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Close your eyes and tell me about a time when you felt safe.

Went around like my friends and family, like people that all have a history of building each other up.

Like, you know, nowadays I'm living on my own out here, going to college and whatnot in, you know,

especially with this last election. D.C. getting wild.

Like, I don't feel safe around here like that no more.

When was the time that I felt safe?

I would have to go almost back to childhood

because, like, as an adult, especially, like, as a black person in America, I don't really feel safe.

But, yeah, like, childhood, being around my mom, I think that may be back 30-some-odd years years ago since I've really felt safe. It's Notes from America.

I'm Kai Wright.

Welcome to the show.

We are in the final weeks of the life of this show.

And the broader reporting project that it grew out of at our home station, WNYC.

At the end of the year, we'll stop making the show and turn to the next adventure.

And so we're thinking about some of the questions that we've asked most often during our run here, the stuff that just keeps coming up as we

try to understand life in these United States. One of those topics is public safety. How do we make

ourselves feel safe? How do we make ourselves actually safe? These are questions I've pursued

in one way or another for a couple of decades as a journalist,

and I'm pretty clear at this point that what we're doing right now is not the answer. For that

matter, there's not a lot of evidence that it was ever even intended to be the answer,

at least not for my communities. Black people, queer people,

...