Whenever Chenjerai Kumanyika finds himself near City Hall in Lower Manhattan, he thinks of his father.
“My dad got arrested right there,” he said, pointing to the steps of the French Renaissance-style building on a recent sunny afternoon.
Kumanyika, a professor, podcaster and activist, often heard tales about the episode as a child. His father, the civil rights leader Makaza Kumanyika, was detained by New York Police Department officers in 1964, after a highly publicized incident in which he attempted to place the mayor at the time, Robert F. Wagner, under citizen’s arrest.
“It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that the stories were true,” Kumanyika said.
The police have been a subject of fascination for Kumanyika for much of his adult life. Walking along City Hall Park, he pointed to a section of Park Row named after Elizabeth Jennings Graham, a Black schoolteacher whom police forcibly removed from a racially segregated trolley car in 1854. (Graham, represented by a young Chester A. Arthur, sued the trolley company and won.)
Graham’s story, and that of Kumanyika’s father, are both told in “Empire City,” his rigorously researched narrative nonfiction podcast about the N.Y.P.D. from Crooked Media and Wondery. The eight-part series, which will premiere Sept. 9, is a by-turns-panoramic and personal history aimed at untangling the mythology and influence of the nation’s largest police force.
Following a variety of characters from across the police department’s nearly 180-year history, “Empire City” challenges both those who believe that the institution has always worked to produce public safety and those who assume it can never be changed.
“When the N.Y.P.D. does something oppressive, a lot of people on my side of the political spectrum will say it’s working as designed,” Kumanyika said. “But I think that’s actually letting power off the hook. It doesn’t acknowledge all the ways it has had to innovate and adapt in response to pushback.”
Kumanyika, 52, is tall and gregarious, with deep-set eyes, rich brown skin and a lush, baritone voice. He is a prodigious talker, with a professor’s habit of encasing any opinion or conjecture in layers of sweeping historical context, before inevitably circling back to the point with the phrase “I say all that to say,” and a final, capsule summary.
Since 2013, he has worked as a professor in media studies, most recently at New York University (he joined the staff in 2022), where he teaches nonfiction audio journalism and podcasting. His own work has appeared on “This American Life” and All Things Considered.” In 2018, Kumanyika won a Peabody Award for “Uncivil” — a history podcast he created and hosted with Jack Hitt that reframed dominant accounts of the Civil War.
Kumanyika’s path has always cut through the worlds of culture and politics. Born in Harlem and raised in Ithaca, N.Y., and Baltimore, he inherited a critical view of institutional authority from his father, who was the chairman of the Bronx chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. His mother, a public health scholar, taught him to defend his decision making with logic, and to expect the same of others.
“My mom gave me a kind of sociological view of the world,” Kumanyika said. “The problem with the world isn’t bad people, but bad systems that create bad incentives.”
In a previous life, he was a rapper. Following in the mold of late-1980s hip-hop crews like Boogie Down Productions, Public Enemy and De La Soul, Kumanyika started a series of rap groups in his teens and twenties (Knights of the Round Table Posse in high school, Deep Thought at Penn State). In the 2000s, his group Spooks sold over 100,000 albums in Britain — largely on the strength of its breakout single, “Things I’ve Seen,” which also went gold in France.
In his lyrics and on the tour bus, Kumanyika was known for his erudition and spirited evangelism, often holding court about this or that political struggle. One day, while on the road in Europe with the alternative hip-hop group Arrested Development, Speech, that group’s lead vocalist and songwriter, gently suggested that scholarship may be his true calling.
“He was like, ‘Brother, I’m glad you do music, but I think your skill might be this other thing,’” Kumanyika recalled with a laugh. “He didn’t say you’re better at this other thing, but I think he could see it.”
Kumanyika was working as an assistant professor at Clemson University, in 2014, when video spread of Eric Garner losing consciousness while pinned down by an N.Y.P.D. officer. (Garner was pronounced dead an hour later.) The following month, Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., was shot and killed in a struggle with a police officer. Kumanyika and his wife traveled to Ferguson to participate in days of protests, with Kumanyika documenting the deployment of military gear and tear gas via livestream.
Amid ensuing debates about police reform and the utility of body cameras, Kumanyika said he increasingly felt that something fundamental was missing from the conversation. The Garner incident and the police actions in Ferguson had been well captured on video. And yet similar episodes kept happening.
“I realized that the things we really needed to understand were actually not on camera,” he said.
He was beginning to get his arms around what those things were when the murder of George Floyd, in May 2020, ignited global protests in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. That summer, working with his agent and Diane Hodson, a producer and story editor, Kumanyika took the pitch for “Empire City” to several potential partners, including Pineapple Street Media and John Legend’s Get Lifted.
He landed at Crooked Media, the progressive podcast company behind “Pod Save America,” in part because it agreed to fund a research and development phase before the start of production.
“He clearly digs deep into these subjects; he’s not someone who is just reading from a script,” said Tommy Vietor, a co-founder of Crooked. “And he has that charisma and voice — every time I listened to ‘Uncivil,’ I just wanted to hang out with him.”
One of Crooked’s contributions was narrowing the show’s focus to the history of a single police department — Kumanyika and Hodson’s initial concept would have centered on a different department in each episode. They chose the N.Y.P.D. partly because it is one of the oldest professional police forces in America (officially established in 1845) and is at the center of a trove of little-known stories from an earlier era of law enforcement.
In the first episode, Kumanyika tells the story of Tobias Boudinot and “The Kidnapping Club,” a gang of police constables who abducted free and emancipated Black New Yorkers and sold them into slavery in the decades before the Civil War. Others feature an interview with a descendant of a notoriously corrupt 19th-century N.Y.P.D. inspector (known for declaring that “there is more law in the end of a policeman’s nightstick than in a decision of the Supreme Court”), and the story of how Republican reformers successfully disbanded the department in 1857.
“We freed ourselves from the burden of trying to tell every story and really picked our lanes,” said Hodson, who previously edited the podcasts “Think Twice: Michael Jackson” and “Hysterical.” “Encyclopedias are a great resource, but not a great listen.”
As the national conversation around policing has shifted, with Democrats, including the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, and the vice president, Kamala Harris, embracing some “tough-on-crime” policies, Kumanyika’s belief in the urgency of the project has grown. For him, “Empire City” is both a piece of entertainment and an attempt at an intervention. Listeners are entitled to any choice but ignorance.
“We’re entering this into the historical record,” he said. “Maybe we can fix things, maybe we can’t — but you’re going to know what happened.”
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