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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Cesar Sayoc, the man suspected of mailing 13 suspicious packages to prominent critics of President Trump, has a criminal record that includes at least one bomb threat.
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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. -
According to the FBI's latest Uniform Crime Report, overall crime rates are stable but regional variations are quite large. -
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. -
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. -
One of the stars of German soccer has quit the national team, complaining of racism from both fans and the football association because of his Turkish ancestry.
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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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President Trump said Germany is "totally controlled by Russia," because it gets, in his words, "60 to 70 percent of their energy from Russia." Does that square with the facts?
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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. -
A handful of recently-released videos of police using their fists on suspects raises the question, When is it OK for a cop to punch someone? We explain the rules and the pressure to change them.
