74 Seconds

On July 6, 2016, the police pulled over Philando Castile for a broken taillight. Seventy-four seconds later, police officer Jeronimo Yanez fired seven shots into Castile’s car, killing him as his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, streamed what was happening over Facebook and her 4-year-old daughter wept in fear. Castile became another name on the long list of victims of police violence identified by the #BlackLivesMatter movement. “74 Seconds” is also the name of a remarkable podcast series, produced by Minnesota Public Radio, which sought to put a human face on this tragedy and to provide a context for the legal and political struggles that followed. They turned their microphone toward Castile, his family, his friends, and his contribution to the community, helping us to understand why his life and death mattered. And they reconstructed the thoughts that ran through Yanez’s mind as a routine traffic stop escalated to the use of deadly force, helping us to see how this officer did what he was trained to do at the Police Academy. Across 22 episodes, these reporters followed the story in real time, providing not only excellent on-the-spot reporting, but also constructing a larger context within which to understand these events. For the model it offers us of how to comprehensively cover incidents of police violence, we award a Peabody to “74 Seconds.”