The Three Numbers Your Mayor Doesn't Want You Asking About

Government has exactly one job it can't hand off to the private sector, and that's keeping citizens alive long enough to complain about everything else it does badly. I spent years working private security and pulling shifts as a licensed EMT in Los Angeles before I ever ran a hedge fund or testified as an expert witness in federal court, so I learned early that “public safety” isn't a slogan on a campaign mailer. It's a stopwatch, a phone call, and a decision some prosecutor makes at 9 AM about whether the man arrested for the fourth time this year goes home for lunch.

Three numbers tell you whether government is doing the one job the Preamble actually assigns it. How long it takes when you dial 911. Whether the FBI catches who it says it catches. And whether your district attorney prosecutes crime or waves it through the courthouse like a maître d' seating a latecomer.

Start with the phone call. Police response to the most urgent, life-threatening calls averages somewhere between 6 and 10 minutes nationally. That number hides a brutal geographic split: urban departments average roughly eight minutes while rural counties run closer to 25. And where anyone bothers to publish it, the trend runs in the wrong direction. An analysis of 15 law enforcement agencies found response times increasing in nearly all of them between 2019 and 2022 as departments bled officers to retirements, resignations, and recruiting shortfalls that never got solved. New Orleans is the extreme case: average response climbed from 51 minutes to 146 minutes over three years. If you're bleeding out on your kitchen floor or a stranger just kicked in your back door, the distance between “six minutes” and “146 minutes” is the entire gap between a government doing its job and one that's checked out and gone home.

Now the FBI. Director Kash Patel isn't shy about the numbers: eight of the Bureau's 10 Most Wanted fugitives captured in his first 14 months, twice the total the FBI notched across all four years of the Biden administration, he says. The preliminary 2025 data the Bureau released in May backs a broader claim of historic improvement: murder down an estimated 18.1 percent, robbery down 18.5 percent, aggravated assault down 7.2 percent, all against 2024. The Council on Criminal Justice puts the resulting national homicide rate near 4.0 per 100,000, the lowest figure recorded since 1900. Credit where it's earned. That's a real number, and as a numbers guy by trade, I'll take it.

I'll also give you the other side, because a fund manager who only reads the statistics that flatter his position loses money and eventually his reputation. Multiple current and former agents told reporters that some of Patel's fugitive captures involved suspects added to the Most Wanted list mere hours before their arrest, inflating a headline count without taking anyone genuinely new off the street. The Bureau called the allegation false and noted the eight fugitives had collectively evaded capture for more than 60 years combined. Both things can be true at once. The underlying crime numbers are real, independently tracked by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice, and a federal bureaucracy under new leadership still has every institutional incentive to pad a stat sheet before a Senate hearing. Trust the murder rate. Read the press release on fugitive counts with one eyebrow raised.

Then there's the local level, where I think the real accountability gap actually sits. Washington's U.S. Attorney's office declined to prosecute just 19 percent of arrests in fiscal 2025, its lowest declination rate in decades and down from a startling 66 percent only three years earlier. That's not a rounding error. That's the difference between a government that arrests people for show and one that actually convicts them. Compare that to Colorado, where prosecutors in Boulder's judicial district resolved 34 percent of felony cases and half of all misdemeanors last year through dismissal, diversion, or deferred judgment, driven partly by attorney vacancy rates that top 50 percent in some offices. A prosecutor's office that can't staff itself is functionally the same as one that's chosen not to prosecute. The defendant walks either way.

Cashless bail belongs in the same conversation, and it's more genuinely contested than either side admits. Yolo County's own district attorney found that defendants released without bail were rearrested for 163 percent more crimes than those who posted bail. New York's Data Collaborative for Justice found the opposite in New York City, where felony re-arrest rates fell after the state's 2019 bail reforms. But a companion study of the state's suburban and upstate counties found recidivism rose specifically among defendants with a recent violent felony arrest released without bail. My read, from a decade testifying as a designated expert witness in state and federal matters: aggregate statistics wash out exactly the cases that matter most. A system that treats a repeat violent offender identically to a first-time shoplifter isn't reform. It's an abdication dressed up as equity.

I coached youth sports for years, and the first thing you teach a teenager is that consequences which never arrive don't teach anything at all. A DA who declines to prosecute, a 911 call that takes 146 minutes, a fugitive list quietly padded for a press conference, these aren't separate failures. They're the same failure wearing three different uniforms: government treating its most basic constitutional function as optional whenever it's politically inconvenient.

The national murder rate is falling, and this administration deserves genuine credit. But falling from a pandemic-era high isn't the same as safe, and a family waiting on a 911 dispatcher in New Orleans doesn't care what the national average says. Measure your own city. Call your DA's office and ask for the declination rate. Ask your police chief for actual Priority 1 response times, not a cherry-picked average. If neither one will give you a straight number, you already have your answer about how seriously they take the one job they can't outsource.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.

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