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Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
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30 Jan, 4 tweets, 1 min read
THREAD: Democrats are now demanding an increase to the Capitol Police force budget. A few things you might not know about the Capitol Police: (1)
Capitol Police already have a $515 million dollar budget. This is more than 10% of the entire budget for the whole Legislative Branch of the US government. (2)
52% of their time is spent on traffic charges, and 14% of their arrests are minor drug arrests. They mostly arrest very poor people in the surrounding DC community (DC also has the largest racial disparity in arrests of any US jurisdiction). (3) firstbranchforecast.com/2021/01/06/a-p…
Whatever problems led to the events of January 6, insufficient funding for the Capitol Police is not among them. As usual, monumental failures of police are used by those same police to get more money and military equipment. The cycle goes on. (end)

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More from @equalityAlec

Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
29 Jan
THREAD: When politicians talk "reform" of racist systems, remember the story of how New York politicians used "reform" after Kalief's death to perpetuate violence against Black children. (1) newyorker.com/magazine/2014/…
Kalief committed suicide after three years of pretrial detention at Rikers, falsely accused of stealing another child's backpack. He spent 18 months in solitary confinement. (2)
His mother Venida died shortly afterward--died from a broken heart. (3) theroot.com/mom-of-kalief-…
Read 7 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
28 Jan
THREAD: This video is the daily churn of injustice. A Black man arrested for "drinking beer in a parking lot" is jailed because he cannot pay $5,000 cash. He begs for release, judge says: "Thank you, go with the deputy." (1)
This isn't an issue of "good cops" or "bad cops." This video right here is most of what police do. There are more arrests each year in the US for marijuana possession than all of what police call "violent crime" combined. (2)
96% of all police time is spent on what they call "non-violent" crime. (3)
Read 4 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
28 Jan
THREAD: This is another very bad NYT article by the metro desk. Almost everything in here is worth criticizing, include the idea to write the story. But a few high-level thoughts: (1) nytimes.com/2021/01/27/nyr…
The article says there has been a "major" culture shift in Queens. Most good propaganda doesn't involve false statements--it's normative claims like this, reported as a fact, that try to set the boundaries for the reader's imagination of what's possible. (2)
The NYT makes the editorial *choice* to call her a "major" reformer, even though the paper knows that the office is still a mass incarceration machine that has barely changed at all. Very little has changed in any objective analysis of that office. (3)
Read 10 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
27 Jan
THREAD: If you paid attention to what happened on January 6 in DC, pay attention to this: prosecutors in Phoenix are pursuing felony "gang" charges against peaceful BLM protestors who police attacked. theappeal.org/maricopa-count…
The felony "gang" charges, which could lead to many years in prison, "are based only on the fact that the group carried umbrellas, wore black, and used the phrase “all cops are bastards.” (2)
Police didn't attack, and Phoenix prosecutors didn't charge, large groups of armed far-right gangs who descended on the local board of elections in an attempt to "stop the steal" (3)
Read 6 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
27 Jan
THREAD: In this 30-second video, a 17-year-old child with no lawyer is told that he must spend the weekend in an adult jail because he can't pay $1,000 for a misdemeanor. (1)
If you've never watched a bail hearing, this is what they look like in 3,000 courtrooms across the country. There will be 400,000 human beings jailed tonight because they can't pay enough cash. (2)
Few pieces of evidence more clearly show the cruelty and indifference of the US legal bureaucracy to Black bodies than a video where you watch a Black child thrown in a cage away from his family, with no lawyer, in a matter of seconds. (3)
Read 4 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
24 Jan
THREAD: A few more shocking things about Harvard University using students to test military counterinsurgency tactics on behalf of police brutalizing young people of color in Massachusetts. (1)
Note the language in the course solicitation: prof wants to take military lessons from Iraq/Afghanistan to "clean up" Black and Brown communities. This is the language of ethnic cleansing. (2)
This Harvard solicitation comes at a time when US cages Black people at 6 times the rate of South Africa at the height of Apartheid and on behalf of one of the most notorious police depts where DOJ found massive civil rights violations perpetrated. (3) bostonglobe.com/2020/07/25/met…
Read 5 tweets

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