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Can Policing Be Reformed?

Erwin Chemerinsky on police brutality, plus Eyal Press on dirty work.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

September 30, 2021

Many proposals to reform the police were made after the Black Lives Matter protests of last summer the largest protest movement in American history. But the problem, Erwin Chemerinsky argues, is not just the police; the Supreme Court has empowered the police and subverted civil rights. Erwin is dean of the law school at UC Berkeley, and author of many books—most recently, Presumed Guilty.

Also: dirty work—and the people who do it: the low-income workers who do our most ethically troubled jobs. Eyal Press will explain—his new book is Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America.

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Start Making SenseTwitterStart 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 WienerTwitterJon 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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