I am in France for the week so there was no weekly newsletter, but there is a great new podcast! Back on Monday with another great analysis.
Today’s guest is Andy Wheeler, a renowned criminologist, data scientist, and founder of Crime Decoder. Andy is a terrific voice for explaining the role technology can play in analyzing and decreasing crime as well as the barriers to adopting new techniques and technologies.
We talk through Andy’s work with police departments, including crime trend monitoring, predictive analytics, focused deterrence, and the challenge of turning data into useful operational decisions. We also discuss the practical realities of artificial intelligence in criminal justice. Rather than focusing on the hype around AI replacing workers or transforming society overnight, Andy walks through how these tools are actually being used today: helping analysts write code, automate repetitive work, build dashboards, and make better use of messy public safety data.
This is a great conversation about how the future of criminal justice analysis is already here.
Andrew P. Wheeler, PhD and founder of CRIME De-Coder, collaborates with police departments across the United States on custom software and data analytics. His work focuses on predictive analytics, operations research, and policy analysis. See his firm and other resources at https://crimede-coder.com/.
Andy also has a recent book, *Large Language Models for Mortals: A Practical Guide for Analysts with Python*, https://crimede-coder.com/blogposts/2026/LLMsForMortals
You can also catch it on the Jeff-alytics YouTube page where I’ll be posting episodes and video clips, so be sure to like and subscribe there if you’re so inclined!
And while you’re here, be sure to check out these other recent great episodes:
Filmmaker Lynn Novick
Georgetown Professor Christy Lopez
Yale School of Public Health Dr. Megan Ranney
Fund for a Safer Future CEO Rob Wilcox
