Police

Border Patrol with Kelly Lytle Hernández

08 Aug 2020
Dan interviews Kelly Lytle Hernández on MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol.

Cops and Counterinsurgency with Stuart Schrader

24 Jul 2020
Our police system is a product of Cold War US imperialism too. Dan interviews Stuart Schrader on Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.

Defund Police Organizers Forum

20 Jun 2020
A Dig special. Zoom forum Dan hosted with leading defund police organizers from around the country. For more info:

Resisting the School-to-Prison Pipeline

27 May 2018
The steady pace of school massacres has revived calls to put more cops in school. And so atrocities committed by white students are exploited to make schools more like prisons, and ensure that the former...

Dorothy Roberts: Policing Poor Black Families

12 May 2018
Recent cases of horrific child abuse have elicited widespread media attention. What the media coverage often misses is what these incidents reveal about a two-tiered child protection system that systemically surveils, punishes and destroys poor...

Comey Liberal Cop Fetish

27 Apr 2018
James Comey is liberal America’s favorite cop and now, as a result, a bestselling author as well. Patrick Blanchfield returns to talk about his Baffler review of Comey’s new book. It’s awful, of course. But...

Real Sanctuary Means Ending Mass Policing with Kade Crockford

25 Mar 2018
Perhaps nothing has more defined the monstrosity of Donald Trump than his racist demonization and targeting of immigrants from Mexico, Muslim-majority countries and those nations he deems to be “shitholes” or, according to another account,...

Baltimore’s Crisis Continues with Lester Spence

03 Feb 2018
The uprising following the police killing of Freddie Gray drew national media attention to Baltimore and the abusive law enforcement agents that discipline and control those most exploited and excluded by contemporary American capitalism. As...

The Origins of the Opioid Crisis with Leo Beletsky

28 Nov 2017
The drug war is a cause of, not solution to, the overdose crisis. Law and public health scholar @LeoBeletsky explains the origins of the opioid overdose crisis and how drug prohibition, policing, interdiction and incarceration...

Bonus: Alex Vitale v. Heather MacDonald

27 Nov 2017
We’ve got a bonus episode for you today, which is audio from a debate between Alex Vitale—a recent guest on this show, sociologist and author of The End of Policing—and Heather Mac Donald, one of...

Policing for the Market with Brenden Beck

03 Nov 2017
Why have the size of American police departments grown so dramatically in recent decades, even as crime rates have fallen? One factor may have been the growing centrality of real estate for urban economies, according...

We must end policing as we know it with Alex Vitale

17 Oct 2017
In his new book The End of Policing Brooklyn College sociologist @avitale makes the case that technocratic reforms won’t fix American policing. In reality, we can only fix policing by ending the carceral state and...