Current Affairs

Rosa Brooks is a professor of law at Georgetown University and the author Tangled Up In Blue: Policing The American City, named one of the best books of 2021 by the Washington Post. The book chronicles Prof. Brooks' experiences as a reserve police officer with the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. As an academic raised in a socialist household (her mother is a former Current Affairs podcast guest), Prof. Brooks wanted to get a better understanding of how police saw themselves and the sources of dysfunction in the system. In this episode we discuss:- How police officers are trained to fear the populations they police- The limits of police training: what police are taught (e.g., how to handcuff suspects) and what they're not (e.g., anything about racism)- How police officers are often called on to perform "social work" responsibilities that they are ill-equipped to handle, and why arresting and jailing people becomes an all-purpose tool- What it means to say that the problems with policing are "sy