Systemic

This spring, the nation held its breath as Derek Chauvin, the officer charged with murdering George Floyd, went on trial. Was the officer a single bad apple, or a symptom of a broken system? Nekima Levy-Armstrong is a former law professor who gave up her career to become a full-time activist. Since then, she’s spent the better part of a decade pushing for police reform, and played a pivotal role in the movement that followed Floyd’s death. In this year when rethinking law enforcement is at the center of a global conversation, Nekima is working to hold those in power accountable for change.

On this episode, we follow an officer in leadership who’s working to reform policing from the top down. As director of public safety in the small community of Franklin Township, New Jersey, she’s taking a hard look at the diversity of her department, and addressing how officers interact with the community they serve.

Against the backdrop of George Floyd’s death and nationwide Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Colorado legislators won praise for swiftly passing an ambitious law meant to punish future abuses by police officers. But part of the genesis for that law began in 2019 amidst a different set of police protests after the death of a Black man in Colorado Springs. That moment left a grieving family searching for answers in a complicated and frustrating legal system.

Meet two Black police officers — a young officer in the Minneapolis suburbs and a veteran sheriff's deputy in Colorado Springs — working to protect their communities. In the wake of George Floyd's death and the nationwide protests that followed, these two women offer a glimpse of what it's like to serve in law enforcement at a time when policing itself is under fire. They also speak frankly about how their jobs and their identities sometimes come into conflict.

Since the death of George Floyd in 2020, America has been searching its soul over questions of racial injustice. Many people are looking for solutions to change a police culture that disproportionately harms people of color. They’re asking hard questions about what should be done to reform law enforcement. To capture this defining moment, we followed a group of people across the U.S., working to change police departments from the outside and within.