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?
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1412428329806860288
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.
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1430159907366621190;
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1400820163851718663
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.
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1454486985943535624
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:
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1469398430103400450
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:
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1436053960608059396
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.
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1402265276893339662
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.
https://twitter.com/dwallacewells/status/1463517703226937348
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.
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1405935877013086212
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.
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1464270507310727171
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.
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1464270507310727171
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.
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1470790952558243848
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:
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1464270519365246979
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. 
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.”
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1472994178506407939
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.
https://twitter.com/orennimni/status/1398997701031825414
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.
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1408077685620985863
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.
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1442548020118097921
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.
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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