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Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
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10 Oct, 12 tweets, 4 min read
Thread. This morning, the NYT published another dangerous piece of copaganda, filled with misrepresentations and strategic omissions, all to confuse the public into normalizing and supporting record human caging budgets. nytimes.com/2021/10/10/us/…
First, the NYT conflates cops budgets and "public safety." Without an explanation or evidence, NYT says increase in cops shows mayors "prioritizing public safety." The opposite is true. How does NYT write this clause without noting that experts disagree?
A cardinal rule of police propaganda in the NYT is that it always subtly suggests--usually in unsupported clauses in the middle of sentences presented as so unarguable that they require no citation--that cops are connected to narrow, vague notions of "public safety."
Next, NYT says experts support "hot spot" policing (code word for flooding Black and poor neighborhoods with armed bureaucrats). Not a single piece of rigorous empirical evidence supports this police union favorite, but NYT does not tell readers. currentaffairs.org/2020/08/why-cr…
Despite naming "criminologists" as supporting this nonsense, we have yet another NYT article that does not cite, quote, or explain the views of a single expert who studies how police increase violence, crush social movements, and preserve inequality.
Imagine writing a piece on record police budgets to respond to "violent crime" but not explaining all this "crime data" excludes *several million* physical and sexual assaults by cops and that only 4% of all police time is spent on "violent crime."
Then the piece again fails to provide key context. E.g., there was no significant "defunding." Police budgets increased last year in vast majority of top 100 police forces.  Where budgets did decrease, it was *tiny* percentage that didn't significantly change operations.
The subheading says more police money is a response to "rising levels of crime." False. Even if you put faith in police reported "crime," the NYT just misleads its readers: every category of "major crime" is down, "property crime" and "violent crime."
There is much more wrong, but I have to do my other work. This is one in a very troubling series of pro-police articles by the NYT. I wrote about two of the most recent ones here:
Also, remember this recent classic, where the NYT whitewashed hundreds of thousands of police crimes and used the police response to protests to say that cops needed more money for "training"?
I hope @jdavidgoodman will dig into this and think critically about the harm he caused. The issues are too important and the propaganda too widespread for smart journalists to keep groupthinking their way into normalizing the greatest human caging bureaucracy in world history.
More important points about this terrible article:

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More from @equalityAlec

Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
11 Oct
Thread: There are some important things missing from the media's welcome attention on the humanitarian catastrophe at Rikers. Here are a few more things you should know about it: nytimes.com/2021/10/11/nyr…
First, not once in this story about the deplorable conditions at Rikers are the words "judge" or "prosecutor" mentioned. But know this: the most proximate cause of this disaster are the illegal and inhumane money bail, probation, and punishment practices of local judges/DAs.
Second, people have been talking about horrific jail conditions in thousands of U.S. jails since jails were created. Look at Eugene Debs' fantastic memoir Walls and Bars, or read this fantastic interview with Michel Foucault in the NYT from 1975: archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.co…
Read 9 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
9 Oct
Thread: I was just invited to speak to students at Harvard about how to pursue social justice in the face of pressure to work for wealthy corporations. As I walked on campus, I passed the Arthur Sackler museum, and it got me thinking about how our society defines “crime.” ImageImage
Sackler built a fortune in part by pioneering new marketing techniques for exploiting drug monopolies and bribing doctors for prescribing his drugs. This was possible b/c U.S. criminal laws permit the rich to hoard even publicly funded patents that could save millions of lives.
We live in a society in which the wealthy have decided that it isn’t a “crime” to watch someone die by hoarding insulin medication developed with public investment but it is a “crime” to take a dose of insulin without paying for it.
Read 6 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
8 Oct
Thread. Here are a few helpful disclaimers for journalists to insert into their stories when talking about "crime data" or "crime rates" reported by the police, or when police ask them to report on a "crime wave":
"Property crime data excludes most property crime, including illegal seizures by police (which roughly equal all reported burglary), wage theft by employers (which is about 5x more than all reported property crime), and tax evasion (which is about 20x more than all wage theft)."
"Violent crime data reported by police excludes nearly all of the violent crimes committed by police and jail guards, which experts estimate to include several million physical and sexual assaults each year."
Read 7 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
6 Oct
Thread. Here is the Democratic Party District Attorney in Houston working with local Fox station on unhinged racist rants about "predators," "anarchy" and "violent, repeat offenders" who will "maim, rob, and kill fresh victims." fox26houston.com/news/harris-co…
Know the context: these racist rants come as the metro area has record of more than $2 billion police/jail budget, as "violent crime" is at historic lows, and as all data shows even modest bail reforms have been success. This is how threatening even *talk* of reform can be.
Why are they so scared? Profits for bail industry are declining and officials are starting to talk about investing in community-based alternatives to human caging in public health, schools, restorative justice. First step in bail reform a huge success:
Read 6 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
5 Oct
Today marks the end of our four-year lawsuit against prosecutors in New Orleans to end their practice of using fake subpoenas and fraudulent material witness warrants to jail survivors of crime to coerce their testimony. The story is unbelievable.
For years under DA Leon Cannizzaro, DAs in New Orleans fabricated documents that looked like official court documents in order to trick crime victims into private meetings at the DA's office. When many didn't cooperate, they had them illegally jailed. newyorker.com/news/news-desk…
The case is a vivid example of the real interests pursued by punishment bureaucrats who are willing to separate children, cage the most vulnerable people in the community, and threaten crime survivors if they do not participate in a charade of further state violence.
Read 5 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
1 Oct
THREAD. This is one of the most disturbing stories I have seen in a long time: a huge corporation that profits from separating parents from their children and then charging monopoly prices for jail phone calls is partnering with Sesame Street.
The company is GTL. Along with Securus, it dominates the profiting off mass human caging. GTL and Securus worked with jails to end in-person visits so that people too poor to pay bail cannot see or hug their kids. Why? Because then they spend more $$, with kickbacks to the jails.
Now, using the very money it extracted from some of the poorest families in our society--families too poor to buy their loved ones out of jail--GTL is laundering its reputation by partnering with Sesame Street to teach children about "coping with incarceration" of their parents.
Read 5 tweets

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