THREAD. There is a big scandal happening today in the Washington Post. The paper allowed the D.C. Mayor to lie, quoted the lies as fact, and then did nothing to tell readers they were being lied to. I try my best to show what happened, with data and links.
For background, the article was about the D.C. Mayor's sweeping new plan to dramatically increase police budget and add more cops. The article doesn't mention this: D.C. already has the largest number of cops per capita and most total police forces of any city in the country.
To put this into context, D.C. is already the most policed city in the society with the largest amount of human caging in modern world history. U.S. cages Black people 6 times South Africa at height of Apartheid, and D.C. cages Black people at higher rate than *any U.S. state.*
Incredibly, as the article notes, the Mayor is offering this plan even though the Commission of experts convened by the D.C. Council studied the issue and recommended *the exact opposite.* They said D.C. needed fewer cops based on a thorough review of D.C. residents and science. 
Here is where it gets incredible. To support her plan, the Mayor asserted as a fact to the Washington Post that "crime was lower when the policy department had more officers." The reporters @phscoop @TheArtist_MBS @ELaserDavies @juliezweil printed that factual assertion.
The Mayor's claim was a lie. The FBI statistics show that both total "violent crime" and total "property crime" were significantly higher during the years when D.C. had more cops.
Even if we look beyond the Mayor's claim at homicides, the data doesn't track. Homicides are about the same as before 2009, and they fluctuate without any correlation to police staffing levels.
Then it gets worse. The Mayor claims to the Washington Post that a reason D.C. needs more cops with more money is that it took "90 seconds longer" to respond to 911 calls in 2021 versus 2020. The Post reporters just print this unexplained nonsense.
This is a classic example of cops using their own failures to seek more cash. Is response time a function of cops responding to too many things that don't need cops? Would response times be faster with dedicated medical and social work teams that the City and community deploys?
Is response time a function of D.C. police focusing half billion dollar budget on drugs, illegal stops and searches in poor neighborhoods, civil forfeiture, sweeping homeless encampments, minor traffic stops, and overtime fraud? No one asks these questions or talks to experts.
Instead, the clear bureaucratic policy choices of cops to prioritize a lot of other stuff rather than improving 911 response time is treated *as a reason to give the bloated police bureaucracy more money.* It's an incredible lack of rigor on the Post's part.
The whole episode is also a laughable failure of several city council people who told the Post they would vote for the plan without answers to *any* of these questions. An incredible failure of governance by @ChmnMendelson @marycheh @BrianneKNadeau @charlesallen @mayorvincegray
These council members asked a Commission of experts what to do, and are then talking about doing the exact opposite of what the Commission said, all while acknowledging they don't even have the info from cops that would justify the Mayor's science-denying requests. Amazing.
As I've explained, the scientific evidence is that things like affordable housing, health care, mental health care, treatment, education, the arts, after school programming, and reduced poverty and inequality are how you increase safety and reduce harm.
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1476221720621166601
We keep getting more cops instead of more equality and more good governance in part because too many news outlets permit officials to spew copaganda without the rigorous scrutiny that adversarial media requires. "Democracy Dies in the Darkness."
If you made it through all that, you deserve a photo of what Franklin was up to as all this copaganda was happening:
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