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Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
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30 Jul, 4 tweets, 1 min read
A humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Texas: Governor is illegally kidnapping human beings, separating families, demanding cash for their release, and setting up unconstitutional concentration camps for immigrants who can't pay. Biden is doing nothing. texastribune.org/2021/07/30/tex…
This is a good example of our culture's desensitization to the most profound injustices of the authoritarian punishment bureaucracy. To do this, Governor needs thousands of officers, prosecutors, retired judges, jail guards, aides, bureaucrats, etc... Everyone goes along.
When the history of this period is written by those who are organizing against it, all of the people who created the greatest human caging bureaucracy in modern history and used it to cage the poor, people of color, immigrants, and other vulnerable people will be held accountable
Read more here from those on the ground fighting against it and documenting these crimes against humanity:

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More from @equalityAlec

Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
16 Jul
A few thoughts on Boston police: Boston cops, after getting a record city budget in 2019, devised "operation clean sweep" in which a squad of cops had the goal of destroying the wheelchairs of homeless people with disabilities living on the street. boston.com/news/local-new…
Virtually the entire police bureaucracy in Boston hid the fact that the union president had been accused of child molestation, promoted him, and had him working on child sex cases. He was then accused of attacking five more kids. bostonglobe.com/2021/04/10/met…
The Boston police convince the City to lavish them with extra overtime cash every year--the overtime budget alone in Boston is 240 times the budget for the City's "Human Rights Commission." data.aclum.org/2020/06/05/unp…
Read 4 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
15 Jul
I've been thinking these last few weeks about how, the very next day after white cops beat John Lewis and hundreds of civil rights marchers on the Pettus Bridge in Selma, the President of the U.S. announced an unprecedented expansion in funding for U.S. police departments.
That expansion was predicated on the need to spend money on police "training" and the assertion that poor people and Black people were engaging in a wave of crime. Sound familiar? presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/spec…
Everyone paying attention knew exactly what and who the President meant by "crime" and "criminals." When powerful people talk about "crime" they are only talking about some of the harm that some people commit in some places some of the time. yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…
Read 5 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
12 Jul
a strange thing is happening. the pro-police media, having *no evidence* that the greatest expenditures on cops and cages in modern world history leads to any semblance of safety, are now weaponizing a new argument: poor people and Black people supposedly *want* more police (1)
according to this hysteria, it's "elitist" to suggest that we shift resources from cops, prosecutors, and prisons to things like housing, treatment, medical care, violence interruption mutual aid, etc... these people are shameful. (2)
most of these media people have never worked in or with the communities most harmed by the carceral state. the polls they are citing are both highly manipulated and completely dependent on how the question is phrased. and it's all in the context of the media's own copaganda war.
Read 4 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
12 Jul
I don't think even Greenwald understands what he's saying anymore. What is the point of this? The biggest cop bureaucracy in world history needs more weapons and surveillance tech? Amazing he doesn't see the link between U.S. cops and cops who killed his friend Marielle Franco.
You can always find a few people willing to support forces of oppression. In fact, many in the media (like you) are contributing to the propaganda that causes this, and to the fact that jobs in the carceral bureaucracy are a huge source of economic wealth for many communities.
Greenwald explicitly treats calls for U.S. military invasion by small numbers of marginalized people in other countries very differently. In that context, he gets that there are complex economic and propagandistic forces at work--but on U.S. policing, he buries his head in sand.
Read 4 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
11 Jul
Thread. I represented a client named Paula. She had serious physical disabilities and illness that required constant, careful attention. Prosecutors were threatening her with jail because she couldn't pay monthly probation fees. What happened next is astonishing. (1)
Paula asked me to come to the sheriff with her so that we could explain her medical issues so that, if she was jailed for her poverty, she wouldn't die. We went to meet the sheriff, and we handed him a sheet of paper with instructions for her medications and needs. (2)
Sadly, we weren't able to stop a judge from jailing her. She was locked up briefly for misdemeanor probation violation because she couldn't pay. At the jail, the sheriff mocked her. He showed her the paper with her medications, tore it up, and threw it in the trash. (3)
Read 8 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
10 Jul
Thread. People don't understand the corruption connected to civil forfeiture. I once had a client arrested for marijuana. The cops used civil forfeiture laws to take his car. The officers would then drive around my client's neighborhood mocking him from his own car.
The cops had followed him around for months pulling him over, and one time they claimed that their drug dog smelled marijuana in his car. After hiring an expert to analyze the records, I later discovered they had fabricated the training records for the drug dog.
But they used this fabrication to get a search warrant for my client's house because judges will sign virtually any drug search warrant police request. They raided his home with a SWAT team and found marijuana and seized his car.
Read 5 tweets

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