Investigating Police Crime

We begin with the response to what was seen on television, a white policeman murdering a black man before our eyes with demonstrations and protests in Minneapolis degenerating into burning and looting. Philip Stinson, a Professor in the Criminal Justice Program at Bowling Green University whose research interests include police crime, policy integrity and historical analyses/case studies of crime and trials, joins us. The author of Police Crime: The criminal behavior of sworn law enforcement officers, we discuss the role of smart phone video in shining a light on what has been going on in the shadows and continues to happen out of sight, and that is the actions of rogue police officers dispensing “street justice” invariably against the poor and minorities. With the Justice Department and FBI pledging “a robust investigation” we will assess whether good cops can purge their ranks of bad cops and why it is hard to bring murder charges against rogue cops even as large financial settlements appear not to have been a sufficient incentive for cities and municipalities to clean up their police departments of those who use the color of law to abuse and even kill citizens they are sworn to protect and serve.

 

Trump’s Attacks of Twitter Are About His Freedom to Continue to Lie

Then we speak with Thomas Nichols, a U.S. Navy War College University Professor and an adjunct at the U.S. Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies who is the author of The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. He joins us to discuss how Trump’s executive order to punish Twitter for flagging one of his tweets claiming mail-in ballots create massive fraud as requiring a fact-check, is not as he claims striking a blow against censorship in the name of free speech, but really about ensuring Trump’s freedom to continue to lie.

The Pandemic as the Fourth Turning Point After 9/11, the 2008 Crash and Climate Change

Then finally we look into how the last 3 major crises 9/11 and the lost wars in the Middle East, the financial crash of 2008 and bailouts, and the climate crisis are turning points in American history, now joined by a fourth, the pandemic. Greg Grandin, a Professor of History at Yale University who just won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for his new book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, joins us. We discuss how Trump’s border wall and his claim he closed the border with China to stop a virus which has killed over 100,000 Americans so far, is a way to wall off capitalism’s limits and its pain, without having to challenge it’s terms, while his response to the pandemic, exposes the anti-government ideology of Republicans as delusional.