Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is June 23, 2020, and my guest is Franklin Zimmering, the William G. Simon Professor of Law,

and the Faculty Director of Criminal Justice Studies at the Law School at the University of California, Berkeley.

He's the author of numerous books, including When Police Kill, which is the subject of today's conversation.

Frank, welcome to Econ Talk.

Well, thank you for having me.

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Frank, your book was published in 2017. A lot has happened since then, much of it tragic.

But I want to start with where your book starts, which is you talk about the fact that there are two ways that the state takes the lives of the people here.

One is through capital punishment, the execution of criminals who have been convicted of crimes, the other is through the actions of police officers.

And until 2014, there was an enormous amount of attention focused on the death penalty and very little on the deaths from police action.

Why was that the case before 2014?

Well, it's a very simple political fact that what happens with executions and execution policy, state by state, is that we aggregate it.

But the fact that we have 18,000 different police departments and that the police department is the operational unit to focus on,

meant that each police killing happened as a separate news event.

And we never added them up. So what happens is that you have 20 to 40 executions in the United States.

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