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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School police officers are trained in best practices for stopping an active shooter. The law requires it, and there's money to pay for it. And yet, that training seems to have failed in Uvalde, Texas.
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Philadelphia last year broke its own records for homicides, so it's trying a new approach. It's focusing more on solving non-fatal shootings to try to bring down the murder rate.
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No-knock warrants have been in steep decline since the height of the war on drugs, but the killing of a Black man in Minneapolis has raised questions about why police still insisted on the tactic.
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The San Jose City Council has approved the nation's first law requiring gun owners to have liability insurance. City leaders hope it will reduce gun violence. Gun owners say they're being harassed.
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Brazen shoplifting is caught on video, but hard numbers for shoplifting don't really exist. Nonetheless, merchants say it's growing fast and online retailers are partly to blame.
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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.
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The failed ballot measure proposed a new Department of Public Safety that would emphasize a public health approach to policing.
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Minneapolis may become the first big city to eliminate its traditional police department. A Nov. 2 ballot question would replace it with a "Department of Public Safety."
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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.
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A year after historic protests calling for police reform, communities across the country have grappled with what that reform should look like amid rising violence and funding questions.