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Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
@equalityAlec
Aug 4, 2021 • 26 tweets • 8 min read • Read on X
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
Apr 26
As we see police in dozens of cities beating philosophy professors, tackling economics scholars, body slamming Fox camera people, and putting chains on 100s of students singing songs and enjoying seder, it's important to see that these are not a few bad apples.
What we are seeing is one of the primary functions of armed government bureaucrats. Police enforce *some* laws against *some* people at *some* times in *some* places
Each eruption of police crushing a progressive social movement--whether womens' suffrage, civil rights, LGBTQ, environmental, labor, anti-war--is a chance to educate people about why elites care so much about having expansive concentrations of government weaponry + surveillance.
Read 4 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Apr 15
During one of my investigations early in my career, I met a Black teenager who was ticketed for sagging his pants (which was made illegal where he lived). He couldn't afford the ticket, so a judge and a prosecutor approved his arrest, and he was put in a cage.
Several hundred thousand people are jailed every year in the United States because they can't pay various court debts. This is actually a significant fraction of what municipal courts do, and a huge part of the job of police and prosecutors.
The people who talk about police violence, but frame the problem as one of "bad apples" don't want people thinking about the everyday violence all around us--the violence that has become so normal that many people live their lives without even noticing that it is there.
Read 4 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Apr 8
THREAD. One of the most nefarious forms of copaganda is the "authoritarianism is actually what marginalized people want" trope. Here we are told Black people want the military to come into their community rather than, say, free medical care, housing, and guaranteed income. Image
Liberal elite opinion punditry is awash in this nonsense. It's similar to French propaganda in colonial Algeria and South African elite commentary during apartheid. And all share something in common: it works best when members who identify with the group make the argument.
The overall goal of commentary like this is to constantly *manage* the results of unjustifiable inequality with state repression rather than to make our society more equal.
Read 9 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Mar 21
THREAD. Across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of children have been banned from visiting their parents who are awaiting trial in local jails. Why? A conspiracy to make money. We just filed two landmark civil rights lawsuits to stop it, but the story is unbelievable.
The lawsuits allege that Sheriffs banned family visits as part of a conspiracy with kickbacks from the multi-billion dollar jail telecom industry on the theory that they could all make money on expensive phone and video calls if families couldn’t visit their loved ones for free.
Children have a right to hug their parents, hold their hand, and look into their eyes. It's one of the basic liberties that the government cannot take away. And yet, most people in U.S. don't know that their local sheriff and a few private equity-owned companies are doing this.
Read 7 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Mar 20
THREAD. Today, the New Yorker magazine has published one of the worst pieces of copaganda about retail theft that I have seen in my archive. I'm not going to link to it, but I want to share a few thoughts. Last year, L.A. endured what became known as Flash Rob Summer. On August 1st, nearly a dozen masked people swarmed a Gucci boutique and fled with armloads of merchandise. On August 8th, at least thirty people snatched more than three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of items at an Yves Saint Laurent store and left in a fleet of getaway cars. Four days later: Sunglass Hut. The same day, at a Nordstrom, dozens of people dressed in dark clothes ransacked the designer-handbag department, toppling mannequins. Another day, at a Nike store, a witness yelled “Where’s security?” while recording a man...
First, as I have written, the fixation on retail theft by corporate media, police, and Big Retail is scandalous. We now know that they lied about it at a time when property crime is near historic lows. There is no evidence that retail theft is increasing.
Even New York Times (and Atlantic, NPR, LA Times, and many others) debunked this nonsense. It was a cash grab by cops and retailers to socialize corporate security, increase police budgets, deflect from labor practices, and promote anti-online legislation. nytimes.com/2023/12/08/bus…
Read 7 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Mar 15
THREAD. The most effective propaganda is based on true facts. It is simply inaccurate that the best propaganda are lies. This is a phenomenon that is widely misunderstood. A few quick points.
The best propaganda takes true facts and uses them to create a false impression. For example, the news media can create the impression that shoplifting is rising in a given city in year X by reporting more true anecdotes of shoplifting than it did in year X-1.
The public can be influenced to conclude that shoplifting is rising based on seeing only true stories of shoplifting, even though the actual number of shopliftings had gone down significantly.
Read 8 tweets

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