The New Yorker Radio Hour

As the Black Lives Matter movement brought sustained national attention to police shootings of unarmed Black people, there have been many efforts made around the country to reform policing. The movement also became associated with police abolition and the controversial call for defunding. Kai Wright, the host of WNYC’s “Notes from America,” convenes a panel to look at the effects of the movement on policing, talking to the policy analyst Samuel Sinyangwe, of Mapping Police Violence; the attorney Anya Bidwell, of the Institute for Justice; and Michael White, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Assessing the results of reform efforts remains difficult, because obstacles exist even to the collecting of data. “We have a system of eighteen thousand different law-enforcement agencies, each with their own set of policies and practices, their own department culture,” Sinyangwe says, and yet certain patterns are repeated year after year: Black people, he says, “are abo