This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Solvable. I'm Jacob Weisberg.

There is a lack of accountability for police violence, and one part of solving that is to give federal prosecutors more tools so they can actually prosecute these cases.

Approximately 1,000 people are killed during police encounters in the United States every year.

And in fact, that number is held steady for nearly 20 years.

Around half of those killed are white.

Black Americans are more than twice as likely to die at the hands of police.

They are killed disproportionately to their overall representation in the population.

I'm thinking about, say, the shooting of Philando

Castile outside Minneapolis, Tamir Rice, you know, a 12-year-old boy who was shot and killed

by an officer when playing in a park in Cleveland. How do we achieve racial justice while

protecting public safety? Lawyer Chirog Baines believes the federal government has a key

role to play.

What exactly would you like to see happen there?

For Congress to lower the intense standard from willfulness to recklessness,

so that it would be a federal crime to recklessly deprive someone of their rights under color of law,

to recklessly use excessive force.

For all the Americans who died during police encounters, in less than 2% of cases,

does an officer end up being charged with a crime?

When you were at DOJ, how many times did that specific language of willful thwart a possible

prosecution of an officer you felt had done something wrong?

Routinely, that was the biggest barrier.

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