On today's Your Call we’ll talk about the escalating use of military weapons and tactics by police departments.  Reporter Radley Balko, says, “Police militarization is now an ingrained part of American culture.”  We’re seeing local police dressed in riot gear use stun grenades and rubber coated bullets on demonstrators.  How did we get here? And how is this affecting the relationship between police departments and local communities?   Join us at 10 or email feedback@yourcallradio.org.  What’s an appropriate use of force?

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE, from NPR News. Coming up, there's a new television program aimed at showcasing stories of missing people of color with the hope of getting the public to offer information to help solve these cases. And you might be wondering: Why is there a need for a show like this? So we've asked the people involved with it, including the famous actress from "Law and Order," S. Epatha Merkerson, to tell us more about it in a few minutes. That's coming up.

GOP hopeful Rick Santorum carried wins in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri, on Tuesday. The White House also tries to manage a controversy over requiring many Catholic institutions to provide free contraception in their employees' health coverage. Host Michel Martin covers these topics and other political news with a diverse panel of politicos.

Poet Donald Hall spends much of his time in his blue armchair, looking at the landscape out his window. The 83-year-old former poet laureate has lived for years on the same New Hampshire farm that his grandparents used to own, and still writes in the room he slept in as a child.

Chuck Prophet's new album, Temple Beautiful, takes its name from a former synagogue that hosted punk-rock shows in the late '70s and early '80s; it was next door to the temple overseen by cult leader Jim Jones. That may sound like a grim or black-humored reference point around which to erect an album, but with Prophet, grimness, humor, fact and fiction mingle freely. Before anything else, he's a guitar player with a melodically nasal voice whose phrasing favors the whimsical and the querulous.

There was a decline last year in the already "small" number of Muslim-Americans indicted for violent terrorist plots and the rate of radicalization among that group remains "far less than many feared" after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a researcher at North Carolina's Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security reports today.

Alan's guests are song stylist Paula West, who is celebrating her new CD with a concert at Herbst Theatre on Saturday, and baritone Torlef Borsting, who is singing the role of Giorgio in Opera San Jose's production of Verdi's "La Traviata." Peter Robinson also stops by to talk about recent cultural events.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo spent more than three years in Mumbai's Annawadi slum to do research for her new book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Residents of the slum — which is located next to the Mumbai airport and in the shadow of several luxury hotels — live in devastating poverty.

The two DVDs I want to talk about today are hilarious, but they aren't sitcoms. They're talk shows — well, one's a talk show, and one's a filmed seminar. But they're both fascinating examples of a specific pop-culture moment frozen in time.

And they're something else as well: Both are highly entertaining real-time examples of talk-show Darwinism. Both shows feature a large, unwieldy guest roster, all of the guests competing for attention at the same time — and by the time the programs are over, the winners are apparent.

What did a Cobb salad and a chicken salad have in common that have made them the latest entries in a big ongoing food safety recall?