Vida Johnson: Police Bias and Testimony

Vida B. Johnson is an Associate Professor of law at Georgetown Law where she teaches in the criminal defense clinics. She writes about policing and criminal procedure. She received her law degree from NYU and her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Johnson discusses her two articles on police bias. First, we talk about her article, "Bias in Blue: Instructing Jurors to Consider the Testimony of Police Officer Witnesses with Caution" where…

Philip Reichel: Slave Patrols: Origins of the Police

During his more than 45 years in academia, Professor Reichel has received awards for teaching, advising, service, and scholarship. He is the author of several textbooks and has authored or co-authored more than forty articles and book chapters. His areas of expertise include comparative justice systems, transnational crime generally, and human trafficking more specifically. Professor Reichel discusses his articles "Southern slave patrols as a transitional police type" and "The…

Adam Malka: Rise of Baltimore Police

Adam Malka is an Associate Professor of U.S. History at the University of Oklahoma. Professor Malka discusses his book "The Men of Mobtown" exploring how the free black population of the antebellum South came to be controlled and policed. We explore the roles and expectations of white citizens and how black freedom came to define criminal behavior.

Alexis Hoag: Race and the Death Penalty

Alexis Hoag, Practitioner in Residence at Columbia Law School’s Holder Initiative, discusses the systemic racial issues at the heart of our Judicial system. Professor Hoag is an anti-death penalty advocate who recently published, "Valuing Black Lives: A Case for Ending the Death Penalty" and argued before the Ohio Supreme Court advocating for Glen Bates.

Jessica Katzenstein: Problems in Police Training

Police reform advocates often push police departments to move from fear-laden “warrior” survival trainings and toward reality-based or scenario trainings, which involve immersive role-playing scenarios such as making an arrest. Scenario trainings promise to teach officers to suppress fear, counter racial bias, and calibrate “reasonable” uses of force. But these trainings often fall short of their promise and end up reinforcing the threats and survival mindset. Drawing on 16 months of…

White Supremacy Part 7: Carceral Society and Abolition

Chiamaka Echebiri on White Supremacy, Christy Lopez on Carceral Logic, Anna Preston on Prisons and Mental Health, a debate between Micheal Javen and Marie Gottschalk, and finally an article by Jack Norton from the "New York Review of Books."