Hey, consider this listeners. It's Audie Cornish and we've got a bonus episode for you.

Now, the story of this past week was the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial.

The former Minneapolis Police Officer was found guilty on three counts for the murder of George Floyd last year.

George Floyd's name is on a list, very long list of a centuries old history of black Americans dying at the hands of police.

But his case is one of the rare occurrences in which the officer responsible was held to account.

So why is it so rare?

To get at that, we need to go back in time to understand the present, which is what our colleagues at NPR's Throughline podcast are all about.

In this episode, host Romteen Arablui and Rund Abdel Fata set out to learn the origins of policing in America.

They take it from here.

Before we start the show, we want to give you a heads up that there are descriptions of graphic violence and other heavy content in this episode.

A few years ago, when we were developing what would become throughline, one of the first topics we wanted to learn more about was the history of policing.

This was a year after Freddie Gray died in the custody of Baltimore police.

We were searching for answers. We wanted to know how policing in America started and how the relationship between police and the black community had evolved to be one so bloody and tragic.

Our research led us to making an episode on the history of mass incarceration and we never got back to policing.

Then almost a year ago, millions of people around the world watched George Floyd die in police custody in what felt like an incredibly disturbing repetition, one that's been occurring for a very, very long time.

So soon after that happened, we recorded the conversation you'll hear in a minute.

The trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin that began last week is for murder and manslaughter charges in the death of George Floyd.

But it's also about the role of an institution at the heart of our society, part of a long historical legacy of what policing means in the United States of America.

My name is Khalil Debraan Muhammad. I'm a historian. I teach at the Harvard Kennedy School.

And he's the author of the book, the condemnation of blackness, race, crime, and the making of modern urban America.

In his book, Khalil lays out a historical argument for how black people have been criminalized over the last 400 years in the US.

And he does that by telling parallel narratives about the history of policing in the North and the South.

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