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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Most Americans first learned about "bump stocks," which speed up the firing rate of semiautomatic rifles, in the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre. A year later, they're still mostly legal.
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Berlin postcard: Tempelhof Field, a former airport that's had many functions in history, from Nazi camp to U.S. base, now hosts modular homes for migrants and fun recreational areas.
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Establishing trust with the million-plus recently arrived migrants is a challenge for local police in Germany, whose duties include deporting people ruled ineligible to stay in the country.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a wide-ranging press conference today in Berlin with the German and foreign press. On the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki, she seemed to welcome that the two met.
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Police are getting better tools for mining data. They're supposed to make law enforcement more surgical, but some say it's a high-tech justification for targeting certain places and people.
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There's a new push to study the real-life effects of gun laws. "Red Flag" laws lower suicide rates; reductions in homicides are associated with tougher gun permit requirements.
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American police have been reluctant to use systems that can scan live video for the faces of "persons of interest." Amazon wants to change that with a cheaper, cloud-based version of the technology.
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Washington state legalized recreational pot in 2012, but the black market lives on. Pot grown legally leaks into illegal markets, while networks of illegal producers pretend they're licensed.
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The suspected shooter in the Nashville Waffle House attack legally surrendered his guns in a previous incident. Many states seize guns from people who pose a danger. But how did he get them back?
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After Stephon Clark's death in Sacramento, many people are wondering whether anything has really changed in the way police use deadly force since Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Mo.