Hannah Dreier on This American Life

Back in July, in one of my too-many-tabs posts, I included this:

Mulligan constantly flails about the gang MS-13, which I confess I don't know much about. This Politico story is by Hannah Dreier, a reporter who's been covering MS-13 for a year: Here are the five things Trump gets most wrong. The gist is: The gang is not growing or even particularly large compared to other prominent gangs in the U.S. It's not involved in the international drug trade, or involved in illegal immigration, and its victims are 99.x percent people they know. Not that they are harmless, no one claims that, but they exist in a context that Mulligan pretends does not exist.

Today that writer, Hannah Dreier, filled the hour of This American Life with an in-depth report on how the Suffolk County, N.Y., police department mishandled what became the murder cases of multiple Latino teenagers in 2016 and 2017. The department's racism, objectively worthless police practices, and overt sexism (as displayed by the police chief toward Dreier) are all clearly displayed.

The police in Suffolk County clearly did not (and do not) value the lives of Latino kids. One former cop refers to their deaths as "misdemeanor homicides," in fact. It took the deaths of two white girls (Mulligan's favorite victims, of course) to get the police to care about what MS-13 was up to in its jurisdiction.

Listen to the story and empathize with the parents of the kids who died, and who were left dangling by the police. Whose rights to interpreters were ignored. Or read it on Propublica (but I recommend listening).