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

“She told me that there was something crazy going on at my high school,” Reeves tells MovieMaker. “I looked into it, and it didn’t take very long for me to be absolutely absorbed watching these school board meetings where I was watching my old teachers cry and students just devastated in fear of school shootings.”

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

“One night after a basketball game at the high school, a huge fight breaks out in the parking lot between two groups of boys that have been consistently fighting at the school,” Reeves says. “A teacher is breaking it up, and she sees a gun fall out of this kid’s backpack, and the entire community loses its mind.”

The result is a podcast that grapples with some of the most intense political topics of our times: school shootings and the role of police.

More About Emily Reeves and the Violence Week Podcast

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, East Lansing was among many school districts across the country who decided to remove police from school hallways. But although the gun that was spotted in the aforementioned student’s backpack wasn’t fired that night, it caused a panic that divided the community.

Some argued that removing police from the school left students vulnerable to gun violence. Others felt that having police in schools would put students of color in danger.

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The people of East Lansing were left with a tough question: should police officers be reinstalled in the hallways of East Lansing High School?

“After a little bit of research, I also realized that this was a story with national stakes, so it just felt like a really compelling topic that nobody else was covering. I went to Michigan, I spent a month there reporting, and the story just kept unfolding,” Reeves says.

“We were always talking about how proud we were to be diverse. It’s a huge value of the school. And so there are conflicting values that are playing out in this topic about policing at schools,” she adds. “It ultimately becomes a conversation about who do we want to be as a town, and what does this choice says about that?”

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

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

Violence Week is a co-production of Reeves and the Silver Podcast Network, marking the network’s nonfiction debut following its first podcast, Aisha, which won the Tribeca Festival’s 2023 Independent Audio Fiction Award.

Reeves is an audio producer, podcaster, and storyteller based in Brooklyn, New York. She has previously worked on work the Queens Memory podcast, LinkedIn Podcasts, Reimagining Love, and Aisha.

Read the full episode breakdowns below, courtesy of Silver Podcast Network:

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

Chapter Two: Serve and Protect Who? — Whenever the School Board was questioned on the decision to remove police, they always cited an incident from nearly thirteen years before when a Black student was tased twice in the chest by the school’s police officer. Emily was a student when this 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 issues with school policing, but efforts for reform have long clashed with the threat of school shootings. This fear proved very real for East Lansing when, in the midst of this community debate, a mass shooting occurred less than a mile away from the high school at Michigan State University, claiming the lives of three students and traumatizing the community.

Chapter Three: Good Cop, Bad Cop — In the aftermath of the tragedy at MSU, we confront a challenging question: in the world’s most heavily-armed country, can anything actually make schools safe? To explore this pressing question, Emily takes listeners to a School Resource Officer Training to debate with a school police officer, and heads to the University of Michigan’s groundbreaking Institute for Firearm Prevention to meet Dr. Justin Heinze, an expert in school safety.

Chapter Four: Back to School — We return to East Lansing to meet with community organizers and the President of the School Board to learn what made the fighting at East Lansing High stop and what this story illuminates about violence prevention. Finally, we return to one final tense School Board meeting to discover if police will return to East Lansing’s halls.

The cover of Violence Week courtesy of Silver Podcast Network

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