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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Efforts by states to to raise the minimum age for buying a long rifle have been challenged in court by gun rights activists. -
Homelessness and drug use became more visible on public transit during the pandemic, worrying commuters. Philadelphia is now pairing cops with social workers to help those in need. -
Police hope to lower the city's raging homicide rate by focusing more resources on shootings that don't kill." We're modeling a lot of our things on what homicide does," says Lt. Dennis Rosenbaum. -
A study by the National Institutes of Health said pills are the most common form of the drug with a nearly 50-fold increase in law enforcement seizures. -
Chicago was shaken by the shooting death of 8-year-old Melissa Ortega last Saturday. Nationally, the number of children shot has jumped during the pandemic. -
Specific homeless camps may fuel property crime, but one researcher says on average, camps do not appear to increase city-wide crime rates. -
Stock markets around the world tumbled on concerns about the new variant. While it's too soon to tell exactly how the variant functions, virologists are rushing to learn more. -
The failed ballot measure proposed a new Department of Public Safety that would emphasize a public health approach to policing. -
A federal jury in Tacoma, Wash., found that private prison contractor, the GEO Group, underpaid detainees who provided menial services in the facility -
Public health data experts have a new way to calculate the underreporting of people killed by police. Criminologists call the results "interesting" but are reserving judgment on the accuracy.
