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Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
@equalityAlec
Aug 4, 2021 • 26 tweets • 8 min read • Read on X
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UPDATED THREAD. You're going to hear a lot about how cops need more resources because "crime is surging" in the next few months. It's propaganda, and here's how you can respond:
First, what constitutes a "crime" is determined by people in power who have a lot of money.
Second, cops manipulate crime stats for political reasons. Cops don't even count the *violent and sexual crimes that cops commit,* which would entirely reverse the crime stats in every city and state.
Third, police ignore most "crime." They only look for *some* crimes committed by *some* people in *some* places. A school fight in a poor neighborhood is recorded as a “crime,” but a fight in a wealthy private school is not. Read hundreds of examples here: yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…
Fourth, police have incentives to focus on some “crimes” and not others. They make billions of $ in overtime for low-level arrests. This is one reason cops have ignored 100,000s of untested rape kits while making record drug arrests for decades. ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-9…
Fifth, police corruption in search of extra cash and weapons affects all of what cops do and what they tell us about what they do. For example, police take more property through civil forfeiture than all “property crimes” combined.
Sixth, only 4% of all cop time goes to what they call "violent crime." And cops are terrible at solving "violent crime." Overwhelming evidence establishes that cops and prisons actually increase future “crime.” So, cops are terrible at preventing harm. nytimes.com/2020/06/19/ups…
Seventh, what cops call “crime” is different from what causes harm. E.g., tobacco kills 480,000 people every year in the U.S, including 41,000 from second-hand smoke. These preventable deaths dwarf police-reported data on deaths from the drugs cops call “crime.”
Eighth, the same is true of water/air pollution and fraudulent home foreclosures, all of which cause huge death rates that kill far more people than what cops call homicides. nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/…
Ninth, wage theft by employers isn't in crime stats b/c it is almost never investigated by cops, but it costs low-wage workers an estimated $50 billion/year, dwarfing the cost of all cop-reported robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and car thefts combined.
Tenth, did you know that rich banks make about as much in fraudulent “overdraft” fees as all of what police call “property crime” combined in the U.S.? Did you know that none of this makes it into police “property crime” statistics? prospect.org/economy/big-ba…
Eleventh, these are millions of yearly white-collar “crimes” by big corporations and the wealthy people who own them but police don’t put them in their crime stats. Read more here about why cops distort the concepts of "crime" and actual harm. currentaffairs.org/2020/08/why-cr…
Twelfth, people will say: but even if "crime" is politicized and even if "violent crime" is actually down in 2021, "shootings" are up. Well, gun sales are up 40% and we’re in a global pandemic mental health crisis. Murder is a problem but not one related to more cops!
Thirteenth, the initial 2021 trend of more shootings is especially accelerated in places that increased police funding, and almost no city decreased police funding significantly. See a few examples:
Fourteenth, almost all reporting about a “crime surge” uses low base rates so that percentage changes can appear high. An increase of 10 shootings to 12 shootings is reported as a 20% increase!
Fifteenth, media often focuses on month to month or year to year numbers, emphasizing different crimes at different times if one goes up, obscuring larger trends like this: we have among lowest murders in last 50 years, and other countries with fewer cops have way fewer murders.
Sixteenth, cops/media thus cherry-pick data. The result of this manipulation is one of the big scandals of our time: for decades the public has hugely overestimated crime rates: fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-…
Seventeenth, there is no evidence that cops/prisons reduce any "crime," especially that they reduce crime *relative to other alternatives.* Think about what could have been done to help people with the trillions of dollars spent on the War on Drugs:
Eighteenth, people telling you to give more cash to cops b/c of “crime” don’t count the *costs*: millions of arrests; millions of separated kids; millions of lost jobs, homes, medical appointments; tens of millions of police assaults; hundreds of millions of criminal records.
Nineteenth, those calling for more cash for cops don't tell you that the trillions of dollars spent on police/prisons has been used by cops for total surveillance and to infiltrate and crush every single movement for social justice in the past 100 years.
Twentieth, the idea of “soaring” crime after a few dozen more shootings w/o reporting how many people died from unstable housing, lack of access to healthcare, pollution, or malnutrition is how elites keep us focused on solutions of control and profit and not liberation.
Finally, not all human tragedy is preventable, but quite a lot of it is, and accepting copaganda on “crime” and police data about that concept as a proxy for holistic public safety is the original sin of most writing in this topic.
Read more @interruptcrim and fight back against propaganda that wealthy interests and cop unions are feeding to us. interruptingcriminalization.com/cops-dont-stop…
I just did the @CitationsPod podcast with @adamjohnsonNYC and @WideAsleepNima featuring the brilliant @tamaranopper on all of these issues. Take a listen:
I've just added to this thread the most important, most comprehensive meta study ever conducted on the topic, showing that incarceration on balance does not improve (but harms) public safety, even as that term is narrowly defined by police and prosecutors.

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More from @equalityAlec

Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Jan 31
All people of good will must know the history of body cameras. Why did Democrats, consultant, and pundits push them as "police reform"? The truth is quite dark.
I set out the shameful history of Democratic Party propaganda about body cameras in my 2024 study called The Body Camera: The Language of Our Dreams. campuspress.yale.edu/yjll/volume-4/…
For those in other places where liberals and the multi-billion dollar surveillance industry is pushing this "reform," my article was translated into French and published as a book. As always with everything I write, the royalties are donated to charity. ruedorion.ca/la-camera-dint…
Read 4 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Jan 14
THREAD. This can be a big educational moment for progressive people who don't work in or study the punishment bureaucracy. Having spent 20 years in it--and just publishing a book on exactly this topic--I can say that reality works in the opposite way that Jamelle assumes: Image
Rhetoric about stuff like "training" has, time and again, in dozens of contexts I studied, had the opposite effect on the approach of liberals to addressing the violence, lawlessness, and ineffectiveness of the punishment bureaucracy.
It's quite similar to the Democratic party and liberal punditry's approach to body cameras, which I wrote about at length last year: . "Training" rhetoric is an even more stark example of effective counterinsurgency propaganda.campuspress.yale.edu/yjll/volume-4/…
Read 8 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Jan 2
THREAD. Every year, I tell the story of Ezell Gilbert. It's the story of one of the most remarkable cases in U.S. history, and you’ve probably never heard of it. The story of what the U.S. government did to him is vital for understanding the current moment we are in.
In 1997, Ezell Gilbert was sentenced to more than 24 years in federal prison in a crack cocaine case. Because of mandatory sentencing (treating crack 100 times as severely as powder), he was put in a cage for a quarter century, and even the judge said this was too harsh.
At sentencing, Gilbert noticed an error that increased his sentence by about *10 years* based on a misclassification of a prior conviction. In 1999, without a lawyer, he filed a petition complaining about the mistake. The Clinton DOJ opposed him, and a court ruled against him.
Read 18 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Oct 12, 2025
THREAD. Did you know that at about 1/3 of all stranger homicides in the U.S. are perpetrated by police? But there's something hidden here that is important to understand in this authoritarian moment.
First the basics: The vast bulk of physical and sexual violence in our society is *not* perpetrated by strangers, but by people who know each other. Obscuring this fact is a critical feature of copaganda in the news. People are shocked to hear it. Why?
A simple answer is that the news makes people extremely scared of strangers--the person next to you at CVS, the person walking down the street, the unhoused person in a tent, the anonymous burglar, etc. These are the kinds of crimes associated with surveillance, policing, etc.
Read 12 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Oct 2, 2025
THREAD. In Trump's speech to an unprecedented gathering of generals, he announced he was preparing to order them to use U.S. "cities as training grounds for our military." I want to highlight a few other bone chilling statements and put them into context that media obscures.
First, although it didn't get as much coverage, Trump also said the U.S. is facing "a war from within" against "the enemy from within." This essentially declared to military leaders--who Hegseth had just essentially told he would be purging of disloyalty--a new civil war.
Second, Trump specifically added that this "war" was something the "people in this room" (i.e. military generals) would "straighten out" in domestic deployments to cities run by Democrats "one by one." He added: "inner cities" are "a big part of war now. It’s a big part of war."
Read 16 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Sep 27, 2025
THREAD. I happened to be in Portland yesterday to give a university lecture as Trump called it “war ravaged Portland” while illegally ordering the deployment of the U.S. military to use “full force.” Image
Image
This kind of outrageous misinformation would not be possible without the culture of fear spread for years by the mainstream media. He is playing on the prodigious ignorance and irrational fear cultivated by the way the news media distorts our sense of safety.
Portland, needless to say, is nothing remotely like what Trump describes. But the mass media has created an entirely delusional public perception of what threats we face and from whom.
Read 5 tweets

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