Robberies are up. WBEZ’s Alden Loury looked at data from last year and found that robberies were at a six-year peak, and armed robberies led the surge.

What do those numbers mean? And what causes someone to pick up a weapon and rob somebody? In this episode, Rundown podcast host Erin Allen talks with Loury and criminologist David Olson, who co-directs Loyola University’s Center for Criminal Justice, about the causes of crime, strategies to reduce it and the effectiveness of “tough on crime” laws and rhetoric.

“Anything that’s easy, usually isn’t very effective,” Olson said. “It’s easy to quote ‘get tough on crime’ because usually all it means is we pass a law, right? The challenge with that is it really has no effect on crime because rarely do those tougher penalties ever get imposed.”