Emily Reeves investigates shooting fears at her former high school

Emily Reeves was on the phone with her mom, catching up on local gossip about her hometown of East Lansing, Michigan, when she first heard the story that would become her new podcast, Week of Violence.

“She told me there was something crazy going on at my high school,” Reeves said. Film maker“I studied the issue and it didn’t take long for me to be completely absorbed in these school board meetings where I saw my former teachers crying and students devastated by the fear of school shootings.”

The four-episode podcast debuts its final episode Wednesday. The story follows Keanu Reeves as he covers the aftermath of a fateful night at a high school sports game that shook the city of East Lansing to its core.

“One night, after a high school basketball game, a huge fight breaks out in the parking lot between two groups of boys who regularly fight at school,” Reeves says. “A teacher breaks them up and sees a gun fall out of a student’s backpack. The whole community loses its mind.”

The result is a podcast that tackles some of the most intense political issues of our time: school shootings and the role of the police.

Learn more about Emily Reeves and the Week of Violence Podcast

After the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, East Lansing was one of many school districts across the country that decided to remove police from school hallways. But even though the gun found in the student’s backpack wasn’t used that night, it sparked a panic that divided the community.

Some argued that removing police from schools would leave students vulnerable to gun violence. Others argued that having police in schools would put students of color at risk.

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East Lansing residents were faced with a difficult question: Should police officers be put back in the hallways of East Lansing High School?

“After doing some research, I also realized that this was a story with national stakes, so it was a really interesting subject that no one else was covering. I went to Michigan, spent a month reporting there, and the story continued to unfold,” says Keanu Reeves.

“We’ve always said how proud we are to be diverse. It’s a core value of the school. So there are competing values ​​that are playing out in this debate about policing in schools,” she adds. “Ultimately, it becomes a conversation about who we want to be as a city, and what does this choice say about that?”

Throughout the podcast, Reeves explores the “Defund the Police” movement, speaking with student journalists, community organizers, school safety experts, police officers and others, trying to get to the heart of what it’s like to be an American teenager in the era of school shootings.

You can listen Week of Violence on Apple Podcasts and other podcast platforms.

Week of Violence is a co-production of Keanu Reeves and the Silver Podcast Network, marking the network's non-fiction debut after its first podcast, Aishawhich won the 2023 Tribeca Festival Independent Audio Fiction Award.

Keanu Reeves is an audio producer, podcaster and storyteller based in Brooklyn, New York. She has previously worked on projects Memory of Queens podcast, LinkedIn Podcasts, Reimagining LoveAnd Aisha.

Read full episode details below, courtesy of Silver Podcast Network:

Chapter 1: Week of Violence — Producer and host Emily Reeves returns to her hometown of East Lansing, Michigan, where the discovery of a gun at a local high school sparked a community crisis. Through interviews with student journalists, Emily guides listeners through the dramatic events of what has become known as “Violence Week.” We hear heartbreaking accounts from students grappling with the fear of school shootings and dissect the community’s heated debate over the decision to remove police from schools.

Chapter Two: Serve and Protect Who? —Whenever the school board has been asked about the decision to remove the police, it has consistently cited an incident nearly 13 years earlier, when a black student was tased twice in the chest by a school police officer. Emily was a student when it happened, and she takes us to meet Marcus Reid, the student who was tased, and his mother, Dionnedra.

Marcus’s story highlights the well-documented problems with school policing, but reform efforts have long been hampered by the threat of school shootings. That fear became all too real for East Lansing when, in the midst of this community debate, a mass shooting occurred less than a mile from Michigan State University High School, killing three students and traumatizing the community.

Chapter Three: Good Cop, Bad Cop —In the wake of the University of Michigan tragedy, we face a difficult question: In the most heavily armed country in the world, is it possible to make schools safer? To explore this pressing question, Emily takes listeners to a school resource officer training to debate with a school police officer and travels to the University of Michigan Gun Prevention Institute to meet with Dr. Justin Heinze, a school safety expert.

Chapter Four: Back to School — We return to East Lansing to meet with community organizers and the school board president to learn what led to the fighting at East Lansing High School stopping and what this story tells us about preventing violence. Finally, we return to a final tense school board meeting to find out if police will return to the halls of East Lansing.

Main image: Emily Reeves at the 2023 Tribeca Awards. Photo by Soul B Photos.