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Prologue

When we started putting together this week's show, we assumed we'd be using the phrase "tarred and feathered" as a metaphor for when someone is publicly shamed. We didn't think we'd find a story about someone being literally tarred and feathered, especially not recently.

Act One: Kim Possible

Former DC police detective Jim Trainum tells reporter Saul Elbein about how his first murder investigation went horribly wrong. He and his colleagues pinned the crime on the wrong woman, and it took 10 years and a revisit to her videotaped confession to realize how much, unbeknownst to Jim at the time, he was one of the main orchestrators of the botched confession.

Act Two: You Don't Say

A person is accused of a murder he didn't commit. But in this story there is no false confession.

Act One: Chinese Checkmate

Some adventures you seek out on purpose, and others hunt you down. Producer Alex Blumberg tells this story, about the experience a guy had in China...which started out as first kind of adventure, then quickly turned into the second kind.

Prologue

A few years back, when he and his family were driving home from a vacation in Texas, John Nova Lomax realized that the police were aggressively tailing him. And he was definitely not prepared for the reason they pulled him over.

Prologue

Host Ira Glass speaks with former FBI agent Bill Tobin about police collusion with organized crime in 1970s Chicago. It turns out that old boys networks like the mob pull in good and bad cops alike.

Act Three: Side Effects May Include...

In Tehran in 2004, Omid Memarian confessed to doing things he'd never done, meeting people he'd never met, following plots he'd never heard of. Why he did that, and why a lot of other people have confessed to the same things, is all in the fine print. This American Life producer Nancy Updike tells the story.

Prologue

Host Ira Glass Host talks to Paul Gereffi, a letter carrier in Ft. Lauderdale who helped save the life of a stabbing victim who saw Gereffi's mail truck and flagged him down.

Act Two: Is That a Tape Recorder in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Unhappy to See Me?

For 17 months, New York police officer Adrian Schoolcraft recorded himself and his fellow officers on the job, including their supervisors ordering them to do all sorts of things that police aren't supposed to do. For example, downgrading real crimes into lesser ones, so they wouldn't show up in the crime statistics and make their precinct look bad.

Prologue

Ira speaks with Richard Dorsay, who became famous in 2004 when police learned that for years Richard and a friend had been living inside of a Chicago bridge. And this was no ordinary bridge.

Act Two: Taking a Big Pink Eraser to the Thin Blue Line

Michael May tells the story of Barry Cooper, a former crooked narcotics cop who has turned his interest elsewhere...to busting crooked narcotics cops. But after Cooper and a rich benefactor team up to set a trap for the police, Barry's plans are put in jeopardy—including his dream of creating a reality show called "Kop Busters." Michael May is the Culture editor at the Texas Observer.

Prologue

Host Ira Glass talks a veteran police officer about a time in his 20s when he gets sent to a car accident—and it turns out the driver at fault was a nicely dressed chimpanzee. The chimp seemed harmless enough until the other police officer on duty tries to arrest the chimp&'s owner.

Act One: The Fat Blue Line

While riding in a patrol car to research a novel, crime writer Richard Price witnessed a misunderstanding that for many people is pretty much accepted as an upsetting fact of life. Richard Price told this story—which he describes as a tale taken from real life and dramatized—onstage at the Moth in New York.