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Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
@equalityAlec
Dec 29, 2021 • 50 tweets • 15 min read • Read on X
UPDATED THREAD: In 2021, we heard a lot about how police and prisons need more cash because "crime is surging." It's copaganda. I’ve made a new thread of threads with resources to help understand the issue and respond.
1) We must first see that there is a difference between what police do and what police say they do. For example, police talk a lot about “violent crime” in the media, but U.S. police only choose to spend 4% of their time on what they call "violent crime.” nytimes.com/2020/06/19/ups…
2) Police also talk a lot about protecting property and how bad theft is, but police steal more property through civil forfeiture than all burglary crime in the U.S. combined. Do you know about civil forfeiture?
3) Police also manipulate crime data. They don’t count the estimated several million *violent and sexual crimes that cops and jail guards commit,* which would reverse the police-reported “crime stats” in every city and state. ;
4) Police get $$$ 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…
5) Why do you think there is such a big gap between what cops tell us about what they do and what cops actually do? You have to learn the context behind all these calls to increase police and prison budgets: it’s a profitable bureaucratic business.
6) So what is the context? U.S. already cages people more than any society in modern history. Almost everyone caged in the U.S. is poor. U.S. cages Black people 6 times rate of South Africa at height of Apartheid. If human caging made us safe, we’d be safest country in the world.
7) The evidence shows the opposite: the decades-long scientific consensus is that human caging does not reduce crime. This is the most recent meta-study of 116 studies on the question. Sending people to cages does not reduce crime, it increases it: journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/71…
8) Every year in a cage takes *two years* off a person’s life. Because U.S. cages so much, the overall average U.S. life expectancy is 1.8 years lower than if we caged people as much as other comparable countries! Cops and prisons are killing us all.
9) Let this sink in because it’s one of the most important facts you’ll ever read, rarely reported in the news: the policy choice to arrest and cage so many people is costing the U.S. hundreds of millions of years of human life. It’s one of the great modern historical atrocities.
10) If all of the bureaucrats in the system know that human caging and separating millions of families doesn’t make us safer, why do they do it? Read this thread on why 40 years of the “War on Drugs” led to even worse drug problems:
11) So, what works? The evidence for real community safety is clear: invest in healthcare, housing, mental health, addiction treatment, teachers, art/music/theater/sports for kids, violence interruption, mutual aid, etc. Most of all, reduce inequality:
12) And thus a central role of copaganda: distract from inequality. The goal is to extract wealth from working class, make them less safe, and then offer them only those “solutions” that increase the power and control over them by people who own things. currentaffairs.org/2020/08/why-cr…
13) And so what cops say about “crime” is only a tiny part of safety. To start, which of many harms in the world is a "crime" is a political choice by people in power who have a lot of money. They have decided that many really bad things aren’t crimes.
14) And then cops ignore most "crime." Cops only look for *some* crimes by *some* people in *some* places. A fight in a poor school is recorded as a “crime,” but a fight in a wealthy private school is not. I collected examples that will blow your mind: yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…
15) We can begin to see a pattern: What elites call “crime” is different from what causes harm. Air pollution, much of it illegal and technically "criminal," kills 10 million people per year! Elites choose not to enforce it as a crime.
16) Did you know that illegal bank foreclosures are linked to more deaths than all homicides combined and that “law enforcement” officials ignore about 100,000 violations of the Clean Water Act every year that cause cancer, death, child tooth loss, etc…? yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…
17) Tobacco kills 480,000 people every year in the U.S, including 41,000 from second-hand smoke. Alcohol kills 260 people per day. These preventable deaths combined are far larger than the number of deaths from the drugs cops have treated as “crime” for decades.
18) 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.
18) Interests that own news outlets benefit from people focusing urgently on police-reported “crime” and not on crimes like wage theft, illegal pollution, illegal evictions, fraudulent foreclosures, tax evasion, etc. even though these crimes cost far more.
19) Tax evasion by wealthy people costs 20 times more than all wage theft, estimated to be about $1 trillion dollars per year. The money involved in these crimes could eradicate whole classes of social suffering, but these laws are widely unenforced against the rich.
20) 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…
21) Interests that own news outlets benefit from people focusing urgently on police-reported “crime” and not on crimes like wage theft, illegal pollution, illegal evictions, fraudulent foreclosures, tax evasion, etc. even though these crimes cost far more.
22) Because no frantic articles every day about wage theft, tax evasion, and other crimes of wealthy, public perception of which property crimes cause most harm is distorted. Powerful people spend a lot of money manipulating what we think should be urgent.
23) Instead of billions spent by corporations and police to influence media coverage, imagine if the harm done to people most harmed by inequality determined what counted as urgent to us:
24) Cops are bad at preventing harm b/c most harm is caused by inequality, deprivation, toxic masculinity, illness, lack of relationships with others, alienation, lead poison, no access to care, etc. This is how other countries spend less on cages and have less violence.
25) In fact, the cops know that the evidence shows that even a few days in jail increases future “crime” by destabilizing people’s lives, lost jobs, lost housing, lost children, interrupted medical/mental health care, trauma/disease in jail. vera.org/downloads/publ…
26) Most people get that police, prosecutors, and prisons don’t prevent harm or make survivors whole. The vast majority of survivors of violent crime choose not to report their harm to the U.S. legal system because it doesn’t provide what they need. law.ua.edu/lawreview/file…
27) People say: but even if "crime" is manipulated, excludes cop violence, and "violent crime" is actually down in many places, shootings and homicides are up this year. Well, gun sales are way up and we’ve been in a global pandemic mental health crisis.
28) What cops call "violent crime" is near historic lows in the U.S., but it is still a terrible tragedy and public policy problem. But as with all forms of interpersonal violence, the best way to address homicides/violence isn’t with more armed bureaucrats and human cages. Image
29) One fact police asking for more $$ ignore: to the extent some police-reported “crimes” increased in 2021, many went down. Trend was across cities, counties, and states, many with *increased* police funding, most with no major reforms. It’s not linked to “reforms.”
30) Police PR focuses on month to month or year to year numbers, emphasizing different crimes at different times if one goes up, conveying constant increase but obscuring: we have among lowest murders in last 50 years, and other countries with less incarceration have *way fewer.*
31) Most reporting about “crime surges” also 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! Here are some caveats to insert into news coverage of “crime stats.”
32) Cops thus cherry-pick data, focusing on “shootings” when “violent crime” is down and focusing on “property crime” when homicides are down, etc. This manipulation is a huge scandal: for decades the public has hugely overestimated crime rates: fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-…
33) We must remember that those who want to cage human beings have to prove not only that it reduces harm, but that it is better than all of the other social investments and community interventions that science and experience have proven effective.
34) Always ask the person calling for more human caging: have you met this moral and scientific burden?
35) Public debate lacks proper analysis of these costs. People urging more cash to cops b/c of “crime” don’t count the *costs*: millions of arrests and separated kids; millions of lost jobs, homes, medical appointments; tens of millions of police assaults.
36) People urging more cash to cops b/c of "crime" don't count the hundreds of millions of criminal records, ubiquitous surveillance over ever aspect of our lives. They don't count the police murders. The Hundreds of millions of years of lost life.
37) The public debate also ignores what we allow to happen in our cages: putting someone in a cage means a high chance of sexual assault, physical beatings, disease, no sunlight/fresh air/exercise, torture of solitary confinement, untreated cancer, no family hugs for years, etc
38) Have you met your burden?
39) A dirty secrets: the money spent on police/prisons has been used by bureaucrats for total surveillance and to infiltrate and crush each major social movement for economic, racial, gender, and environmental justice in the past 100 years.
40) Idea of “crime waves" after a few dozen more shootings or a few retail thefts w/o urgently reporting how many people died from unstable housing, lack of healthcare/pollution/malnutrition is how elites keep us focused on solutions of control and profit and not liberation.
41) We discussed this in more depth here if you prefer podcasts! @CitationsPod with @adamjohnsonNYC @WideAsleepNima @tamaranopper podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-…
42) Although there are amazing journalists shedding light on these issues, we rarely hear these perspectives in corporate media b/c many media institutions have deep relationships with corporate and carceral bureaucracies. This affects what they tell you.
43) The bottom line is that public safety is extremely important. Our society’s obsession with investments in police/prison bureaucracy are profitable to a small number of people, but the weight of scientific evidence shows they are catastrophic to health and safety.
44) Finally, not all human tragedy is preventable, but quite a lot of it is. Accepting copaganda on “crime” and police data about that concept as a proxy for holistic safety is the original sin of most public commentary in this area, and we must fortify our minds against it.
For more resources on this, I suggest you read this fantastic report by @interruptcrim interruptingcriminalization.com/cops-dont-stop…
To read more about the history of U.S. police and copaganda, I suggest Our Enemies in Blue by Kristian Williams. And for an inspiring, practical account of how communities have worked to build safety and wellness without police violence, read Anarchy Works by @PeterGelderloos
If you made it through this whole heavy thread, you deserve a photo of one of my favorite old cats (he is down to one tooth) and a photo of a one of my favorite kittens sitting in one of my favorite plants. They are both proponents of shrinking police and prison bureaucracies. ImageImage
As discussed in the source, this should read: bank foreclosures, mortgage fraud, and the related financial crimes that led to the financial crisis of 2008 and resulting increase in poverty.

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More from @equalityAlec

Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Dec 30, 2024
THREAD. There is a group of reporters at the New York Times who are intent on peddling copaganda whatever the consequences. The paper's Christmas Day crime article was one for the ages. It's a smorgasbord of propaganda tactics that I've covered, with some amusing new flourishes.
The premise is that New Mexico has a maverick Democratic governor who is fighting against all odds to expand policing, prosecution, and prisons. She's doing this, we are told, out of a genuine, laudable commitment to being "tough on crime" because she cares about our safety. Image
The villains in the article? Other Democrats in New Mexico who have dared to question (based on mountains of evidence) whether more police, prosecutors, and prisons will help address problems of housing, medical care, inequality, precarity, and safety. Enter the New York Times.
Read 14 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Dec 7, 2024
Thread. The New York Times coverage of the police search for the killer of the health insurance CEO is getting weird. One aspect of it is pretty dark.
A key feature of copaganda is that police and the news media attempt to use crises to increase the size, power, and profit of the punishment and surveillance bureaucracies. This has long been one of the creepiest things about it. They don’t let a good crisis go to waste.
In today’s fawning tribute to the NYPD’s surveillance system, the paper celebrates surveillance and even laments that New York does not have enough. That’s the thrust of the entire article. Image
Image
Read 8 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Nov 25, 2024
Thread. A new video of Chicago police brazenly shooting someone who had done nothing wrong at all raises some interesting and under-discussed issues.
First, here's a link to the video. Absolutely incredible that this happened--the police had no basis whatsoever to even stop this person outside his own home, let alone shoot him. abc7chicago.com/post/video-rel…
Most importantly: After they murdered Laquan McDonald and covered it up for years until journalists forced the video's release, Chicago police learned an important and underappreciated lesson: controlling the video helps police either suppress or foment virality.
Read 8 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Nov 18, 2024
THREAD. One of the moments that changed my career was my first day as a public defender in D.C.'s juvenile court. When I walked into the courtroom, which is closed to the public, all the little children were fully shackled in metal chains on their wrists, waists, and feet.
I saw 9-year-olds, 11-year-olds, children with intellectual disabilities, children who had suffered profound abuse--all shackled for hours. But what shocked me most: no one had objected in years. The government officials had become desensitized to everyday brutality.
I asked the judge what she would have done if she came home from a concert and found that the babysitter had shackled her children to a table for hours. She'd probably prosecute the babysitter for child cruelty. Indiscriminate child-shackling is clearly unconstitutional.
Read 6 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Oct 29, 2024
THREAD. Something important is happening in U.S. media that I think is getting insufficient attention, and the controversy around the Los Angeles Times refusing to endorse Kamala Harris amidst her support of an ongoing genocide gets at it.
As background, a lot of uproar ensued in mainstream media circles after @nikasoonshiong’s thread stated that she supported the decision of the paper owned by her father to refuse to endorse Harris and adding that, for her, genocide is a red line:
The mainstream media is, absurdly, attempting to equate WaPo’s refusal to endorse Harris with LA Times, even though they were done for different reasons. Subscriber numbers show normal people get that, with WaPo losing far more readers. Reasons matter:
Read 22 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Oct 23, 2024
Thread. Today’s front page in the New York Times is a good lesson in two of the most important tactics in propaganda.
First, notice the euphemism “pragmatism.” The idea that people who support enormous injustice and terrible policies are “pragmatic” is one of the most subtly ideological and dangerous characteristics of corporate news. This trope is used for decades. House correspondent Kamala Harris is not offering sweeping change, even as voters express dissatisfaction about the direction of the country. She’s an institutionalist who wants to preserve democratic ideals, and an incrementalist who believes progress takes time. That means her pragmatic approach could be frustrating to some supporters.
People become unable to distinguish between someone who supports lofty values but who is wisely playing 4D chess by pretending not to support them for years versus someone who actually doesn’t support, say, universal health care, social security, peace, economic equality, etc
Read 13 tweets

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