‘I Am More Optimistic Than I’ve Been in a Long Time’
ON MAY 25, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, died at the hands of Minneapolis police. Six years ago, after cops killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, just 43 percent of Americans believed that such incidents indicate a systemic problem. Though police killings have remained level since 2014, 69 percent of Americans now agree that “the killing of Floyd represents a broader problem within law enforcement.”
Radley Balko is a Washington Post opinion columnist and former Reason reporter who covers police abuse, the drug war, and criminal justice reform. His Reason coverage of Cory Maye—a black man who was put on Mississippi’s death row for supposedly killing a police officer during a no-knock raid in 2001—helped bring about Maye’s acquittal. His 2013 book Rise of the Warrior Cop (PublicAffairs) was ahead of its time in documenting the dramatic increase in the militarization of local law enforcement and the dangerous incentives and confrontations that creates between police and citizens.
His latest book—The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist (PublicAffairs), co-authored with Tucker Carrington—documents widespread problems with law enforcement, forensic evidence, expert testimony, and media coverage of crime. In June, Nick Gillespie spoke with Balko about how to dial back the militarized police tactics that have become commonplace and whether lasting reform might be possible.
Reason: You’ve been covering the intersecting topics of the war on drugs, police abuse, and race issues in America for going on 20 years now. Why did the George Floyd killing explode into public consciousness the way it did?
I think [it’s] the power of video. If you go back to the civil rights movement, obviously there were abuses going on for a long time in our country’s history. The organizers of the civil rights movement in the 1960s really recognized the power of images. They knew there was going to be violence; they knew that the other side was going to be provoked and that was a strategy to win over the middle and white America.
The George Floyd video is indisputable. There have been attacks
