The Role of Policing in Our Society

Wight: In the late eighties, early nineties, when there was a spike and crime around the country, as many people saying that actually policing would make things worse. But it seems like calls for more police are the kind of calls that are acknowledged. Wight: There's an organic connection here between really bad economic policies that are making inequality worse, and turning our social problems over to the police to manage. We talk to james foreman junior, who wrote a book called locking up our own, which is about the role that black people in black neighborhoods played in mass incarceration.