No Special Duty

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

History, Science, Documentary, Natural Sciences, Society & Culture

4.6 • 44.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2020

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What are the police for? Producer B.A. Parker started wondering this back in June, as Black Lives Matter protests and calls to “defund the police” ramped up. The question led her to a wild story of a stabbing on a New York City subway train, and the realization that, according to the law, the police don’t always have to protect us. Producer Sarah Qari joins Parker to dig into the legal background, which takes her all the way up to the Supreme Court... and then all the way back down to on-duty officers themselves. This episode contains strong language and graphic violence. Reported and produced by B.A. Parker and Sarah Qari, and produced by Matt Kielty and Pat Walters. Special thanks to April Hayes and Katia Maguire for their documentary Home Truth about Jessica Gonzales, Cracked.com for sending us down this rabbit hole, Caroline Bettinger-López, Geoff Grimwood, Christy Lopez, Anthony Herron, Mike Wells, and Keith Taylor. Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wait, you're listening.
0:03.1	Okay.
0:04.4	All right.
0:05.6	Okay.
0:07.0	All right.
0:08.5	You're listening to Radio Lab.
0:11.4	Radio Lab.
0:11.9	From W. N. Y.
0:13.9	C.
0:14.8	See?
0:15.1	Yeah.
0:19.3	Hey, I'm Chad Abumrah. This is Radio Lab. Quick warning. This episode contains some strong
0:25.5	language and graphic violence. So if you are listening with kids, you might want to sit this one out.
0:31.8	But okay, with that out of the way, we'll start things off with... Recording. parker oh boy all right do you know i mean
0:40.5	do you have a sense of where you want to start sure okay it all began i think in june you know the
0:46.9	george floyd protests were happening in full flux in in new york and parker says since she was a journalist and forbidden from protesting, she was just stuck
0:59.2	in her apartment.
1:00.2	Feeling kind of helpless.
1:02.9	And just spending a lot of her time thinking.
1:05.7	And I wound up having this like genuinely befuddling thought of just like, wait, what exactly is the police for?
1:18.3	You mean like what is their job?
1:20.2	Yes.
	...

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