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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Here are some other recent examples from a smorgasbord of UK copaganda about low-level theft: “Broken Britain.” “Industrial-scale crime.” “Shoplifting crime wave."
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:
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.
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.
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.
"I had been wondering whether profiting from fascist kidnapping and mass torture/deportation/death was right or wrong, but this philosopher told me it was ok if I give money to the ACLU" is among the best things I've ever consumed in mainstream media.