California Sun Podcast

Connie Rice, the long-time Los Angeles civil rights lawyer and activist, has played an important role in the transformation of the LAPD. Yet she looks at our current moment and reminds us that the police rank-and-file still have a long way to go. In minority communities, she says, police are the preeminent symbol of systemic oppression and racism further fueled by a lack of economic justice.

Lt. Ben Kelso, a 30-year veteran of the San Diego police force and the president of the Black Officers Association of San Diego, gives us an inside view of policing and race in Southern California. Sitting astride two worlds, he details the pain, anger, and opportunity of the moment. It's a view of law enforcement from inside the squad room.

Peiley Lau a researcher at the UC Berkeley Global Lab explains a new study showing that nearly 1.7 million coronavirus infections may have been avoided in California — and many more throughout the world — thanks to policies that kept people at home. It was a collective action unlike anything that has ever happened.

Eloy Ortiz Oakley, the chancellor of California's community college system oversees the largest education system in the country with more than 2.1 million students and 115 colleges. That puts Oakley on the front line of many of the social and policy problems we now face. At a time of growing enrollment and shrinking budgets, the college system is confronting the challenges of moving education online, training our next generation of police and first responders, anticipating the employment needs of the future, and navigating a system that is awash with diversity and racial tension.

California's chief election officer, Secretary of State Alex Padilla brings the background of a long-time politician and his training as an engineer to the challenge of ensuring safe and secure voting. From mail-in ballots to recruiting a whole new generation of poll workers, it's going to be a tough year to oversee California's next election.

The California-based journalists Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano reported extensively on the 2018 Camp Fire. Their coverage from the day the inferno began through the refugee crisis that followed gave them special access to the lives, forever changed, in the community of Paradise. In the shadow of our current pandemic, and as a dry winter gives way to the winds of fall, there is much to learn from the story they share in their new book "Fire in Paradise."

Steve Inskeep has hosted NPR's "Morning Edition" since 2004. He is also a popular author and historian, and his latest book "Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Fremont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War" looks at the life of the 19th-century explorer who defined westward expansion, coined the name "Golden Gate" for the strait into the San Francisco Bay, and helped shape the ideas of reinvention and celebrity and give us the legacy of California today.

Richard Rushfield has been covering Hollywood for several decades and he says has never seen it as vulnerable as it is today. Your Netflix cue is shrinking, movie theaters may not open for months if at all, production has stopped, even well-paid talent is scared. With Apple, Amazon, AT&T, and Netflix being the new Hollywood money, we are also about to see if the Northern California values of the tech world can coexist with the Southern California values of Hollywood.

Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin is one of the youngest mayors in the Bay Area. He is Berkeley's first Latino mayor, and also serves as the president of the Association of Bay Area Governments. He leads a city that faced enormous homelessness and housing challenges before the pandemic, and today faces both crises, now compounded by economic turmoil that Arreguin says is closer to the Great Depression than to the 2008 financial crisis. He believes however that the caring spirit of his iconic city will prevail.

Carl Nolte has spent 60 years at the San Francisco Chronicle. A fourth-generation San Franciscan, Nolte has seen it all, and still, he says, he feels a sense of surprise on every block. The current crises, however, have made him long for a city he may never see again. As he says, he knows what's going on all over the world, but suddenly he's not sure what's happening nearby in Chinatown or the Mission or Noe Valley.