In one of the scariest moments in modern history, we're doing our best at ScheerPost to pierce the fog of lies that conceal it but we need some help to pay our writers and staff. Please consider a tax-deductible donation.
As calls grow to defund and abolish ICE, author Alec Karakatsanis warns that activists should take care to not fall for “copaganda,” which “takes ordinary people who are outraged over what’s happening and converts them into supporting meaningless reforms that actually don’t reduce the size or power or budget of these bureaucracies.” Karakatsanis is the author of Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. He breaks down many of the myths about crime and policing that arose in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests over the past decade, including the reformist myth of police body cameras and the so-called crime wave. Police-tracked crime, “contrary to what you have been told in the news every single day for the last several years, is actually down,” says Karakatsanis, but fearmongering mainstream media narratives are “designed to make people so afraid that they support repressive institutions that infringe on their own liberty, that don’t make them safer, but that give people in power in our society more ability to control and manipulate.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Renee Good and Alex Pretti were fatally shot by federal immigration agents in south Minneapolis, near the site where police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in May 2020 by kneeling on his neck for nine-and-a-half minutes at least. Floyd’s murder sparked worldwide protests and demands for justice, to defund the police. Nearly six years later, as mobilizations intensify in opposition to Trump’s mass immigration raids and widespread militarization, there are renewed calls for accountability and growing efforts to abolish ICE and defund DHS, with many grassroots movements saying government actions must move beyond reform in the fight against state violence. In fact, there may be a partial government shutdown by the end of the week, because Democrats are saying they want the DHS budget taken out of the renewal for the overall budget.
For more, we’re joined by Alec Karakatsanis. He is founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, author of Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News.
Alec, welcome back to Democracy Now! As we said, it’s been almost six years since the killing of George Floyd, yet police killings have actually gone up yearly — police killing civilians. Can you talk about the significance of this and what your observations are after these fatal shootings of these two Minnesotans?
ALEC KARAKATSANIS: Thanks so much for having me back, Amy.
I came to this particular issue as a civil rights lawyer fighting against the injustice and brutality of the whole punishment bureaucracy, so not just police, but also prosecutors and courts and jails and prisons, all of the unnecessary death and violence that happens in that system. And what was fascinating to me in the early years of my career — and then, of course, we saw it after 2020 — is that no matter what kinds of injustice and brutality and violence, and even murder, this system visits on people, and particularly the most vulnerable people in our population, this violence almost never is ratcheted down. And I think what I started to be really interested in is what are the stories that the system tells the public about itself in the wake of outrage over its own violence, that actually, in every single instance that I studied in the 20th century, led to the increase in the size and power and budgets of the very institutions that were committing that violence.
And we saw that in 2020. In 2020, there was this movement in the wake of the killings, not just of George Floyd, but Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner and many, many more. There was this movement to say, “Well, wait a second. How are we spending our resources as a society on safety? This is not the kind of safety that our society wants.” And instead of actually examining those expenditures, society increased the amount of money that we threw into policing and to courts and jails and prisons. And in 2021, the year after George Floyd was killed, the police killed more people than they did in 2020, as you mentioned, and more people in 2022 than 2021.
And so, I started to try to study the propaganda that takes ordinary people who are outraged over what’s happening and converts them into supporting meaningless reforms that actually don’t reduce the size or power or budget of these bureaucracies or shift the kinds of investments our society is making, but in fact only make those same institutions stronger.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Alec, in terms of this propaganda narrative, the Trump administration has continued to base its claim for the immigration crackdown on this supposed crime wave that’s sweeping across America perpetrated by immigrants, especially the undocumented. Yet there’s been a Stanford University study, all kinds of studies, but a Stanford University study found that since the 1960s, immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated for crimes than people born in the U.S. Yet this narrative continues to flourish. I’m wondering your thoughts.
ALEC KARAKATSANIS: I think it’s very important to understand that it’s not just the Trump administration, and it’s not just Fox News or other right-wing media. These narratives are deeply embedded in how the Democratic Party talks, in how institutions like The New York Times talk. In my book Copaganda, it’s really all about the so-called mainstream or even liberal news media, and it’s if you strip away some of the rhetoric, because, obviously, different forms of propaganda are targeted at different audiences. So, sometimes Fox News will use different examples or different words, but the actual message that’s being conveyed in Fox News and The New York Times on issues of crime and immigration are virtually identical. And that’s what I show with chilling and in sometimes, I think, kind of funny detail in the book Copaganda.
And so, it’s very important to say a few things right up front. Despite what you’ve been told in Fox News and The New York Times, all crime in the United States that police track — and keep in mind, that’s very important, because police, prosecutors, prisons, they really only deal with crime committed by the most vulnerable people in our society. They are not investigating or prosecuting the biggest crimes in our society, like wage theft, which is $50 billion a year, so five times all of the property crime that police track combined, or tax evasion is a trillion dollars a year, or air pollution, much of which is criminal, which kills 100,000 people, so five times all homicide combined. We’re not talking about those crimes, because those crimes are largely committed by wealthy and powerful institutions and individuals. So, the crime that police track, even that narrow range of crime, which is focused on the most vulnerable people in our society, contrary to what you have been told in the news every single day for the last several years, is actually down. And not only is it down, it is at historic lows, since we’ve been tracking this stuff, 50-, 60-year lows. It’s been going down almost every single year for the last 25 years.
And yet, consumers of the mainstream news, especially consumers of The New York Times, of MSNBC, of The Atlantic, these people, when you poll them, they actually believe crime is up. They actually believe crime is associated with immigration, for example, as you said, Juan. And these fallacies are not just some accidental, kind of one-off mistake people are making. They are consistent year in, year out, and they are the product of carefully cultivated propaganda that is designed to make people afraid of the most vulnerable people in our society, afraid of strangers, which is actually a separate big part of propaganda, even though most harm is actually committed by people who know each other. And it’s designed to make people so afraid that they support repressive institutions that infringe on their own liberty, that don’t make them safer, but that give people in power in our society more ability to control and manipulate the population and to prevent the kinds of progressive social movements that might make our society more equal.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about these claims, these claims of cosmetic reforms, like the police or law enforcement need better training, or you institute body cameras, and therefore, that will help reduce abuse, but yet we see now, with all of the video evidence of these ICE raids, that none of that matters? What do you think about that?
ALEC KARAKATSANIS: If I have to say one thing in this moment, it is: Do not become distracted by meaningless and counterproductive so-called reforms. Everybody who studies these questions understands that body cameras are not a reform to any form of police violence. There has been overwhelming research. There’s so much research and overwhelming consensus on this question that even the federal government’s own position, for a decade or more, has been that body cameras do not reduce police violence. OK, that’s the consensus. So you have to ask yourself: In the wake of outrage over police violence, why are so many public officials, particularly Democrats, pushing body cameras? I mean, after all, the person who shot Renee Good filmed himself in that interaction.
What we know from all of the data is that there was a moment where the police were so desperate to get body cameras. So were prosecutors. They badly wanted them to dramatically increase their surveillance capacities, to link to facial recognition software. There was billions of dollars at stake in cloud computing contracts for the tech industry and the surveillance/policing industry. The prosecutors wanted them so they could prosecute in higher volume low-level cases against the most vulnerable people in our society. There were all these reasons that they wanted them. They wanted them for crowd control. You’re seeing now with ICE, when they go to — out in the streets, they have these cameras. They scan the crowd. They’re mapping people’s faces. The policing industry wanted body cameras. They wanted them so badly that before they got public funding for them, they were getting private donations from people like Steven Spielberg, because they were so desperate to get these cameras.
Something happened after the killing of Michael Brown. Prominent Democrats, like Barack Obama, Eric Holder, many local mayors and governors, they came together, and they said, “We should pitch body cameras as a — not as something the police want, which hasn’t worked. We haven’t been able to get those body cameras.” So, the companies got together with the Obama administration, and they decided to shift their marketing strategy. They decided to shift to, instead of marketing it as something that were good for the police and the police wanted, they said, “In the wake of Michael Brown, we’ll market it to low-information people in the public, to well-meaning liberal people. We’ll market it as accountability and transparency.” And so, they totally shifted. And then they were able to get hundreds of millions of dollars toward their goal of outfitting every single cop in the United States with a mobile surveillance camera that the police control. They control when it’s on, when it’s off, what it captures. When something is captured, it’s released to the public, so if the police capture, let’s say, an undocumented immigrant committing some crime, that’s out on Fox News and the New York Post within hours, but if they capture the police doing something horrific, the public may never see that video.
So, body cameras are a mirage. And as I write in the Copaganda book, and this is — it’s really critical to understand exactly how it happens. Not only do they not reduce police violence, but they have been an essential propaganda tool in convincing so many well-meaning people across our society that the authorities care about police violence, that they want accountability, that they’re doing something right. And it distracts people from the core, important kinds of changes that we need, which is to reduce the size and power of these bureaucracies.
And you mentioned, in this example, the Democrats are threatening to remove the DHS funding. But it’s really important to understand what they’re saying. The Democrats are not saying they oppose the unprecedented funding of DHS. Remember, last year, ICE’s budget was basically tripled. Now ICE has a detention budget that is 62% larger than the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons. In this moment, the Democrats are not talking about removing that money. They’re saying we’re withholding our support of all of that money, until you agree to certain kinds of meaningless reforms. So, the Democrats are actually still caught in this propaganda moment where they’re claiming to the public — they’re lying to the public, essentially, because there’s decades of evidence that these meaningless reforms that they’re pushing will actually not curb the size and power of the repressive bureaucracies that they’re claiming to fight. And so, it’s very important that we focus the debate right now on changes that will actually reduce the levels of violence that these systems commit.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Alec Karakatsanis, founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, author of the book Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News.
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.
DemocracyNow!
Democracy Now! produces a daily, global, independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Our reporting includes breaking daily news headlines and in-depth interviews with people on the front lines of the world’s most pressing issues. On Democracy Now!, you’ll hear a diversity of voices speaking for themselves, providing a unique and sometimes provocative perspective on global events.