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So we talk a lot on this show about how academics and institutions are mobilized into

knowledge production supporting the status quo, whether in healthcare, welfare reform,

carcerality, or any sort of other policy arena. But it's not every

day that we see pure ideology of the kind that we have to talk about today. Today, we're going to

talk about a paper from two Harvard professors out with the bold claim that we have an injustice

of under-policing in the United States

and that they have found the cure, which is 500,000 more cops now.

So the article is called, quote,

the injustice of under-policing in America,

and it's by philosopher and legal scholar Christopher Lewis

and sociologist Adonner Usmani. And it was

recently published in the American Journal of Law and Equality. So the top line thing to remember

about this is, I mean, it's right in the name. One of the most offensive titles that I think

I've seen from a paper in, I mean, at least this year.

No, absolutely. And as you may have heard from other critiques of this paper that's been going

around, it's essentially that they're advocating for 500,000 more cops, and we'll get into the

specifics of that in a bit. But the bottom line is that they say that the addition of this

half a million

more police officers will be able to reduce the U.S. reliance on mass incarceration and long prison

sentences. And they sort of frame this as a very politically feasible option. And there's so much

to get into in terms of how that argument is constructed ultimately,

...