Why Police Reform Fails

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

News

4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2021

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Six years after Ferguson, St. Louis hasn’t seen a single substantive police reform. A group of young Black leaders have instead set their sights higher: taking control of city politics.

In 2014, then-Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown. His death sparked reports, blue-ribbon commissions and countless police reform efforts. But so many of those reforms fell short of their stated goals. Today, St. Louis leads the nation in police killings per capita.

As the nation continues to grapple with how to save Black lives from police violence, we’re partnering with The Missouri Independent to examine why police reform efforts so often fail. We follow a new generation of leaders who, as a part of the Ferguson movement, are finding new ways to change policing in the St. Louis region. Reporters Trey Bundy and Rebecca Rivas follow local activist Kayla Reed, who went from attending protests to organizing them. After years of frustratingly slow progress toward reform, Reed transformed herself into a political powerbroker who is upending city politics.

And there’s no way to talk about police reform without talking about the power of police unions. We look how the St. Louis Police Officers Association, the city’s main union, formed to protect white police officers from accountability after beating a Black man. And we talk with James Buchanan, one of the city’s few Black police officers in the 1960s, who went on to help start the Ethical Society of Police, a union founded by Black officers to fight for racial equity in the department and community.

This show is guest hosted by Kameel Stanley, executive producer of Witness Docs, a documentary podcast network from Stitcher and SiriusXM.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Alan. I hope 2022 has been a good year for you. But to be honest, it's been a tough one for us.
0:08.0	This year, Reveal was struck by a financial crisis that jeopardized our very existence.
0:14.0	But we've rallied, and all the while that was happening, our staff forged ahead to produce ambitious investigations
0:22.0	that exposed corruption and abuses that the powerful interests did not want revealed.
0:27.0	Because that's what we do. If we're going to keep telling these kind of stories though, we're going to need support from you.
0:34.0	To support fearless investigative nonprofit journalism, please donate by December 31st.
0:41.0	Just visit revealnews.org slash 2023. Again, to donate to the show and to support our work into the future.
0:48.0	Please visit revealnews.org slash 2023. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
1:05.0	From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Camille Stanley, filling in for Owl Letson.
1:12.0	Owl's working on a big series that you're going to be hearing a lot more about in the coming months.
1:18.0	I'm the executive producer of Witness Docs from Stitcher. We make great podcasts about complicated people.
1:26.0	Today on Reveal, change. How do we make it happen?
1:32.0	We have to come together.
1:34.0	President Biden, speaking this month before a joint session of Congress.
1:38.0	Throughout systemic racism in our criminal justice system. And on act police reform, George Floyd's name.
1:45.0	Police reform. It's one of those phrases that gets thrown around a lot. But what does it really mean?
1:52.0	What does real reform look like?
1:55.0	It's been just a few weeks since former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty for the murder of George Floyd.
2:04.0	And already, it's hard to keep track of all the police killings that have happened since.
2:11.0	So, as the nation grapples with police reform, we're going to look at a region where it's been fought over.
2:18.0	Maybe more than anywhere else for the last six years. It's the place where I live, St. Louis.
2:35.0	Musters person immediately. Now this is an order. We're subject to a arrest or an interaction.
	...

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