Martin Kaste
Martin Kaste is a correspondent on NPR's National Desk. He covers law enforcement and privacy. He has been focused on police and use of force since before the 2014 protests in Ferguson, and that coverage led to the creation of NPR's Criminal Justice Collaborative.
In addition to criminal justice reporting, Kaste has contributed to NPR News coverage of major world events, including the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2011 uprising in Libya.
Kaste has reported on the government's warrant-less wiretapping practices as well as the data collection and analysis that go on behind the scenes in social media and other new media. His privacy reporting was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court's 2012 United States v. Jones ruling concerning GPS tracking.
Before moving to the West Coast, Kaste spent five years as NPR's reporter in South America. He covered the drug wars in Colombia, the financial meltdown in Argentina, the rise of Brazilian president Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, and the fall of Haiti's president Jean Bertrand Aristide. Throughout this assignment, Kaste covered the overthrow of five presidents in five years.
Prior to joining NPR in 2000, Kaste was a political reporter for Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul for seven years.
Kaste is a graduate of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.
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Donald Trump wants to punish local law enforcement that doesn't cooperate with immigration law, but the decisions to enforce are varied, and some worry it could lead to abuse. -
Borrowing tactics from campaigns to legalize same sex marriage and marijuana, gun control groups are shifting to a national strategy of tightening gun laws via state ballot initiatives. -
Police say elected officials have become too quick to blame cops involved in deadly shootings before all the facts are in. A recent incident in New York is their case in point.
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Twitter and Facebook say they are cutting off bulk data access to a firm that scans vast amounts of public social media posts. Critics say the service enables police to conduct invasive surveillance.
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There have been calls for police reforms since 2014, but there are practical limits to how fast a willingness to change can translate into its actually happening. -
NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, one of the most prominent figures in American policing, is stepping down. Crime declined in the city after Bratton's early enthusiasm for the broken windows policy.
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Advocates of police reform say there's been real progress since the Ferguson, Mo., protests, but both sides worry about how to keep that process going after recent, deadly attacks targeting police. -
Legal guns are a reality for police, especially in states with open-carry or concealed-carry laws. But there's no consistent guidance for either gun owners or police on how to react to such weapons.
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Critics say training firms use ambush-style videos that make police paranoid and quick to react with force. But not exposing officers to such scenarios puts them at unnecessary risk, trainers say. -
Gunmen opened fire at the end of a protest in downtown Dallas, shooting 12 police officers, five of them fatally. KERA reporter Stella Chavez and protest organizer Jeff Hood talk with Morning Edition.
