Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Jul 6, 2021 13 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Thread. Have you ever heard of "civil asset forfeiture"? You're never going to think about the police the same way again. (1)
A few years ago, when I was at the public defender's office, my very poor clients kept telling me the same story: they would be walking down the street and DC police would stop them, search them at gunpoint, tell them to open their wallets, and take all the cash they had. (2)
The wildest part? The DC police would then send them a letter saying that, if they wanted to challenge the police taking of their cash, they would need to pay either $250 or 10% of the amount taken, whichever was more! (3)
So, if police took $10 or $20 from someone, the person would need to pay $250 to even have the right to challenge the cops in court. If you couldn't pay, the cops kept your money. (4)
If you challenged them in court, you'd have to prove that your property was *not* somehow connected to a crime. Think about how hard that is. (5)
If you still wanted to challenge the DC police, they'd send a lawyer to litigate an entire civil asset forfeiture case against you, and you aren't entitled to a lawyer if you're poor because the cops call it a civil case not a criminal case. You have to fight them alone. (6)
Sure enough, when I examined the DC records, the cops had taken cash from thousands of people, almost entirely Black people. They'd also taken hundreds of cars from people, mostly older women of color. I couldn't find a single example of a person successfully challenging it. (7)
A lot of the time, cops were taking $5 and $30 from extremely poor people who were struggling to meet the basic necessities of life for their children, like buying food and diapers and shoes. (7)
In most places, there is no need for the cops to arrest you with civil forfeiture. There's no need for a conviction. They can just allege that your property is connected to a crime and take it. Then they can keep most of it for fancy weapons and corrupt travel junkets. (8)
To understand the scope of this problem, you should know that cops take more money from people in civil asset forfeiture than all burglaries combined in the U.S. (9) washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2…
The cops at the local, state, and federal levels across the country have taken almost $70 billion in civil forfeiture in the past 20 years! (10) ij.org/press-release/…
When cops ask you for more funding, remember that only 4% of all cop time is spent on what they call "violent crime." Next time they ask for money, remember the kafkaesque abuses at every U.S. police department and ask if cops actually care about safety for everyone. (end)
By the way, here's a great piece from @NewYorker that tells some of the stories of our clients in D.C. newyorker.com/magazine/2013/…

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More from @equalityAlec

Jul 16
The level of ignorance among liberal pundits about surveillance technology, police violence, and authoritarianism is astonishing. Just no effort to understand important issues before commenting on them.
The idea that the problem with what ICE is doing now is that it lacks hundreds of millions of dollars for surveillance technology is utterly a wild thing for someone to utter in public. Just an incredible thing to focus liberal energy on.
Read 5 tweets
Jul 13
THREAD. This week, the New York Times published a hagiography of a ruthless drug war prosecutor. I want to make a few important points about the most important kinds of misinformation that regularly appear in the New York Times and other mainstream news outlets. Image
First, something subtle. The below quote is a microcosm of the full article: it contains an assertion, reported as fact, that this prosecutor "was trying to make safer” one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York through mass human caging for drugs. Image
This statement of fact about her intentions is absurd—the people involved knew that mass incarceration had been disproven by as a means of reducing dangerous drug use or making anyone safer. Exactly the opposite was true: the policies were increasing violence, death, and lots of other suffering.
Read 23 tweets
Jul 7
THREAD. Something must be said about the New York Times. We are in the midst of a full-blown fascist takeover, and the NYT let one of its most dishonest reporters publish an article today full of misinformation arguing for massive new investments in police and surveillance.
The thesis of the article is that because American cops are so terrible at solving murder (and getting much much worse than they used to be), "experts" believe the U.S. must spend massively more money on hiring police and surveillance. Image
I have a chapter in my Copaganda book on how the news media cherry picks pro-police "experts"--a small group who are kind of like flat-earthers--and then tries to manufacture some kind of consensus. It's actually unbelievable when you lay it all out across outlets and articles.
Read 17 tweets
Jun 20
THREAD. As I visit London next week for the UK launch of my book Copaganda, I have to say publicly how outrageous the mainstream British media’s crime coverage is. It’s like they’ve studied the worst aspects of U.S. news culture while taking performance-enhancing drugs.
This may seem comical to U.S. news consumers who lived through the fake “retail theft” panic, but British press has worked itself into a frenzy in 2025 using the same playbook. Some of it is funny, but the effects will be devastating for British society. Look at BBC: Image
Here are some other recent examples from a smorgasbord of UK copaganda about low-level theft: “Broken Britain.” “Industrial-scale crime.” “Shoplifting crime wave." Image
Image
Image
Read 16 tweets
Jun 18
THREAD. The New York Times editorial on the New York City Mayor race is shameful. A lot of people have criticized its cowardice for refusing to endorse, but I want to highlight something deeper and more disturbing.
One main theme of faux-intellectual neoliberal propaganda in recent years is that we tried progressive policies, and those policies failed. As I discuss in my Copaganda book with lots of funny/disturbing examples, this NYT lie is one of the most pernicious lies in modern media: Image
The story goes: lefty policies to make society more equal, free, and ecologically sustainable are naive. Now that we've tried them with terrible results, we have no choice but to boost repression to manage inequality we cannot solve and to help oligarchs make society less equal.
Read 11 tweets
Jun 15
THREAD: The assassinations in Minnesota highlight a dirty secret hardly ever mentioned in the news: U.S. has 1.1 million private police officers. There is an unprecedented footprint of privately organized violence that is doing all sorts of things most people have no idea about. Image
Many journalists and "experts" quoted in the news go out of their way in new stories to conceal the reach of the private security/policing industries, what interests are behind it, and what it means for the possibility of a democratic life.
In my Copaganda book, I tell the story of how pro-police scholars and journalists have worked to conceal from the public estimates of private police--from forces at universities like Harvard, to much of downtown Detroit, to DC metro, to smaller stuff like this shooter.
Read 5 tweets

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