Reveal

This episode originally was broadcast May 11, 2019.

Tasers are on the duty belt of nearly every American police officer. Their manufacturer, Axon Enterprise Inc., has long promoted the device as extremely effective at helping police resolve dangerous situations without using their guns.

Who qualifies for a visa? How much does it cost to become a U.S. citizen? Stories about the invisible barriers immigrants come up against when trying to apply for legal status.

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Shop. Click. And the next day, your purchase is on your doorstep. Amazon has changed the face of shopping, but at a surprisingly high human cost. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming soon, we look at what’s behind those smiling packages and expose the dangers of working at Amazon. We start with an investigation from Reveal’s Will Evans into workplace injuries and safety culture at Amazon warehouses. While Amazon touts its workplaces as safe and efficient, Evans finds that many are much more dangerous than the industry average.

Shop. Click. And the next day, your purchase is on your doorstep. Amazon has changed the face of shopping, but at a surprisingly high cost to its workers. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming soon, we look at what’s behind those smiling packages to reveal the dangers of working at Amazon.

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How does a seventh grader end up in solitary confinement in an adult jail? Reporter Ko Bragg takes us to Mississippi to learn about a set of laws that automatically send kids into the adult legal system for certain crimes. 

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A reporter is threatened with prosecution, an officer outruns his past, and Al sits down with the president of the largest association of police officers in the United States to ask the question: When police officers misbehave, why does it stay secret?

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As the House of Representatives continues its impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, we go back in time to the Nixon administration, when the threat of impeachment and a presidential pardon changed the course of history. We then examine the pardons system and learn why it has stopped functioning as originally intended.  

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In 1936, an unarmed black man was killed by an Atlanta police officer who later became leader of the Ku Klux Klan. We explore why the city doesn’t recognize the case as a lynching.

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After the housing bust, a group of men profited by destroying the American dream of homeownership for hundreds of thousands of families. On Reveal, we learn how these Homewreckers did it and meet a woman who fought back. 

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This episode originally was broadcast July 1, 2017.

Picture an American farmer. Chances are, the farmer you’re imagining is white – more than 9 out of 10 American farmers today are. But historically, African Americans played a huge role in agriculture. The nation’s economy was built largely on black farm labor: in bondage for hundreds of years, followed by a century of sharecropping and tenant farming.

Ever since police used genetic genealogy to crack the famous Golden State Killer case, this new crime fighting tool has solved dozens of murders and rapes that had gone cold for decades. Our show looks at the promise and perils of this powerful tool that combines DNA science with genealogy.

We start with the murder of a young couple in Canada more than 30 years ago. This was the first case after the Golden State Killer to employ genetic genealogy, and the person who identified the suspect walks us through how she did it.

When President Trump tweets, the news cycle listens. Whether it’s the trade war, immigration police, vague threats of war or racist language, what the commander-in-tweet has to say often becomes a top story. But is it driving us to distraction? On today’s show, we’ll dig into the details of one story that may have been obscured by furor over Trump tweets: U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen. Then, we'll explore the contours of a conspiracy theory that's developed around the President.

This episode comes to us from Marketplace’s wealth and poverty team and their show, The Uncertain Hour.

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush did his first televised broadcast, speaking directly to the nation about an issue he believed was the gravest domestic threat to America: drugs. Specifically, crack cocaine. In the speech, Bush pulled a baggie of crack out of his desk as a prop, saying it had been seized from Lafayette Park, right across the street from the White House. 

Today’s show looks at the Trump administration’s pattern of pushing expert scientists out of policy discussions. \

In a tweet last month, President Trump urged  Israel to bar two Democratic Congresswomen from visiting that country. The women support a movement against Israel called B.D.S., which stands for Boycott, Divest, Sanction. Trump said Israel would show weakness by allowing them to enter. 

For the 2019 Fall fundraising season, here are three of our favorite Reveal stories from the past year.

The herbicide dicamba is causing a civil war in farm country. Plus, honeybee rustling in California’s almond groves. Lastly, sulfur and its link to asthma in children.  

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Four hundred years ago this month, English pirates brought enslaved Africans to America’s shores. We reflect on how the legacy of slavery has reverberated through the generations to the present.

Dominique Martin was thrilled to get a state-funded voucher to send her daughter to private school. We go to Louisiana to investigate the cost of school choice. 

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A bombing in rural Nevada you’ve probably never heard of. A plot to blow up a government building.  Reveal teams up with the podcast series, Bundyville, produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting and Longreads, to see what happened to rancher Cliven Bundy’s supporters since his original armed standoff with the government. 

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As smart devices become a bigger and bigger part of our lives, we look at how Facebook and other companies gather information about their users and turn it into profits. 

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In Oregon, the concussion protocols that were supposed to keep high school athletes safe end up falling short for a star quarterback. 

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President Donald Trump says he doubts humans have much of a role in climate change. His administration has downplayed the science of climate change and sought to silence scientists working for the federal government.

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President Donald Trump has brought presidential pardons into the news by granting clemency to several controversial people, including Joe Arpaio, a former sheriff in Arizona who targeted immigrants at traffic stops, and a serviceman who killed a suspected terrorist in the Iraqi desert. In this episode, we go beyond the headlines and tell the story of a pardons system that’s completely broken down. 

On a freezing January morning in 2014, a fire broke out in the cabin of a MH-53E Navy Sea Dragon helicopter on a training mission over the Atlantic. Seconds later it slammed into the ocean. Only two sailors survived. 

This week, Reveal partners with Investigative Studios, the production arm of the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to find out what caused that crash, and why the 53 is the military's deadliest aircraft.

They belonged to an elite police task force charged with getting guns off Baltimore’s streets. Instead, the plainclothes cops roamed the city, robbing people on the street, breaking into homes to steal money and drugs, and planting evidence on their victims.

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In the second part of Reveal’s series about hate, we look at how racism and white supremacy are institutionalized in America. We start with Reveal’s Will Carless, who over the past year has been tracking police officers’ activity on Facebook, finding that hundreds of them belong to racist groups connected to the Confederacy, Islamophobic groups, misogynistic groups and groups connected to violent anti-government militias. He takes us inside this online world where officers share racist memes, and jokes and share conspiracy theories.

The mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue and the killing of activist Heather Heyer at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, are reminders that hate crimes are on the rise in the U.S. This episode surveys the state of the hate movement in America, tracing how it has evolved since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and looking ahead to 2020. The first segment includes a discussion with Megan Squire, a professor of computer science at Elon University who’s been studying efforts to de-platform hate sites on the web.

In our first story, we take listeners to a place where no human has been before. Reporter Carolyn Beeler boards an icebreaker to sail along the face of Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier. If Thwaites collapses, it could cause 2 feet of global sea level rise. But glaciologists fear the consequences could also be much worse: Thwaites may be holding back the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, almost like a cork in a wine bottle. If it crumbles into the ocean, the results could be catastrophic.