Changing the Police: Reckoning with the Past

Embedded

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News, Documentary, News Commentary, Society & Culture

4.7 • 12.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2022

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For a long time, the police department in Yonkers, New York had a reputation as overly aggressive, especially when it came to policing the poorer parts of the city. There were lots of stories of "bad apples"-police officers who allegedly roughed people up or planted drugs during random stops and arrests. Eventually, the U.S. Department of Justice stepped in to investigate. Now the Yonkers Police Department says it is transforming. With the help of a progressive police chief, it has adopted new policies and procedures to minimize force and make the police more accountable to the public. As Embedded, in partnership with The Marshall Project, continues its look at police reform in one American city, we confront a question many of those who say they were mistreated by the police have raised: is it enough? For some alleged victims the answer is clear: there can never be real reform until the police have fully accounted for the wrongs of the past.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Just a warning before we get started, this episode has some strong language.
0:04.6	Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Embedded from NPR.
0:08.9	Why don't we just kind of start from the beginning? It was January 5th.
0:14.0	It was a Friday, 2000.
0:16.6	It was a Friday.
0:18.5	So, what happened was...
0:22.4	Naima Yancy remembers a lot about that day.
0:25.6	It was a Friday, and...
0:28.4	She was 23, had recently finished college, was living with her mom in Yonkers,
0:33.8	and her mom had taken in a teenage foster daughter, who Naima was in charge of that day.
0:39.9	At one point, the girl ran out the door, and so Naima gets in her car to try to find her.
0:47.1	Pulls up to a corner where there's a stop sign.
0:49.6	I can clearly see the cop sitting on the hill watching this stop sign.
0:54.3	And Naima says she stopped the car, and then made it right.
0:58.1	And as soon as I do that, he makes the U-turn.
1:01.9	And I'm like, I know he's not about to stop me.
1:05.6	The cop does stop her.
1:07.6	Naima pulls over, the cop asks for her license.
1:11.2	So I say, like, I don't have my license.
1:13.6	I was looking for my foster sister, and he was like, well, where is she?
1:17.4	I was like, I don't know. She ran away.
1:19.9	And then I was like, but I stopped at that stop sign.
	...

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