justice reform organization. We do lots of policy through our 501c3, but we also know we have to tackle the politics around crime and public safety. Otherwise, the progress that we make on criminal justice reform, frankly, it just doesn't stick.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

So on the, I want to get to the research side after this, but like on the advocacy side, how do you balance that need to, you know, the advocates, this is the policy we're advocating for, but you also want the data and the research side. And sometimes those don't necessarily match up. So how do you avoid falling into the advocacy trap where you're you're pushing something based on feelings and thinking it's good when the data and evidence may not suggest that?

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Well, so much of the advocacy that we are seeing around justice reform is actually very driven by the data. For example, we know when it comes to bail reform, and if wealth instead of safety is the determinant of who stays in jail pre-trial, well, jail has a criminogenic effect. It's longstanding research that even 24 hours in jail actually makes you more likely to be arrested in the future than avoiding incarceration altogether. That is the evidentiary premise for reforms like bail reform, for example. I worked on New York bail reform, which, you know, if you if you see the politics around it or sort of the political debate, it often feels like, well, that was bad for public safety. That was uh far reach from advocates. But in fact, it was very data-driven. We looked at places like Washington, D.C., that had done bail reform many years earlier, New Jersey that had just done bail reform a few years before New York did. And there have been several independent studies of New York bail reform since the reform went into place in 2020. And what we have consistently seen from the research is that bail reform did not lead to an increase in crime. And it did have the other good effects that we expect from a reform like taking money and profit out of the system and getting people back to their jobs and to their families. And so, Jeff, I use that example of bail reform because I think in the sort of political debate, it's often one of those advocacy reforms that is so often sort of pilloried as like without basis and sort of overreach and wanting to decarcerate. Um, but in fact, it's very evidence-based. And we see that for other kinds of reforms that my organization advocates for, like community violence intervention and investment in crisis response. All of that has actually a very strong evidence base. So here's what I would say to when people are like, well, how do you balance the evidence with advocacy? Is you want your advocacy to be principled, you have a set of values that matter. But every policy that we advocate for has an evidence base. And Vera's particular role is to bring that data, evidence, and solutions from our policy side into the advocacy conversation. I think that's actually the unique role that we play in our advocacy work.

SPEAKER_01 8:53

And how do you we speaking of bail reform, like there's always gonna be an outlier? There's always gonna be somebody that without the reform probably would have stayed incarcerated and they're gonna do some terrible thing. You know, there's gonna be horrendous tragedies, somebody's gonna get lose their life. But that's not like, you know, that that's the the outlier case. How do you sort of handle the communications of that? Because the politics of the moment, they're gonna pick up on that and they're gonna say, look at this case, this is the case that everybody should pay attention to and not the overarching good maybe that the reform is doing.

SPEAKER_00 9:29

Well, what you raise is so important because we can have an evidence base, we can pass a policy, but if we don't tackle the politics and the communications around a policy change, chances are we're gonna face rollbacks. And we've seen that on bail reform and a number of other measures. And so here's my guidance to folks is you wanna start telling the story of what this reform does and how it benefits public safety before the first bad thing happens. And when I go back to 2019 and when bail reform was passed in New York, the thing I kick myself for and my colleagues who worked on the reform with me, and that's folks in the governor's office, in the state legislature, as well as other advocates, is that we should have been telling the story from the very beginning of this person who's released, and they didn't have to pay money to be released, and they're back home, they are in their job, they're taking care of their children, and telling that story day in and day out. As opposed to waiting and sort of hoping that nothing bad happens, of course, something bad will happen. The sort of outlier case always happens. It's actually the thing we can predict, and that becomes front page news, which it will be anyway, but if it's not sort of buffered by positive stories of the impact of reform, that's when on its own it just sort of, you know, has outsized impact. And when the one bad thing happens, here's what I really counsel people to do is acknowledge that it's bad. Don't shy away from it. Don't hope that it blows over, lean in and say, that is awful. That's a tragedy. It should have never happened. And then talk about what would actually prevent it. What are you gonna do? Say a judge released somebody and they perhaps should have like taken a closer look at the court file, or maybe there was information that they should have had through pretrial services that they didn't have. What concrete changes are you gonna make to try and prevent that next tragedy from happening? And we've seen actually when leaders do that and they actually sort of acknowledge the tragedy and say what they're gonna do differently, it tends to then blow over. It's really when you ignore it or minimize it that people feel affronted. Because I have heard people say so often, and I do a lot of work in the community, look, I believe in justice reform, but I want to know that it's not at the cost of public safety. So we need to be telling the story of these reforms deliver both safety and justice. There is no false choice between one or the other.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

Yeah. And you are advising a politician of some sort into how to communicate this. How would you advise on the best way to sort of balance the need for the data and the evidence and the research with the fact that the public sort of tunes out when you start talking about the data and the evidence and the research?

SPEAKER_00 12:12

Yeah. Is you and I, and I am not nearly as expert in data and research as you are, but I certainly consider myself a data nerd. It's why I work at a place like Vera and not somewhere else. I'm always a little bit disheartened at how the statistics and the data themselves are not as persuasive as I would hope. They're persuasive to me, they're persuasive to you. There are some legislators and elected leaders who it's persuasive to as well, but that's not the place to start. Here's what we always recommend is start with values. Say we want safety, we want accountability, we want justice. And then name what isn't working about the status quo. And for example, let's go back to bail reform since we started there. Like having wealth and not safety determine who stays in jail and who gets released pretrial makes no sense. It's actually compromising public safety. Rich people can go free while somebody who is no threat to public safety but is poor languishes in jail. Just say it really clearly what's a problem that we're trying to fix. And then you go to the numbers. So bail reform in New Jersey actually led to a decrease in the jail population by over 25%. And we saw crime go down at the same time. And the benefits were the millions of dollars that families save that otherwise would have gone to bail, and the benefit to communities to have people in their jobs and to provide pretrial services instead of using jail. There's also a cost benefit as well, and the cost of relying on jail and prison, which is the most expensive answer to our problems. We use it less. So you want to go to the data, but you want it to be the last thing you talk about after you talk about the values and the problem with the system and the status quo. And then you go to what's working and what's the data that shows that it works. That's the sort of like sandwich in terms of communications that works really beautifully to actually be able to talk about reform, talk about progress, and bring in the data, but not sort of have people's eyes glaze over.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

What do you see as sort of the future of this field and this field being not just bail reform, but generally criminal justice reform? Is this something that has a bipartisan future, like it had a bipartisan past? How do we get there? That's stacking a lot of questions there. But like what does it look like going forward?

SPEAKER_00 14:28

Yeah. Well, I shared that this work for me is deeply personal. And it's deeply personal to at least half of all Americans. As you know, one in two Americans has experienced jail or prison themselves or had a loved one in jail and prison. And that is, you know, everybody from the left to the right to people who live in big cities to more rural parts of this country, people have seen this system. And one of the things we see consistently in some of the polling that we do under Vera Action and that we've seen in Gallup surveys and others is that people do not think the current criminal justice system works. They don't think it works to deliver safety. They don't think it works to deliver due process and fairness, they don't think it works to deliver justice, which means there's actually a lot of opportunity to keep making reform happen. And I think that we have a lot of potential. There's still good bipartisan work happening, not at the federal level right now, but certainly in states. So, Vera, we work in over 40 states. We have helped to pass reforms in places like Oklahoma and Texas, more battleground places that we think of as purple, like Michigan. So reform is still very much underway and it is happening. It's just less sort of loud and chest pounding than what we saw in the sort of decade ago of what I call the golden age of criminal justice reform, where we saw, you know, legislation being passed on bail reform, on sentencing reform, on police accountability. Like that stuff is still happening. It's more modest reforms. We're seeing actually some really good reforms continue around sentencing, certainly around the front end of the system and crisis response and community violence intervention and ways to actually prevent crime and break it cycle. And I think the future of our field will continue to be bipartisan. I think it will continue to be progress, sometimes incremental, sometimes big, but I think we can't overreach or just try and get the big things. The small progress matters too. And I think we are a country where people understand the harms of mass incarceration. We have learned a lot since 1994 and the 1994 crime bill. So if you ask everyday Americans, they favor what we call a serious about safety approach over tough on crime, 60% to 40%, and that holds up with independent voters. About two-thirds of them prefer a serious about safety approach that is sort of reform-oriented. But what we've seen is that the political debate is lagging. The political debate feels stuck in 1994 and are you tough or are are you soft on crime? And it actually doesn't reflect where the American public is. So if I were talking to a politician, I'd say, listen to your voters. And if you are a tough on crime politician, if you are listening to your voters, you change your tune.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Just sort of overing in this field for a while as you have, I want to ask a two-parter, which is one, what frustrates you the most? And one, and the other is what encourages you the most about working in this field?

SPEAKER_00 17:31

Start with what encourages me the most. I feel generally optimistic about our field. I'm an optimistic human being, but I actually feel in this particular moment we are again rounding the curve of the backlash that we've been in for the past five, six years and are feeling tailwinds again, not just headwinds. And what makes me optimistic is that even in that period of backlash, we saw real progress on justice reform. For example, we dropped to less than two million people behind bars. And that was a first about five years ago. And we've maintained that. Sure. Have jail and prison populations ticked up in the last couple of years. There's some sort of, you know, hangover from COVID and delays. There's certainly been some places that have passed more tough on crime policies. But overall, we're a country that is more free, relying less on incarceration as the default than before. And the other part that gives me a lot of hope is even in a moment where many of us think of as like the winter for criminal justice reform, uh, you know, pretty fallow period, we saw real gains in the front end of the system and investing in things like alternative crisis response and community violence intervention and things like summer youth employment and mental health treatment, drug treatment, all things that are sort of outside of the traditional sort of criminal justice reform, you know, menu, but actually have huge impacts on preventing crime and breaking it cycle. And so that gives me a lot of hope because it actually is a bigger tent of folks working on justice reform and a much bigger, more sophisticated approach to delivering both safety and justice. What frustrates me is what I said before is that I see this progress on the ground with community leaders, government leaders, and yet a lot of politicians are sort of missing the memo and are really sort of stuck in a different bygone era that doesn't reflect where the American public is. And so that frustrates me tremendously because I will have conversations with legislators who I'll say, here's what the evidence shows, and here's actually what public opinion is on these reforms. And politicians will say, I hear that, but I want to get re-elected. And so I'm gonna go either ignore this issue and not talk about it, or I'm gonna go to fun crime if I have to. And that's changing. Like I actually see a glimmer of hope. There are increasingly politicians who are like, no, I will actually reflect what my public wants. I've seen mayors do that a lot, and they are very close to this issue. They literally get voted in and voted out on issues of crime and public safety. It's such a local issue. And so we need that to sort of like filter up to other positions, whether that's state legislators, members of Congress. And that's where I feel both frustration and where we've got a lot of opportunity to grow.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

I love that answer. We just had Nair Quentin Lucas from Kansas City on the podcast recently, and he talked about the ownership of the issue and not just of the, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna fight this issue, I care about gun violence, but the complexity of the issue and the complexity of the solution. Thinking through you you listed a lot of things, and I want to focus on sort of the summer because we know there's it it when it gets hot, and I I had a one of my first pieces for 538 was about the fact that like as when the weather gets hot, gun violence goes up, and then when it gets cold, it goes down. It and you you mentioned summer jobs. Are there other approaches that cities should be taking? Because I know summer jobs is one that's kind of just a ton of research. It's like this is a great idea, we should be spending a ton of money on this. Right. What else can we be doing? And is there any research into why specifically summers are such a challenge? And maybe that gives ideas of like what should cities be doing.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

Yeah. Well, the reason summers are such a challenge is that there's simply more people out and there's more opportunity for interpersonal conflict, random crime, for violence to pop off. It's just a fact of when there are people out, there is more opportunity. People, if you think back to the beginning of COVID and where crime rates just dropped precipitously, why was that? Because more people were at home. So that explains. It's nothing sort of more complicated than that. But there is so much cities can do. And I want to point to a specific example to make this concrete. So Camden, New Jersey, which is a place that has struggled with high levels of crime and especially. Especially gun violence for many, many years and has really taken a sort of all of the above, all of government and community approach to trying to drive down crime and break it cycle. They had their first ever homicide-free summer last year. And that was in 50 years. And how they did it was essentially to have this sort of, again, all of government and all of community approach. They launched this program called the Village Initiative, so takes a village. And that was a partnership with local police, the city, local organizations. And literally every night they would host events like an open gym and like long hours, walk party barbecues, movie nights. They invested in summer youth employment. They had things for senior citizens to do, sort of being outside as well, the eyes on the street of Jane Jacobs is a very real phenomenon. And all of that work to actually prevent homicide. And that's remarkable. And again, I'm just using a specific example to get, you know, concrete, but we saw that same trend in places like Baltimore and Boston, Chicago, New York City where I live. We've really seen if there is a very specific whole of government and whole of community approach to tackling violence during the summer, focusing on young people, but focusing on the community overall and turning people out and turning interactions that could go south into positive interactions. That's actually the way to do it. And one thing I want to note, Jeff, is the role of police here. Because we often find, like, again, there's the research and the evidence about the role of policing and the importance of policing. And then there's the political debate. And so often for many years, we've seen cities during the summer months just sort of like flood the street with more police and turnout police. And they haven't had the same kind of positive impact that we've seen in Camden and other cities by not only doing targeted policing, but really investing again in this all-of government and community approach that takes the village approach.

SPEAKER_01 23:56

How can, from sort of the reform advocacy side, can those that side of things promote the importance of policing in so much of this? And not the idea being that you want to promote clearances, you want to promote crimes getting solved, you want to promote that targeted enforcement. Um, you don't want to promote the tough on crime, the arrest quotas and arrests for the sake of arrests. How do you sort of walk that balance?

SPEAKER_00 24:24

Well, somebody like Mayor Q, who you just had on, is a great example of how you walk that balance. And every mayor who is thinking long and hard and following the evidence on public safety will say there is a specific and focused role for police, and that's in solving serious crime, having faster 911 call response times, building trust with the communities that they police, and actually closing cases. That is the most effective way to channel police. And then you also need more than police, certainly to respond to things like disorder and crisis, things that need a different response, like a mental health expert or a trained civilian expert. You can also have sort of the preventative factors. We talked about summer youth employment and programs and activities for young people and old people to do. And if a mayor, like again, Mayor Lucas and in Kansas City and many others, like if they're talking about these issues in that, again, holistic, it takes all of us a village approach, that's where it isn't an antagonistic relationship between police and the community, but they're actually seen as important players in a larger effort to deliver public safety. And let me point out a few other examples because I really do think making it concrete helps. Um, Mayor Brandon Scott in Baltimore, he does what every mayor before him has ever done, which is have press conferences around public safety. But in addition to having the police chief, he will have a community violence intervention worker. He'll have someone from the local summer youth program, he'll have educators there. And the fact that, again, he's modeling for his constituents, what does it look like to take a whole of government, whole of community, a village approach to public safety?

SPEAKER_01 26:12

And how would you encourage the policymaker that, you know, let's say you you are talking to a policymaker, they're in the middle of their four-year term or the year six of an eight-year term? They may only have a year or two left. And these are interventions that sometimes you don't see the results quickly. And the research takes a while to see it, and then you need a pilot and then to to make it bigger and ramp it up. And how do you encourage politicians to take on projects that aren't easy and won't inherently show results right away?

SPEAKER_00 26:47

Well, one thing is there are a number of these interventions that actually do show results pretty immediately. And we're talking about in a year or two, which in research terms is pretty much immediate. And so if I were counseling a mayor who is towards the end of their term, I'd say the most important thing you can do is set up the budget to invest in all of these programs that we're talking about. So that's one thing, because if the money isn't there, and we've seen in many places, it's not for a lack of effort or interest in all of these community-based programs. It's for a lack of money. And so mayors control the budget, uh, can, you know, convince their counterparts in local legislature to go along with them. And I think that that is a really important sort of, again, foundation for the next mayor or the next, you know, person who's who's sort of taking over city government. The one other thing is to focus on policing. There are actually changes that can be made to the police department that have, again, sort of important impact. For one thing, the police department in many cities is one of the largest budget items. Like in New York City, it's over a $6 billion budget every year for the police department. And an overall budget that's about $115 billion. That's a huge line item. And within that, making changes to encourage civilianization of certain tasks that right now sworn officers are doing. It's cheaper, it's also more effective. Redeploying officers and training them up to have more detectives, to have more 911 call operators who know how to work with civilian crisis response and other alternative responders. Those are all things that, again, they're not sexy. They're not going to make the sort of, you know, the nightly news, but they are really important, immediate changes that a mayor can make, and they will have lasting consequences for both the role of police as well as the role of community partners and programs in delivering public safety.

SPEAKER_01 28:48

And the the big question I sort of ask every guest is how do we close that gap between the actual crime trends, which are clearly falling and are falling at levels that we've really never seen before, um, and the perceptions which at best lag the actual data and at worst are completely divorced from the actual data?

SPEAKER_00 29:10

Jeff, you asked me what gives me hope, and here's one more thing is Gallup has asked every single year, do you think crime is going up or down? And as you know, every single year, including through the 2010s when crime was dropping, people said crime was going up. Last year's survey is the very first time we saw people say, actually, I think crime is going down. And crime is in fact going down. So I think the lag between perception and reality, maybe it's getting a little smaller. We've got a lot more work to do to make it even smaller, but we're making progress on that front. And here's how I think we actually do it. I think it's the work of the mayors that we've talked about who are owning the safety lane. They are going out and they are talking about it constantly, not just when the one bad thing happens, but every single day, wherever they show up, they're mentioning this program, this after-school basketball initiative, this, you know, school-based mental health program. And they are just connecting all of that back to preventing crime and breaking it cycle and making our community safer. And if we see a sort of constant drumbeat on the safety lane and just see more and more of our elected leaders who have large platforms owning this issue as opposed to only talking about it when faced with, you know, the microphone in their face, being asked about that one terrible incident, that's how I think we ultimately close the gap so that perception is closer to reality. But I will say this safety is one of those things we all want and we all deserve. And our sense of safety, mine, yours, even though we're data people, isn't actually shaped by the numbers. It's by what we perceive, what we see. And so it's why changing what people perceive, what people see, things as simple as fixing street lights and cleaning up the garbage makes people say my neighborhood is safer, even though it's actually got nothing to do with crime, but it has to do with the perception of crime.

SPEAKER_01 31:10

And what about when the opposite is of the present is the case? I'm I'm fascinated by this counterfactual that who knows if we'll ever see it. But at some point, crime is gonna stop falling like a rock. And maybe it doesn't start surging, but it starts to increase. How do you how do you own that as a politician while also being engaged in smart data-driven reform efforts?

SPEAKER_00 31:36

Yeah, there is essentially like there's gonna be a bottom to this plummeting crime rate that we have seen for the past couple of years. And I think when we hit it, what we need our elected leaders to do is to not run away from the bad news of crime ticking back up or just not continuing to drop. Again, we need them to own it and be like, one homicide, one assault, one crime is one too many. And here's what we are doing to prevent crime and break it cycle. And I think people, if you sort of think about it rationally, we all know that you can't get to zero. There's unlikely to ever be zero poverty, zero crime, right? But people appreciate, first of all, to see their elected leaders trying. That is a thing that in some of the public opinion research we do in our focus groups, we've heard people say, like, it might not be perfect, it might not work immediately, but I want to know that you care, that you acknowledge my concerns about this issue and that you're trying. And then in the trying, again, it's signaling constantly and talking about what's working, telling a story, telling an anecdote, so that people again have a sense of what's being done and have a sense of what's working and what isn't. And again, that creates sort of protective buffer for when the one bad incident, you know, makes the front page news.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

So, this question I've been asking, I'm really curious how it shapes your work, but what role does AI play in what you guys are doing? And how can it play a role of any sort? Do you see it playing any sort of role in the future?

SPEAKER_00 33:09

I do. I mean, tech and AI has already changed the work of criminal justice agencies, police in particular. Um, and there's an opportunity for technology and AI to change how we approach reform and advocacy and research as well. So at Vero, we are cautiously optimistic and careful about how we're using AI. I think we all have seen the stories in recent months of companies that have just said, go use AI, use it all the time. And they're sort of, you know, they have a leaderboard of their staff using AI and suddenly 500 million tokens a month later. We can't do that. We're a nonprofit. And not only do we not have those kinds of resources, I think we have a healthy and rightful skepticism about the next big shiny thing and wanting to make sure that our use of AI is smart, efficient, and also ethical. So I think there are really good ways to make some of the functions that we do every single day in a nonprofit organization, in a mission-driven organization, just become automated. So we free up time for the thing that only human beings can do, which is creative thinking and strategy and sort of putting expertise to bear.

SPEAKER_01 34:24

All right. And my last question is what is next for you and what's next for Vera?

SPEAKER_00 34:28

So what's next for us is twofold. One is continuing to make progress, whether incremental or big, on more safety and justice. And I'm in particular really excited by the quiet boom that we have seen across the country of investment in offices of community safety and offices of neighborhood safety. They've proliferated in a way that I think none of us would have predicted in 2020. But the investment from federal recovery dollars into cities to set up alternative crisis response and community violence intervention and other community-based solutions is remarkable. And we've been doing a lot of the work with cities across the country and communities across the country to really help those departments and those offices like come to fruition. And that's exciting work because it's actually deeply bipartisan. We're working in places that are very red and we're working in places that are very blue. And it's amazing to watch the level of agreement on this particular policy solution and intervention across the board, across the political spectrum. And then the other part of what's next is to the conversation we've been having that I think always is a sort of a valence of the policy conversation, is the political one. And I do think we have an opportunity as the midterms approach and we look to 2028 and the presidential cycle to bring issues of safety and justice back to the fore for both parties. And I think Republicans, and we work a lot with our partners on the center right, they are figuring out how do we get issues of justice reform back in the sort of mainstream of the Republican conversation. Republicans have actually led for many years on justice reform. And it feels like that is slipping away. And we know there's a real effort on the right to bring it back to the fore. And likewise, we've watched Democrats and the left run away from this issue. They think it is toxic. And so we've got work to do on the left as well to again bring this issue to the fore. And I feel strongly that there is a bigger we and a bigger tent around this issue. And again, if you look to where people are and not where the politics are, you see widespread belief and commitment to both safety and justice. And so that's what's next for us is continuing on the policy front and also continuing on tackling the politics because we need both.

SPEAKER_01 36:56

Great. Just small hurdles then.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

Small hurdles. But we can do it.

SPEAKER_01 36:59

Nothing big.

SPEAKER_00 37:00

We can do it. Believe in it.

SPEAKER_01 37:02

Inja Inja, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 37:06

Thanks for having me, Jeff. Wonderful to be here. Thanks for all you do.

SPEAKER_01 37:10

Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Jeffalytics Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and to learn more, head on over to ahdatalytics.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 Asher.