‘Behind the Police’ podcast links police to slavery, white supremacists

A new podcast, launched this past June, criticizes law enforcement for its alleged systemic racist past. The podcast, called the “Behind the Police,” featured an offensive image of police officers. In its podcast image, a Ku Klux Klan member and a Wild West-style sheriff stand behind a modern white male police officer.

The podcast’s description said, “How did American police get so violent? The answer to that question goes back centuries, to the earliest days of this nation.” It continued, “On this special podcast miniseries hosts Robert Evans and rap artist Propaganda (Jason Petty) draw a straight line from the darkest days of slavery, to the murder of George Floyd and the mass violence American police meted out to their citizens this summer.”

The podcast episode titles are as follows:

• “Slavery, Mass Murder and the Birth of American Policing”
• “How The First Police Went From Gangsters, To An Army For the Rich”
• “The History of American Police and the Ku Klux Klan”
• “How Police Unions Made Cops Even Deadlier”
• “How The Police Declared War On All Of Us”

Podcast host Robert Evans’s biography on Podchaser noted that his journalism career included travels to cover the Iraq war and Ukraine’s civil war. He worked as an editor at Cracked, which is an online humor website, and authored the “ridiculous book A Brief History of Vice.” His biography said that he once “experimented on his co-workers with strange ancient narcotics” and is “taking his voice, as smooth as warm molasses, and making a podcast for HowStuffWorks.”

Jason Petty, known as the rapper “Propaganda,” is no fan of the police after several officer-involved shootings across the country. The rapper also compared putting police officers on trial to the post-World War Two trials of Nazi war criminals, “After WWII we had to figure out how to put Nazis on trail for war crimes. Biggest hurdle was figuring out what court bc their acts were technically legal in Germany. But we figured it bc we knew it was the right thing to do. Louisville, be like your WWII grandads #BreonnaTalyor.” He also promoted the “Behind the Police” podcast and claimed that it has been “Reaseached fact checked and street certified.”

Petty has yet to correct his spelling errors in the aforementioned tweets. It is also unclear what Petty meant by including the phrase “street certified” with “fact checked” because fact checking implied neutral, nonpartisan and impartial analysis of the facts when “street certified” implied anecdotal evidence.

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