Are You a Police Officer?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Sarakari: What most police officers want to be doing is standing between the general public and violence. sarakari: The actual mandates for what police are supposed to be doing are kind of internal to the police departments themselves. It's city charters that rated police forces in those cities chargers, that say things like a, protect the peace, maintain order, enforce the law.

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.

Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.

Radiolab is on YouTube! (https://zpr.io/MTSFMLXQWDkE) Catch up with new episodes and hear classics from our archive. Plus, find other cool things we did in the past — like miniseries, music videos, short films and animations, behind-the-scenes features, Radiolab live shows, and more. Take a look, explore and subscribe!