From WNYC Studios.

I'm Brian Lerer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Thursday, March 23rd.

Can the police be reformed?

Many people are losing faith in the idea that police reform, as opposed to just

reducing police presence, can work to stop crimes and tragedies like the killings of George Floyd,

Tyree Nichols, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, and so many others. That's the point of the defund the

police movement. It's from despair that police community relations can ever actually be strong enough in heavily

police communities to really protect public safety, safety from civilian street crime

and safety from police violence and mass incarceration that destroys communities at the same time.

But a new book by a former police officer makes the case that police reform is possible.

The author and former police officer is Neil Gross, now a sociology professor at Colby College.

His book is called Walk the Walk, How Three Police Chiefs Defied the the odds and change cop culture. Neil, thanks for

coming on. Welcome to WNYC. Brian, thank you very much for having me. Would you tell us some of your own

story first? Where'd you grow up? What made you want to become a cop? Sure. So I grew up in the

San Francisco Bay area, in the East Bay, and I got interested in policing in the late 80s and early 90s. This was a time when crime was really high in the country, much higher certainly than it is now. And it was particularly high in California and in my city.

So in high school, I got the notion, as many young people do who go into policing,

that I could do something to protect the community by going into law enforcement

and set that as my goal.

I have that as my aim in high school, worked part-time for various police

departments while I was in college, and I went to UC Berkeley, graduated there, and got hired

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