The following are podcast episodes on policing. To access the episodes, click on the title of the section.
Each episode of The Inquiry interviews four experts on a given topic. In this episode, they interview experts on implicit bias and police training. Among the experts interviewed is Charles Ramsey, a prominent police chief who co-chaired a task force on police reform established by President Obama. The episode proposes that the relatively high incidence of police killings of unarmed black men is a consequence of implicit bias, training that primes police to perceive danger, and an over-reliance on policing.
Videos of police interactions with the public have become commonplace, but their proliferation is historically unique. It seems obvious that they are reshaping Americans’ attitudes about policing. In a series of episodes in March 2017, Embedded looked at three police videos. In one, a black man is killed by police in Charlotte, North Carolina. In another, a police officer is killed in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the third, an officer de-escalates an encounter in Flagstaff, Arizona. To access the episodes, scroll down to March 2017.
In 2012 Rialto, California adopted the use of police body cameras. An early study of this adoption showed promising results. Police use of force declined, and so did public complaints. However, in 2015 Washington, DC adopted the use of body cameras, and the promising results of the Rialto Study were not replicated.
The Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013. The immediate catalyst for its formation was the acquittal of George Zimmerman of the murder of Trayvon Martin. Patrisse Cullors is one of the movement’s founders. In this June 2, 2020 interview, she argues in favor of reducing spending on police and increasing spending on social services so that the first responders to mental health and homelessness issues are someone other than police.
Alex Vitale is the author of The End of Police. He writes about the historic origins of policing and argues that police are not equipped with the tools and training necessary to address the societal issues they are tasked with addressing. This is just one of his many interviews available as podcast episodes, which can be found by searching his name in a podcast app.
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