Defund—and Disarm—the Police

Defund—and Disarm—the Police

Kelly Lytle Hernandez, D.D. Guttenplan, and Zoë Carpenter.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener
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Defunding the police and reimagining public safety—in Los Angeles—starts with the LAPD, but includes the sheriffs, the school police, and the UCLA police force. Kelly Lytle Hernandez comments—she’s a professor of history at UCLA; author of City of Inmates, a history of the LA jails; and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant.

Also: it’s time to disarm the police. They didn’t always carry guns, and there are other big cities in the world where most cops are not armed—like London. D.D. Guttenplan, editor of The Nation, explains.

Also: Black Lives Matter protests are everywhere, even the most unlikely places: for example, Laramie, Wyoming; Florence, Alabama; and even Vidor, Texas—it’s a former Ku Klux Klan haven that Texas Monthly described as the state’s “most hate-filled town.” Nation contributing writer Zoë Carpenter reports.

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Start Making Sense Start Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon Wiener Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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