Hello and I'm here, as a host,

Hello and welcome to the Katie Halper show.

I'm a host Katie Halper and I'm here as always with my lovely co-host.

Lovely, yes.

Yes, right?

It's an appropriate word, right?

Yeah, man.

Thank you for starting off with some flattery.

You of course can hear the Katie Halper show every Wednesday at 7 PM on WBAI, that's 99.5 FM,

WBA.org. You can find us this little old mom and pop show, known as the Katie Hopper show. You can find us

on iTunes Sound Cloud. So on today's show we speak to Alex Vitali the author of

the end of Policing and he's a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the

coordinator of the policing and social justice project there.

He spent the last 25 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human

rights organizations internationally.

He is also a frequent essayist whose writings have appeared in the New York Daily News,

New York Times Nation, Gotham Gazette and New Inquiry.

His website is Alex-Vatale.

So can you tell us where the idea for this book came from?

I have been working on policing issues for over like 25 years and for most of that

time there really wasn't a whole lot of sustained organizing around policing. What

there would be was these kind of episodic

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