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The kindest thing i've done on the subway, it was, like in february, i saw a girl crying, and i gave her a tissue. And now that the coveits happened, i know that i won't do that any more. You just give her an ampathetic frowned face ross across the waylike, i'm sorry, ma'am. Im sorry. I'm moing to leave this clean x right over here, and you can come and get it from me. Like it takes two, like a a badly wounded guy and a gy with some napkins to defeat a seril killer here.

Since the massacre that took the lives of 19 schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas, people across the world began to ask versions of one question: why did police wait outside the door instead of protecting the kids?

It's not the first time this question has come up. Two years ago, as she watched police respond to the protests that followed the death of George Floyd, Producer B.A. Parker wondered: what are police for? With the help of our Producer Sarah Qari, she found that the United States’ Supreme Court had given this a most consequential and bewildering answer.

We decided to re-air this episode to shed light on how a case from 2005 upended our assumptions about the role police are meant to play in our lives.

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