Thread by @equalityAlec

THREAD. I've been thinking about this New York Times headline that permits a powerful politician to spread false information. It surfaces several important flaws that people should know about a lot of recent news coverage.

A first major flaw: there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that little tweaks to bail laws or policing strategies or prosecutor charging policies could even possibly have significant effects on "crime." At most, these things would be extremely marginal.

The root causes of crime are big things! Like inequality, trauma, toxic masculinity, addiction, housing, health care, mental illness, unemployment, social unrest and alienation, lots of guns, etc. It's false to suggest that tiny changes punishment bureaucrats make matter a lot.

Almost no article you read in the New York Times or other elite outlets mentions these root causes. Instead it allows powerful people to engage in an evidence-free debate with an absurd premise--the little things bureaucrats do have much impact on how much people harm each other.

A second major flaw: the U.S. punishment bureaucracy looks VERY similar in 2022 to what it looked like in 2020. There have been *no meaningful structural changes* to the system that, as a matter of physical reality, could have led to significant changes in "crime."

No reasonable person thinks that relatively minor changes to bail procedure in a 3-4 states or minuscule reductions in discretionary budgets of a few dozen police forces (most of which have been reversed) can significantly impact crime rates. This is like denying global warming.

Take bail reform. Although "bail reform" is being blamed for crimes from Texas to New Mexico to California to New York, there has been almost no meaningful changes to bail systems across the country. Even in places with reforms, the assembly line looks almost the same each day.

Moreover, the overwhelming data we do have on bail reform shows clearly that reducing the use of money bail *decreases crime.* A politician blaming "bail reform" for more crime is lying to you. It is like denying global warming based on available science.

Take defunding police. There was not a single U.S. police force that was meaningfully "defunded" in any way. And total spending on the wasteful police bureaucracy is higher now than prior to the murder of George Floyd. And police killed more people in 2021 than 2020!

There is not a single scholar or cop or police consultant or New York Times columnist who has any evidence that tiny tweaks to police budgets could even theoretically cause significant changes to the crime rate. It's all complete nonsense.

And a third major flaw: people across the country actually believe (falsely) there have been significant reforms to the criminal punishment bureaucracy.

-U.S. still by far world leader in human caging.
-U.S. and Philippines still only two countries with for-profit bail industry.
-U.S. still cages Black people 6 times rate of South Africa during Apartheid
-Police and prison and prosecutor and court budgets are at record high

People only believe there have been major changes because the media is constantly giving a platform to reactionary right-wing forces who have a political strategy of fearmongering and then using that fear to increase their own power and profit.

Well-meaning journalists should see this massive gap in public knowledge as a real failure of their profession and its norms.

Why is this important? There has been a deluge of media coverage in which cops purport to blame "reforms" for various crimes. This is a deception of historic proportions. News organizations are pushing us toward reactionary, fascist repression based on wild copaganda.

While many elite media began to apply more rigorous skepticism to people like Trump and Bannon and Miller, they have so far refused to do so for cops, prosecutors, and the new generation of fear-mongering mayors whose public comments are every bit as intentionally false.

This could go down as one of the biggest historical scandals of modern media. Police surveillance and weaponry is so advanced, the fascist movement so organized, inequality so great, and democratic norms so eroded, that we face an unprecedented threat.

For just one of a number of recent examples, see this thread about another false headline from the New York Times.

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1464647227650019331

It's also worth noting that, in this article itself, the reporting established that the Mayor's claim was false. Instead of the story being the Mayor lying, the NYT editors chose to make the Mayor's lie *the headline,* which by far more people will read.

https://twitter.com/soledadobrien/status/1487437402868269057