Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Sep 9, 2021 11 tweets 3 min read Read on X
THREAD: One enduring truth you don't hear police mention when they talk about "crime waves" is this: violence is higher in countries that are more unequal, and violence is higher in U.S. states that are more unequal. Structural inequality kills. Let's look at the data:
In groundbreaking work studying decades of data from around the world, leading researchers found a number of things that you should know about how inequality determines all of the problems that cops, prosecutors, and judges tell you we need cages for. equalitytrust.org.uk/sites/default/…
Homicide rates are higher in more unequal rich countries:
Drug use is higher in more unequal countries:
Mental illness is more prevalent in more unequal countries:
Human caging by the government is more prevalent in more unequal countries:
Human caging by the government is more prevalent in more unequal U.S. states:
People trust each other less in more unequal U.S. states.
This is profound evidence that what you've been told by powerful people who profit from human caging is wrong. If police and prosecutors made us safe, the U.S. would be the safest country in world history. No one else has spent remotely close to the trillions that we have.
You can explore more in depth how and why powerful people created the myth of linking our health and safety to police, prosecutors, and prisons here:
Thank you to the amazing people at @equalitytrust for this powerful work.

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More from @equalityAlec

Apr 17
THREAD. As authoritarianism rises, people still don't know the story of what Democrats and news outlets did after the fake shoplifting epidemic: created one of the most alarming expansions of surveillance in modern times. The details of what Democrats + cops did will shock you.
First, as I explain in my new book Copaganda, everyone now acknowledges the "retail theft" and "shoplifting" epidemic was fake. Shoplifting was not up--it was **down.** And property crime at historic lows. It was entirely a fabrication. But why?
The companies had their own reasons--distracting from the real reasons they were closing stories, lobbying for various crackdowns on online commerce, and socializing the costs of security to the public so they could cut costs. But the real story is the police.
Read 8 tweets
Mar 30
Copaganda 101: the New York Times suggests without evidence (and contrary to actual polling evidence) that “left-leaning views” on public safety “have become less popular.” It’s a neat sleight of hand where the news doesn’t actually tell us what those mystery positions are. While many of his progressive rivals in the race have adopted more centrist positions on certain issues like policing and public safety, Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, continues to embrace left-leaning views that have become less popular with voters in New York.
Notice also the paper’s description of violent police surveillance and repression as “centrist positions.”
I have a chapter in my Copaganda book about the sometimes subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) playbook the New York Times uses against candidates who would attempt to curb the size, power, and profit of police.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 12
THREAD. Last year, we filed landmark lawsuits on behalf of children in Michigan alleging a conspiracy between sheriffs + private equity-owned companies to end family jail visits for millions of kids across the U.S. as part of a scheme to make more $$ on phone/video calls.
Several days ago, a second Michigan sheriff has announced that this ban on visits is wrong and destructive, and that they will be ending it. Hundreds of sheriffs are still doing this--do you know what's going on in your community? facebook.com/SheriffAlyshia…
You can watch a video from NBC News explaining what's going on across the country:
Read 5 tweets
Feb 10
THREAD. Every day I get to work with amazing people from all walks of life who are dedicating their lives to fighting government repression and corporate predation. They do it strategically and relentlessly. The incompetence and grifting of political elites makes a mockery of it.
For years, Jeffries and leading Democrats pushed an agenda of mass economic plunder, health insurance profiteering, prisons, militarism, genocide, identity politics, jingoism, and ecological ruin. It's why he can't say anything meaningful with credibility in this fascist moment.
The crisis is as acute as it has been in my lifetime. People of goodwill and influence must jettison leaders like this from public life. We need to organize and demand people who can put forward a simple, popular plan of widespread human flourishing and resistance to cruelty.
Read 8 tweets
Jan 27
THREAD. The time has come for more people to be talking about how the news media manipulates coverage of public polling. The New York Times's latest coverage of polling about Trump is unethical and dangerous.
The New York Times recently published an alarming article purporting to tell its elite liberal readers that "Trump's Policies" are widely popular. Image
Specifically, the headline and key parts of the article made the bold (and worrying) claim that most people in the U.S. wanted Trump to deport "everyone living in the U.S. without authorization." Image
Read 14 tweets
Jan 21
THREAD. A very grave problem, across New York Times news stories of almost every subject, is the brazen stupidity and credulity of the reporting. Here is the paper's primary response to Trump's absurd push to designate drug cartels as "terrorist" groups: Image
First, no reasonable observer of modern U.S. politics or history could conclude that the U.S. has ever been serious about "defeating" terrorist groups or drug distribution organizations. In fact, the U.S. has been the world's most significant state sponsor of each.
That's not the point of either its selective and laughably contradictory weaponization and construction of the term "terrorist" or its comically disastrous "War on Drugs." I wrote about the latter at length, explaining why all of this is propaganda: equalityalec.substack.com/p/the-big-dece…
Read 9 tweets

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