During one of my investigations early in my career, I met a Black teenager who was ticketed for sagging his pants (which was made illegal where he lived). He couldn't afford the ticket, so a judge and a prosecutor approved his arrest, and he was put in a cage. Several hundred thousand people are jailed every year in the United States because they can't pay various court debts. This is actually a significant fraction of what municipal courts do, and a huge part of the job of police and prosecutors.

THREAD. One of the most nefarious forms of copaganda is the "authoritarianism is actually what marginalized people want" trope. Here we are told Black people want the military to come into their community rather than, say, free medical care, housing, and guaranteed income. Liberal elite opinion punditry is awash in this nonsense. It's similar to French propaganda in colonial Algeria and South African elite commentary during apartheid. And all share something in common: it works best when members who identify with the group make the argument.

THREAD. Across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of children have been banned from visiting their parents who are awaiting trial in local jails. Why? A conspiracy to make money. We just filed two landmark civil rights lawsuits to stop it, but the story is unbelievable. The lawsuits allege that Sheriffs banned family visits as part of a conspiracy with kickbacks from the multi-billion dollar jail telecom industry on the theory that they could all make money on expensive phone and video calls if families couldn’t visit their loved ones for free.

THREAD. Today, the New Yorker magazine has published one of the worst pieces of copaganda about retail theft that I have seen in my archive. I'm not going to link to it, but I want to share a few thoughts. First, as I have written, the fixation on retail theft by corporate media, police, and Big Retail is scandalous. We now know that they lied about it at a time when property crime is near historic lows. There is no evidence that retail theft is increasing.

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1470089954428551173

THREAD. The most effective propaganda is based on true facts. It is simply inaccurate that the best propaganda are lies. This is a phenomenon that is widely misunderstood. A few quick points. The best propaganda takes true facts and uses them to create a false impression. For example, the news media can create the impression that shoplifting is rising in a given city in year X by reporting more true anecdotes of shoplifting than it did in year X-1.

THREAD. One of the most dangerous forms of modern copaganda is claiming “even liberals are doing it” when talking about something monstrous and authoritarian.

First, there is nothing “liberal” about the current SF ruling class. It has among the most authoritarian local government officials I have tracked in my 15 years. The DA and Mayor and former police PR head on the County Board are backed by Republican billionaires.

A lot of people think getting a law passed or a policy changed is the end of the fight, but it's just the beginning. Many progressive reforms I've seen in my career have been derailed by bureaucrats behind closed doors. What is happening in secret in Los Angeles is alarming. After one of the biggest progressive victories in decades, in which people in LA passed a ballot measure to focus county money on systems of care and services, a group of consultants, police unions, prosecutors, judges, and bureaucrats had other plans.

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1698757477117108715

THREAD: These two paragraphs in the New York Times about the unprecedented deployment of soldiers in the NYC subway are unsupported fantasies. Either total fabrications by a newspaper or assertions of causation and fact for which the reporters have no basis. A few thoughts:

Background: This is a frightening moment. New York is spending $100,000,000s at a time of housing and public health crisis for soldiers and 1,000 more cops in the subway even though subway is extremely safe by historical standards and evidence shows cops don’t make it safer.

Oh my god. The New York Times just did a puff profile of the former propaganda head of the San Francisco police department, written by one of the leading purveyors of false information in recent years, who the paper hired as its bureau chief in spite of her ethical scandals. The guy was an unhinged liar and propagandist when he made almost $300,000/year as the head of PR at the police department. After he was caught sending scandalous texts to a local journalist, the mayor appointed him to the county Board without an election.

THREAD. There is a lot of misunderstanding out there about the bail system and what it means to be arrested. This thread will help you explain the issue to anyone. If you ask most people: if you were arrested, would you want to be presumed innocent or would you want to be kept in a jail cell covered in urine with no medical care, inedible food, no family visits, and a risk of being beaten, most people say they'd like to be presumed innocent

This will go down as one of the most shameful votes in the modern history of the Senate--an institution with a lot of shameful votes. It's cartoon-villain levels of evil from Democrats--completely divorced from facts, morality, and existing international and US law.

https://twitter.com/prem_thakker/status/1757239224237961231

Elizabeth Warren voted to fund Israeli army with no conditions, and cut off all funding to UN relief in Gaza as children are starving to death and 1 million trapped in Rafah. This clown gave a speech about Israeli war crimes and then still voted for it!

https://twitter.com/krystalball/status/1757223249761431877

THREAD. As the truth comes out about the viral NYPD video, a few things are important to know. In nearly every case I saw as a public defender, an arrest for assaulting a police officer was a result of an incident in which police had attacked our client. It's extremely rare (not unheard of, but very rare) for people to attack police. Much much more common for cops to attack people and then arrest them for defending themselves.

The idea that more immigration is a bad thing for people in the U.S. and that more militarization can “fix” that “problem” is such a widely held elite ideology that the New York Times presents it as a fact rather than as morally abhorrent and empirically disproven bigotry. Anonymous “immigration experts” are referenced by the NTY to make this grotesque political opinion seem somehow a question of technical knowledge or deep study. No one with a contrary view is even imagined, let alone quoted.

THREAD. In a reasonable society, this level of lawlessness and ignorance would be disqualifying for a "law enforcement" official. A high-ranking NYPD cop suggests--falsely--that the purpose of bail is to detain presumed innocent people and to punish them with "consequences." First, the purpose of bail, since the Magna Carta, is to release people. And it has never been a mechanism for ensuring public safety. This is so for good reason: if you commit a crime while out on money bail, you don't lose the money. Cops (and the media) routinely obscure this.

THREAD. They’ve done it again. The New York Times has printed another article warning about “extreme shortages” of prison guards and calling for massive transfer of wealth to prison guard unions. The concept of mass incarceration is not mentioned.





This article is an outrage. Saying the problem with prisons is a shortage of guards is like saying that the problem with global warming is a shortage of air conditioners.

THREAD. I'm going to keep talking about this because it's important. The media calls enhancing brutal repression "strengthening law enforcement efforts." Here, the New York Times uses that euphemism to describe the torture of solitary confinement. But it's worse. NYT says anything that increases budget and power of police/prisons is "strengthening law enforcement." As I explain in this article, this is flagrant propaganda that masks what police really do: ruthlessly enforce only *some* laws against *some* people. yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…

Exactly as planned by state propaganda officials, the story of Israel's allegations into 12 workers out of 10,000 UN employees in Gaza is now the **leading** story on the New York Times homepage on the same day as the historic ICJ ruling on genocide. This is a new low for the increasingly depraved Biden admin, which has cut off UN aid for Gazans during a time of catastrophic, imminent preventable suffering and death, but also for the various PR officials who had this as their plan in case of a ICJ ruling against genocide.

Rachel Swan, the author of this article, is one of the most serious threats to the integrity of local journalism that I have come across in building my copaganda archives. One of the most unethical reporters I have studied—it’s astonishing the Chronicle’s editors still allow it.

https://twitter.com/Elmanogonsalves/status/1750536326288703804

This same reporter was one of the worst purveyors of similar copaganda prior to the recall of the SF DA. She obscured that crime was *down* under Chesa Boudin, and near historic lows. She's now doing it again. Everyone in the institution who allows it to continue is complicit.

Have you ever seen a bail hearing? Watch this video. A man is sent to a cage for allegedly "sleeping under a bridge" because he can't pay a nonrefundable fee of $500. As with hearings across the U.S., taking away his liberty took less than a minute.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1338891173352464390

Only the U.S. and the Philippines use for-profit cash bail. There are 500,000 people in cells across the U.S. who have not been convicted. Many of their cases will be dismissed and acquitted, but they will lose their children, jobs, housing, medical care, and pets.

One way you can tell people in power don't actually care about "crime" is their failure to promote the policies that all the evidence shows are the best for reducing interpersonal harm: universal access to medical care, early-childhood education, cash transfers, and housing. A lot of things are complicated, but this one isn't. If a politician is talking a lot about "crime" but not promoting the expansion of these four things, then the person is not a serious person.

THREAD. Washington, DC put Black people in cages at 19 times the rate of white people. Here are some things you may not know about DC police and courts, and why it matters right now. When I was a public defender in DC for three years, I never saw a single white child in juvenile court, which are closed to the public.