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Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
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18 Apr, 7 tweets, 3 min read
Thread: Another embarrassing NYT article on police by @SteveEder and @mhkeller. Not a single proponent of defunding police quoted, and all the usual copaganda tricks. I genuinely wonder if they see their own complicity. nytimes.com/2021/04/18/us/…
They spew police talking points, suggest link btw police and "violent crime," and report as fact that powerful people "designed" these fake reforms to address injustice or that the powerful opposed real change because of genuine "fear" of "violent crime." Shameful naivete.
These reporters like @SteveEder and @mhkeller are complicit in enormous violence. Reach out to people with views outside your bubbles and try to learn something before you write about issues of such consequence to vulnerable people. Here are a few:
motherjones.com/anti-racism-po…

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More from @equalityAlec

Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
19 Apr
Overwhelming evidence of federal crimes committed by police against journalists and not a peep from the Biden DOJ. I'm not advocating prosecution, but I'm pointing out that prosecutors only choose to charge *some* people for *some* crimes. There's nothing neutral about it.
@trevortimm @adamjohnsonNYC @Snowden @ggreenwald @FreedomofPress
@akela_lacy @alicesperi @ryanjreilly
Read 4 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
19 Apr
Thread: You probably missed an important story this weekend. Cops in Minnesota arrested, sexually assaulted, electronic body-scanned, and mocked for not "speaking English" an Asian-American CNN producer who was covering racial justice protests. (1) documentcloud.org/documents/2061…
Cops from multiple different Minnesota agencies violated a federal court order and abused numerous journalists, including stealing phones, beating them, and torturing them (inflicting serious pain and injury for the purpose of causing pain). These are all federal crimes. (2)
The reaction from the media was to send a sternly worded letter from a lawyer reminding police about the First Amendment and asking them politely not to do it again. A few thoughts: (3)
Read 6 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
15 Apr
THREAD: one of our clients was a 6-year-old Black child. DC police executed an illegal search warrant raid at his house without any probable cause. Cops forced his mother to watch as they grabbed the child and searched inside the little boy's underwear for "contraband." (1)
It turned out that DC cops got hundreds of such warrants for years that blatantly lacked probable cause, executed them without knocking, and at nighttime, searching for small amounts of drugs. 99.2% of these raids were of Black families (2) washingtonpost.com/sf/investigati…
We @CivRightsCorps sued DC seven times for raids on Black families. When we showed DC gov that over 99% of these illegal "training and experience" search warrant raids were for Black families and showed story after story of brutality, DC council/mayor increased police budget. (3)
Read 7 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
11 Apr
Thread: Police ignore way more crimes than they address. They only "enforce the law" against some people, some of the time, in some places, and every aspect of it is based on who has power. The idea they pursue "public safety" is propaganda.
Most of what Boston police do is discretionary targeting of poor people for living on the street, drug use, and other minor "crimes." And yet the budget for cop "overtime" alone is twice what Boston spends on all parks and recreation for its people. (2) data.aclum.org/2020/06/05/unp…
Remember when the Boston police went on a rampage to destroy the wheelchairs of disabled people who were homeless? (3) commondreams.org/news/2019/08/0…
Read 4 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
7 Apr
Thread: It's not widely known outside legal circles, but in the 1980s Justice Breyer was a main architect of the Sentencing Guidelines, one of the great scandals of mass human caging. But even in legal circles, most people don't understand what a fraud Breyer perpetrated. (1)
There were two main (and many more) frauds perpetrated by elite bureaucrats who designed the Sentencing Guidelines. Hundreds of thousands of poor people and people of color were consigned to millions of extra years in cages as a result of choices Breyer and his group made. (2)
First, the Guidelines purported to be scientific. Elites said they were needed to combat variation among judges. So Breyer and friends did a "past practice study." But after standardizing sentences based on past results as promised, Breyer simply increased them all! (3)
Read 6 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
6 Apr
Thread: Last night, an unprecedented coalition of religious leaders across faiths filed a brief in our case that will determine the constitutionality of the money bail systems in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Their words are powerful:
They wrote: "As leaders in faith, our call is for equality of the wealthy and poor before the law, for an end to the primacy of wealth over justice, and for relief from the physical, spiritual, and moral harms that inexorably flow from the current bail system." (2)
They wrote that caging human beings because they cannot pay enough cash "tears at the moral fiber of our common creed." (3)
Read 6 tweets

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