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https://mobile.twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1465326906442719234

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1466452106139906058

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Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

Mar 18

There has been an alarming development in our legal system. Judges are starting to contract with a private corporation started by an ex-Palantir employee--whose bio says he is also a former speechwriter for Israel's UN ambassador--to have **secretive proprietary AI help decide cases for them.**

The pressure to be "efficient" and to process more and more cases in assembly-line fashion is one of the great legal crises of our time. More and more, the legal system is eviscerating the capacity for even the tiniest level of critical thinking; any semblance of justice amidst the extraordinary pressure to rubber stamp; time for reflection; accountability; transparency; and the hope of some balancing of integrity, moral courage, intellectual rigor, etc.

These developments are happening with almost no democratic public debate, and almost no meaningful public oversight. Most lawyers even are totally in the dark about how the cases they are working on are being decided--and by whom.

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Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

Mar 14

THREAD. I have to say that I am very disappointed with John Oliver. I finally watched his segment on police body cameras, and it was abysmal. Missed the whole point, and in the process bought into some of the worst copaganda about them.

The show correctly (but not strongly enough) points out that police body cameras don't "work"--meaning they are a total failure if one assumes their goal is to make police less violent and more accountable. They do not do that. They do not do the thing most liberals have been told is their purpose. The research is overwhelming on this point. The mainstream news has numerous articles on the evidence. Oliver reports this with some decent jokes, but he largely makes the cardinal error that I identified in my study of a decade of body camera propaganda: **Oliver assumes that the marketing of body cameras to well-meaning liberals accurately reflects their true purposes and functions.** As a result, he follows a long ling of liberal propaganda in obscuring the reasons that police, the surveillance industry, prosecutors, and politicians keep pushing them. Isn't he the slightest bit curious why both Hakeem Jeffries, every prosecutor in the U.S., and Kristi Noem/Tom Homan are celebrating them?

Incredibly, Oliver misses almost all the key parts of the story: 1) The original plan of the tech industry and cops to market them as good for cops/surveillance; 2) They had no success with this and had to rely on private donations for body cameras from people like Steven Spielberg! 3) So, after Ferguson, they pivoted to pitching them to liberals as "accountability and transparency." 4) This is worth literally tens of billions of dollars, and it's inextricably linked to the surveillance industry, AI, facial recognition, voice recognition, cloud computing contracts, policing of protests, databases on activists and poor people and immigrants, and protecting cops from liabilityl etc. 5) The enormous pressure from prosecutors and cops to get liberals to fork over the billions of dollars necessary to give every cop a body camera so they can use it overwhelmingly in low-level cases to coerce guilty pleas from poor people because the entire system is crushed if people exercise their right to trial; 6) The cops love them because they control the footage and can hide bad stuff, make stuff they like go viral, and control public narrative; 7) They play an extremely important propaganda function as we see after police killings and after recent ICE killings of focusing conversations on individual incidents and bad actors to get people to stop asking much deeper questions about why we have these forces and why they are in the neighborhoods they are in and what they are doing.

Read 7 tweets

Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

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…

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Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

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:

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/…

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Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

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

@equalityAlec

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.

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