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.

We cannot back down

We now confront a second Trump presidency.

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The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

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Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

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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