Black Americans are more likely to be infected from COVID-19, be incarcerated, live in poverty, and/or be killed by the police than white Americans. It took a pandemic and the killing of George Floyd to crystallize those facts.
Historian and New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb looks at race, policing, and the difficulty of holding police departments accountable in Frontline's "Policing the Police 2020," a documentary that will air on CPTV on Tuesday, Sept. 15. It follows Cobb's 2016 Frontline, "Policing the Police."
On another front: Trump administration officials have been interfering since (at least) August with the data that are included in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports." These reports are used to help doctors and researchers understand how COVID-19 is spreading and who is at risk. Up to now, scientists wrote the reports without political interference. This is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to censor information intended to protect us.
GUESTS:
- Jennifer Nuzzo is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering and the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; she is the lead epidemiologist for the Johns Hopkins Testing Insights Initiative (@JenniferNuzzo)
- Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor of journalism in Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism; his most recent book is The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress (@jelani9)
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Colin McEnroe and Cat Pastor contributed to this show.
