Episode 208: How US Media Repackages Pro-Police Policies as “Reform”
Citations Needed | September 25, 2024 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: This is the premiere episode of season eight of Citations Needed. We are back from our end-of-summer break. Thank you all for joining us again. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook at Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show if you are so inclined through patreon.com/citationsneededpodcast. And we do hope that you are so inclined because we are 100% listener-funded. We don’t run ads or commercials. We have no corporate sponsors or anything like that. We are able to do the show because of the generosity and ongoing support of listeners like you.
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Nima: “Citizens to Aid Police in New Program,” reported the Los Angeles Times in 1975. “Community Policing: Law Enforcement Returns to Its Roots,” declared the Chicago Tribune in 1994. “Obama Calls for Changes in Policing After Task Force Report,” announced the New York Times in 2015.
Adam: Throughout the decades, US officials propose some type of “police reform” usually after a period of widespread protests against ongoing racist police violence. Police, we’re told, will improve their own performance and relationship with the public with a few tweaks: better training on use of force and equipment, upgrading technology like body cams and shooting simulators, and deeper integration into the so-called community.
Nima: But every time a new reform is introduced, it almost always serves as a justification for bigger police department budgets and fawning media coverage over police, painting the image of a scrappy force for public safety that just doesn’t have the right training and resources. Meanwhile, levels of police harassment and police violence remain the same, and in many cases, even increase. Indeed, 2023 was the worst year for fatal police shootings in decades despite or perhaps because of all of the post-Ferguson so-called reforms.
Adam: On today’s show, we’ll discuss the media-enabled phenomenon of how pro-police narratives, programs, and budget-bloating busy work are spun as so-called reform, how they are used to stem public anger and placate squishy politicians and nonprofits. And look at the decades-old practice of turning public opposition to and victimization from US policing into an opportunity to enrich and expand the security state.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Alec Karakatsanis, civil rights attorney and founder of Civil Rights Corps. He is the author of the Substack Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter, the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (published by The New Press in 2019), and the recent study, “The Body Camera: The Language of our Dreams,” which was published in the Yale Journal of Law & Liberation.
[Begin clip]
Alec Karakatsanis: The story of the police body camera is almost exactly the opposite of the story that we’ve been told. And what I found when I looked at it with my research assistants was something, I think, really profoundly important for understanding the whole context of reforms not just to policing but reforms to the whole punishment bureaucracy. And indeed, reforms across a wide range of areas where a lot of the most powerful institutions in our society end up using their own ineffectiveness, their own corruption, and their own violence as an excuse to get more resources and to actually increase their capacity to control people.
[End clip]
Adam: Now, as always, we are required by Illinois, New Jersey, and New York state law to say this is a spiritual successor to Episode 132: The House Always Wins — How Every Crisis Narrative Enriches the Security and Carceral State where we discussed how various crises always present pro-police, pro-carceral solutions. In this episode, we’re going to discuss the way police themselves when they’re in a state of crisis, when there’s a huge public outcry, anger or lack of trust, or credibility crisis within police, the solutions that are presented to the public by the media, by electeds, and by liberal groups is almost always to give the police more money and more power.
Nima: Resources, Adam. Resources.
Adam: Which over the decades, we will argue, has not exclusively but mostly not solved any of the problems that they’re ostensibly supposed to solve.
Nima: While the concept of so-called police reform as a generic objective goes back centuries, the modern practice of framing counterinsurgency strategies as reform really began in earnest in the mid 1960s and early 1970s, following widespread uprisings against racist policy and policing and the visible, often brutal police repression that followed.
So, let’s start with the Kerner Commission of 1967. Following the urban uprisings of the summer of 1967 President Lyndon Johnson assembled a commission to determine “what can be done to prevent” what it deemed to be “riots.” Now, as Stuart Schrader, associate research professor of Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins and Director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism, has written in his 2019 book Badges Without Borders:
…the commission offered recommendations to alleviate racial and economic inequality, urging a vast federal spending program on jobs, education, and housing to address the socioeconomic conditions underlying the political unrest. President Johnson spurned this proposal, but most of the subsidiary recommendations the Kerner report delivered on how to transform policing were adopted…The way to assure security was to reform its technical apparatus.
Adam: Johnson formalized these recommendations by signing into law the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, the law established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration or the LEAA, which, among other things, earmarked $100 million to states for “community crime control efforts” and $50 million for law enforcement agencies themselves. The $50 million figure included “$15 million for riot control,” according to the Brookings Institution.
Around the same time, the Ford Foundation had been providing funding for some civil rights organizations, including the Urban League and Congress for Racial Equality. University of Cambridge researcher Sam Collings-Wells argued in his 2020 study that by the late 1960s, the Ford Foundation began to incorporate police reform initiatives after backlash from congressional opponents of the civil rights movement such as Senators James Eastland and John McClellan.
As part of the pivot in 1970, the Ford Foundation established a “Police Development Fund” of $30 million with the stated intention of funding police training, procedural reform, and “community policing” and building trust between police and people of color. So-called community policing was, and of course, remains, extremely ill-defined, seeming to refer to the mere existence of cops interacting with civilians. The Police Development Fund would later become the Police Foundation. As Collings-Wells wrote in September 2020:
The Police Foundation was designed as a catalyst for liberal police reform nationwide, pioneering measures to repair the relationship between the police and the community. Liberal law-and-order appeared to offer Ford the best of both worlds; a way for the philanthropic organization to continue its work on civil rights, but in a way which appeared “tough on crime.
Nima: By the early 1970s, initiatives centered around community policing and diversity in policing programs began to crop up in cities such as Santa Cruz, California, and Cincinnati, Ohio, many, if not all of them receiving grants from police organizations like the Police Foundation and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. The Cincinnati Police Department, for example, received multiple grants in the early 1970s including a $2.3 million grant in 1973. That’s approximately $16.2 million today. This, from the Police Foundation in order to launch “team policing” and “inclusion” initiatives. A July 1972 article in the Cincinnati Post announced this initiative with the headline, “Brotherhood in blue. Racially balanced police teams aim of program.” The article would say this: “Cincinnati City Council is expected to pass legislation Thursday, accepting a $1.9 million grant for a community team policing program, including a provision that the city tried to hire at least 31 blacks for the 61 new police jobs the project creates.” The source of that grant, again, was the Police Foundation.
Just a few years later, in December of 1975 in Southern California, Santa Ana police chief Raymond Davis introduced a similar program labeled “Community-Oriented Policing,” cleverly abbreviated as COP, framing it as a potential solution to the problem of rising crime rates. On December 23, 1975 the LA Times ran a piece headlined “Citizens to Aid Police in New Program.” The Times would report this:
Officers who once spent the majority of their work hours in patrol cars will have time to meet citizens on a first-name basis as a result of a department reorganization, which included the hiring of 88 additional officers.
The article would continue:
Police Chief Raymond Davis said the program was prompted by the 1973–74 statistics which showed that the city’s 20% crime rate increase was the highest among major California cities and third highest in the nation.
To reverse that trend, he said citizens are being asked to ‘be suspicious, to call us, to do what they can, to help us.’
Davis said he expects an increasing number of citizens to respond to the program as they develop more confidence in law enforcement through interaction with police.
Adam: The estimated price tag for the program’s implementation was $2.8 million during the first year, approximately $16.3 million in today’s dollars, and $2 million or $11.7 million in today’s dollars for each subsequent year. Part of the funding was provided by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. The LEAA, again, was created as part of Johnson’s crime bill as “riot control.” The LEAA had also funded similar programs in six other cities at that time according to the wholly uncritical report.
The so-called community policing approach would expand throughout the state of California. After visiting Santa Ana’s Police Department in 1977, Governor Jerry Brown outlined a community policing concept called “crime resistance,” ostensibly created to reduce home burglaries. Now, make no mistake, Brown was fully committed to carceral solutions, stating while introducing the program that “we’re going to pass more laws and we’re going to build more prisons.”
Just how successful were these team policing approaches at reducing crime and building trust between police and communities, whatever that means? Not very! The LEAA was found to have little verifiable impact on crime rates and had the effect of further militarizing the police as it gave police departments surplus military equipment, including helicopters, body armor, and armored vehicles. In a move that’s basically unthinkable today, the LEAA was abolished in 1982. This wasn’t for moral reasons but budgetary ones. One of LEAA’s successors, the Office of Justice Programs still exists today.
Nima: And the Police Foundation, now known as the National Policing Institute was a key driver of the much criticized and heavily debunked broken windows policy that followed. In 1982, two Police Foundation officials, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson authored an infamous piece headlined “Broken Windows” for The Atlantic Monthly magazine, a piece which we’ve discussed multiple times before on Citations Needed now.
Kelling and Wilson introduced this theory as an extension of community policing, suggesting embedding officers in neighborhoods on “foot patrol” to crack down on “disorderly behavior” like loitering, asking for money, or so-called rowdiness in order to prevent more serious crime. Never mind, of course, that broken windows policies all across the United States has led inevitably to surveillance, racist targeting, and criminalization of urban neighborhoods as well as the rise of mass incarceration.
Adam: Yeah. Because one thing that I think really is worth noting here is that when you reframe pro-police initiatives and this kind of liberalese, you accomplish two things. Number one, of course, you increase the budgets of police departments and power and surveillance and militarization but also, you sort of look like you’re doing liberal reforms because the social solution, the kind of center-left, liberal, and left-wing solution to things like crime is that they are largely, not entirely, but largely social phenomenon with social solutions. Things like redistributions, reparations, building nice, clean affordable housing and schools and universal health care, that these things would be a way of reducing crime. You know, environmental pollution putting lead, which many criminologists have argued throughout the decades increases crime. All these robust or holistic approaches to reducing crime gets totally pushed to the side or are completely under-resourced if it’s resourced at all. And then, the solution becomes more cops in cages but done through this kind of liberalese because that’s the easy cheap solution that the ruling class prefers because it doesn’t require them to redistribute their wealth.
Nima: Yeah. And optically, you get this idea of, you know, more cops on the beat, this kind of liberal vision of every city becoming Mayberry, right? Like a town where, you know, everyone knows everyone’s name, and you’re all neighbors and you’re all friendly, and the cop is just, you know, one other neighbor, which obviously is not the reality in so many communities across this country. But this idea of community policing or more foot patrol or more cops on the beat has this veneer, right? It’s a way to say, oh, cops are part of the social fabric just as much as anyone in the neighborhood. And this type of “reform,” as we see, is very palatable, gets a lot of funding, and does very little to not only reduce so-called rising crime rates, which the media is obsessed with, but really just masks the funneling of more and more money into police coffers.
Adam: Yeah, because at the time, you know, from the 1960s when it started up until the mid-’90s, you know, for 25, 30 years, crime rates didn’t go down. In many ways, they went up. But meanwhile, mass incarceration skyrocketed around the same time. And so, there was a sense that they could just keep building cages and funding more police and that that would somehow solve the problem. Because, again, the goal is to pivot away from social solutions that deal with the underlying causes.
So, here we are in the ’90s. So let’s start off in 1994 when Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, sponsored most notoriously by now President Joseph Robinette Biden. This is generically known as the Crime Bill. Two years after he campaigned as a tough on crime candidate, the law was the largest federal crime legislation ever passed in the US. And of course, is notorious for creating harsher criminal sentences and incentivizing states to build and fill more prisons even as crime rates were falling.
The law contained a community policing provision characterizing “community policing” as “cops on the beat,” meaning more uniformed officers on the street, and thus, adopting the broken windows framework. The law authorized the distribution of grants for the following, among much else: rehiring laid-off officers and hiring and training new ones, purchasing “equipment, technology, and support systems,” and paying overtime. The law also established a Community Oriented Policing Services Office, again, the acronym being COPS. They love to use that. They want to use it several times. This authorized the hiring of 100,000 more police officers to patrol the streets with funding going only to cities that launched “community policing” programs. The COPS Office states that it had appropriated more than $20 billion for so-called “community policing” initiatives since its creation. The word “community policing” in the bill itself and the crime bill itself is used dozens of times.
Nima: Now, a few months before the bill became law, the Chicago Tribune excitedly broke down the stipulations for cities, stating under the headline, “Community policing: Law enforcement returns to its roots,” this: “The 1995 federal budget has $285 million earmarked for community policing programs. The programs are intended to add more uniformed officers on the street, while working with schools and community organizations in educational and problem-solving projects.” The tribune would go on to frame broken-windows policing policies as “problem solving.” The paper stated this:
“Funds will be used to work with communities to identify and provide police services as needed, such as: putting more police on foot patrols in problem neighborhoods, establishing neighborhood watch educational programs, setting up ‘mini-stations’ in high crime neighborhoods, bike patrols, and/or corner beats as needed, and adding drug and crime prevention programs in schools.”
Adam: In the past two decades, we’ve had a torrent of so-called reforms, many of which, if not most of which have involved a similar dynamic of just pumping money back into the police with very little redistribution of power, any concrete results at all. The most egregious example and the one our guest wrote a whole study about is body cameras. This became popular following the uprisings in August of 2014 in response to local police officer Darren Wilson shooting Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The protests were, of course, met with a highly militarized police response involving machine guns, armored vehicles, and other military grade equipment. Just a few months after the uprisings began, in December 2014, then President Barack Obama requested $263 million in police funding in order to, as NBC News put it, “help improve relations between police departments and minority communities,” through such “reforms” as “oversight, transparency, and training” for use of military-grade weapons and equipment, and the use of body cameras. This “training” would be a convenient way to avoid the act of reducing military surplus available to police, while generating the appearance of being a vaguely progressive reform. So, once again, police shoot someone, national uprising protest, and the result: a quarter of a billion dollars more to police. And now, here’s a clip from NBC’s Nightly News from December 1st of 2014, announcing Obama’s proposal in a gleeful and hopeful way:
[Begin clip]
Chris Jansen: After a series of meetings today, the President promised programs to bring police and communities together.
Barack Obama: Part of the reason this time will be different is because the president of the United States is deeply invested in making sure that this time is different.
Chris Jansen: The president is also asking for $263 million for community policing, including $75 million for body worn cameras. A year-long test in California showed dramatic results. Far fewer complaints of police abuse and use of force was way down.
[End clip]
Nima: Yes, dramatic results, Adam. Indeed, the California study that NBC cited in that clip, which is commonly known as the Rialto study, was deeply influential. Axon Enterprise, formerly known as Taser, which had sold more than 300,000 police cameras worldwide as of 2013 has cited this Rialto study on its own website. And as the New York Times noted, also in 2013, “A federal judge also cited the study in 2013 when she ordered the New York City Police Department to conduct a yearlong pilot program using body cameras.” It was similarly referenced in a testimony before the Obama administration’s “task force on 21st-century policing,” which justified Obama’s request for $75 million in body camera funding as referenced by NBC.
But while the study was indeed influential, it was also grossly misleading at best. A 2017 study found that police wearing cameras used force and prompted civilian complaints at about the same rate as those who weren’t wearing the cameras. The study included more than 2,000 officers. Meanwhile, the Rialto study involved a mere 54 officers. Additionally, a 2019 review of 70 available studies on the effects of body cameras on police behavior concluded that body cameras “have not had statistically significant or consistent effects on most measures of officer and citizen behavior, or citizens’ views of police.”
Adam: But this clearly doesn’t matter, as the body camera industry is growing. Axon, the largest supplier, claims it made $1.5 billion in revenue in 2023, a 31% increase from the previous year, and it shipped more than 100,000 units of its latest camera model in the second half of 2023 alone.
Another busywork faux-reform is that of police diversity. Now, from the onset, we’ll say, look, all things being equal, police departments should be diverse. Why not? It’s probably better than having 100% white guys with Punisher tattoos who vote for Trump. I mean, that just sort of intuitively makes sense. But broadly speaking, there’s not a lot of evidence it doesn’t really affect police harassment and police killings, but this is a very popular talking point pushed by everyone from President Obama to President Biden. This idea that a more diverse police force will somehow be better for oppressed communities who are over policed and over criminalized. And again, money is funneled to police departments, ostensibly for the purposes of recruiting and training people of color in these communities so they can represent the communities that they police. President Biden, when lobbying Congress for his $37 billion police bill, said one of his goals was to “help police departments attract officers they need and hire more diverse officers from the communities they serve.” But as Mustafa Ali-Smith noted at The Appeal in 2022:
In response to the murder of Michael Brown in 2014, a 2017 study by Indiana University Bloomington researchers looked at whether more Black police officers was associated with a decrease in police-involved homicides of Black people. They found that results were mixed. In some cases, adding more Black officers was actually linked to an increase in violent encounters toward Black people. In other cases, adding an overwhelmingly large number of Black officers was linked to a decrease in encounters. Overall, ‘for the vast majority of cities, simply increasing the percentage of [B]lack officers is not an effective policy solution,’ the researchers wrote.
Adam: So, the study showed there was no real evidence that increasing the number of black officers led to a less racist police force. Now, of course, the reason for that is because they are a function of a system. It’s not about the discrete moral choices of individuals by and large. And of course, LAPD, which has a very diverse police force, is also one of the more notoriously corrupt and violent. So, studies on this are pretty mixed. There’s no real evidence that it actually does anything. There’s no evidence that it necessarily makes it worse. So, all things equal, sure, why not? But this is another kind of superficially sounding solution that doesn’t really change the status quo much at all.
Nima: Another one of these is so-called police training. So, let’s examine this a bit. The idea that police officers simply need more and better training to do their job more effectively and thereby be more engaged with the community and ostensibly less violent. Let’s see how this actually works out. A common method of police “training” is the use of shooting simulators, something we have actually discussed on Citations Needed before, another product conveniently offered by Axon Enterprises. Another method is the use of force scenario training, which basically teaches police de-escalation tactics. Now, for over a decade, police departments have sunk millions of dollars into these types of trainings, these simulators, and these scenarios.
Yet, police violence, especially lethal police violence has not decreased since these simulators have been introduced. According to the organization Mapping Police Violence, the number of people killed by police has risen every year since 2019. In 2023, police killed 1,352 people, rendering that year the deadliest for homicides committed by police in more than a decade. The same year, VirTra, a leading supplier of these shooting simulators, reported record annual revenue to the tune of $38 million.
Now, VirTra offers a useful example of how this simulator training industry has used local media as part of its PR strategy. Now, we discussed this when we did a patron-only news brief called “The Split Second Decision Trope: Why Every Media Outlet Does the Exact Same Puff Piece on Shooter Simulators.” In 2018, industry consultant Ron LaPedis wrote a media guide for VirTra focused on how these simulators can be used to “educate the community.” LaPedis quoted Ed Smith, Range Master and Training Officer for the O’Fallon Police Department in Missouri in order to underscore the need to sell, “the community” on the idea that de-escalation is theoretically ideal but typically unrealistic.
LaPedis wrote:
Smith is a firm believer in continually ‘sharpening the knife’ by ensuring that officers go back on the street every day just a little bit sharper than they were the day before. To do that, he has built an officer training program around his city’s VirTra simulator. He has shared the same scenarios with the public so that they can get an idea of those split-second decisions needed to stop a threat. Participants and viewers soon learn that taking control of a situation is not nearly as easy as it is in the movies, and that de-escalation, while preferable, may not always work.
Adam: Right, so there’s three things going on here, and this kind of stuff is just made in the lab for Citations Needed. These police shooting simulators are a) a way of just bloating budgets for police to rack up over time. But b) they’re explicitly based on internal marketing literature that they write when they’re trying to sell them to police departments. They are public relations devices for bringing in journalists to do these rigged scenarios where they have to blow someone away because the simulator is rigged, right? It’s not like a real simulation. It’s just like one of those, you know, rail video games where you have to shoot someone basically. And when they bring in the reporter, they give them the scenario where they have to blow someone away. That’s why they say it’s not like the movies, right? And then c) finally, the reason why they’re so effective is because this idea that cops are going around shooting people because they failed their training is actually the inverse. They shoot people because that’s exactly what they’re trained to do. If the training is just to tell them to shoot people, that doesn’t really work. And that is largely what the training tells them to do as evidenced by the fact that when they do these police shooting simulator propaganda segments, the reporter in question, whoever it may be, or even when they, as you’ll note, they bring an activist to do it as part of some sort of faux empathy —
Nima: Like a gotcha, right.
Adam: Yeah, see what it is. So, they have to shoot the guy with the knife to the woman, right? So, these are all PR devices and budget bloating pretext. These are not here to help some sweaty rookie cop learn how to deescalate a situation when Cletus has a shotgun to his girlfriend’s head.
Nima: Now, this is also the case with use of force scenario training as kind of distinct from those shooter simulators, and these can be both high and low-tech type trainings. It’s really in this context that we have countless local and cable news segments, again, featuring these simulations and scenario training as innovative methods meant to refine and reinforce police decision making. Here’s a particularly noxious example from Fox 10 Phoenix back in 2015 that addresses protests against racist police violence but only for the purpose of getting an organizer, as we’ve discussed, to sympathize with police as he experiences use-of-force scenario training. Take a listen.
[Begin clip]
Fox 10 Phoenix Anchor 1: Jarrett Maupin gets his weapon. You might recognize him as a high-profile organizer in the minority community. Just last month, he led marches on Phoenix Police Headquarters after an officer shot an unarmed man.
[Clip of protest plays]
Jarrett Maupin: We want his badge! We want his gun! We want his job!
[Clip of protest ends]
Fox 10 Phoenix Anchor 1: Today, he accepted an invitation to look at things from the other side, agreeing to go through a force on force training session with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. Three scenarios where you have to decide to shoot or not shoot. Scenario one is a call about a man casing cars in a parking lot. Maupin approaches the man and starts asking questions.
Jarrett Maupin: You’re looking for your vehicle. What kind of car do you drive?
Training Actor: This is my car, man. [Several gunshots fire]
Fox 10 Phoenix Anchor 1: Maupin, the officer, is shot. It happens that fast.
Police Officer: At what time did you think that it was time for you to address the use of force that was given?
Jarrett Maupin: When he came to the back of the vehicle and was hiding, you know, I could sense something. Something was wrong.
Fox 10 Phoenix Anchor 1: Scenario two, a call of two men fighting.
Jarrett Maupin: What’s going on today, gentlemen? What’s going on today, gentlemen? What’s happening here? Back up. [shot fires]
Training Actor: What are you doing, man?
Jarrett Maupin: You shouldn’t approach me. You shouldn’t approach me.
Training Actor: We were just arguing about what happened in there. What are you doing? You just shot him?
Jarrett Maupin: Hey, he rushed me.
Police Officer: Tell me why you shot.
Jarrett Maupin: Well, I’ve shot because he was within that zone. You know, I felt there was an imminent threat. I didn’t necessarily see him armed, but he came clearly to do some harm to the officer, to my person.
[End clip]
Nima:
And later in the same segment, the activist turned killer cop, I guess, Jarett Maupin says that he recognizes the need to comply with police now. He’s been reformed. He’s seen the light. And then the news anchors discuss Maupin’s experience and add this coda.
[Begin clip]
Fox 10 Phoenix Anchor 1: At the time, oh, I can think through this, and I can figure this out. No, it’s boom, it’s just there.
Fox 10 Phoenix Anchor 2: I have a lot of respect for Maupin for going through that and agreeing to go through that and seeing it from the other side.
Fox 10 Phoenix Anchor 3: Do you think it changes the way he approaches these issues going forward?
Fox 10 Phoenix Anchor 1: He says he’s going to go out into the community and say what he said at the very end there. You have to comply with what police officers tell you, let everything sort out at the end, but just do what they tell you right then and sort things out afterward.
[End clip]
Adam: So, there’s literally hundreds of these stories. They run them every month. You can Google it. Again, we did a news brief on it. You can check it out on our Patreon, and I wrote about it for the Subtack as well. It’s the oldest trope in the book. The general idea is that they didn’t realize how the split second decision worked. But of course, the scenario they’re given —
Nima: Guarantees a violent response.
Adam: The things that actually, for the most part, have outraged communities whether it’s, you know, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes or you know, Michael Brown being unarmed, these things are not typically some split second trolley problem the cop has to do, and he makes the tough choice.
Nima: Incidentally, this happened in Maricopa County where, according to the Police Scorecard organization, there have been more police shootings per arrest between 2013 and 2021 than 78% of other police departments across the country, and that that county accounted for more killings by police per arrest than 94% of other police departments across the country.
Adam: So, again, these are the reforms that are presented by centrist, liberal politicians as the thing that’s going to fix the problem. But as the data shows, especially in terms of fatal police shootings, the numbers have actually gone up since George Floyd and since Michael Brown. So, they’re not working, and there’s a question as to why they’re not working. And of course, when you just pump in billions of more dollars to police, you can call it training, you can call it community this, you can call it being your best friend and holding your hand all you want, or, you know, treat them like they’re social workers with guns. But ultimately, the function of the police remains exactly the same, and this is why police critics or abolitionists or abolitionists-adjacent organizations have taken this resource model. The question is, are you just giving police more resources? I mean, the idea that there’s uprisings in Ferguson and Obama’s response is to send a quarter billion dollars to police departments is wonderful public relations.
Nima: And to take decommissioned tanks from Iraq and basically send them to Missouri.
Adam: Right. And this is the kind of PR spin we’re dealing with here that the house always wins. It doesn’t matter what the problem is. Crime goes up. They need more money. Crime goes down. They need more money because their budget has been cut. They shoot some people and cause, you know, riots and local and national unrest. They need more money because they need more training. They don’t shoot anyone for a year. They get more money as a reward for not shooting. I mean, no matter what the fucking scenario is, it’s heads, I win, tails, you lose no matter what. And I think this is, of course, one of the things that frustrates people who want to see genuine results, who want to see these communities not be shot and terrorized to the extent to which they have. And thus far, these reforms have not done that. And in many ways, of course, they’ve done the exact opposite.
Nima: To discuss this more, namely, the phenomenon of body camera reforms, we are now going to be joined by Alec Karakatsanis, civil rights attorney and founder of Civil Rights Corps. He is the author of the Substack Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter, the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (published by The New Press in 2019), and the recent study, “The Body Camera: The Language of our Dreams,” which was published in the Yale Journal of Law & Liberation. Alec will join us in just a moment, stay with us.
[Music]
Nima: We are joined now by Alec Karakatsanis. Alec, thank you so much for joining us again on Citations Needed.
Alec Karakatsanis: Thank you so much for having me back.
Adam: So, I want to start off by talking about, though it’s part of a much larger trend of pro-police, pro-incarceration policies being framed as reforms, a broader picture which we can get into later, I want to begin by the specific subject of your study: police body cams. I’m sure anyone who lived through 2014, 2015, the Ferguson uprisings, obviously, uprisings in various cities throughout the country, they remember body cams being this apparently common sense, modest reform that everyone could get behind. The idea being that if police know they’re being monitored at all times, that they would therefore be more likely to abide by the law. This kind of seems intuitively true to I think a lot of people, even people of good faith who want to “reform the police,” but you paint a different story, one that fits squarely within the milieu of our show, which is something more sinister and more PR driven and maybe has an ulterior motive. So, I want to begin there. What the origins of the body camera as a mode of reform were, why it was so aggressively pushed by pro-police forces, even police unions in the wake of the Michael Brown killing almost exactly 10 years ago, and what these sort of good faith efforts got wrong.
Alec Karakatsanis: Story of the police body camera is almost exactly the opposite of the story that we’ve been told. And what I found when I looked at it with my research assistants was something I think really profoundly important for understanding the whole context of reforms not just to policing but reforms to the whole punishment bureaucracy. And indeed, reforms across a wide range of areas where a lot of the most powerful institutions in our society end up using their own ineffectiveness, their own corruption, their own violence as an excuse to get more resources. And to actually increase their capacity to control people. So, I think it’s really important to go before 2014 when the body camera narrative exploded in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing by Darren Wilson. Maybe five, six years before that, when many, many people around the country had not even heard of the body camera, there was a small group of companies who were producing the technology and who saw it as a multi-billion dollar a year industry. And there’s a whole constellation of surveillance industry profiteers who are not just thinking about body cameras, but they’re thinking about all kinds of other things, like big databases, AI algorithmic policing — what’s called predictive policing, various types of software programs, and ongoing perpetual contracts that can be secured to manage and update these systems in perpetuity. Also, the data storage companies Microsoft and Amazon, etc. who have the cloud storage, cloud computing contracts.
Anyway, there’s this whole industry, this whole ecosystem, and they started marketing the body camera to police leaders. And what’s really, really interesting is if you look back at their own statements by police leaders, by prosecutors in particular, which we’ll get into hopefully a little bit later, why this was such a profound boost to the power of prosecutors, but they started marketing the police body camera. And if you look at their own statements from prior to Michael Brown’s killing, they bear almost no resemblance to what came after in that they don’t talk about reform at all.
The origin of the body camera was actually about surveillance and was really pitched as doing three or four main things. One, to reduce the potential liability of police officers and city governments because they were giving police a tool that they could control. They could turn on and off. They could sort of utilize and weaponize how it was released to the public, which is a really important thing we’ll get into later when we talk about the PR. Really importantly, it was pitched as a tool of surveillance. So, for example, cops can attend protests, they can fix a little device to their chest. They can scan the crowd. And then when you later combine the body camera technology with things like facial recognition technology, AI, you can all of a sudden have a documentation and a record not just of who all is going to which protests but who is standing near whom, who’s connected to whom, who appears to be a leader, etc., etc. Who is really agitated, who is not agitated, etc.
They also were pushed by police and prosecutors because the thought was that it would give them very powerful, almost irrefutable evidence for very low-level criminal offenses that characterize the vast bulk of the millions and millions of arrests that happen every year. And one of the problems is that police arrest so many people for so many low level things. So, for example, about 4% of all police time in the US is spent on what they call violent crime. Only 5% of all police arrests are for things the FBI classifies as serious violent crime. So, the vast bulk of what police do is kind of the relentless, pervasive interference in the lives of very poor people. The plurality of arrests in the US are things like driving on a suspended license, unpaid debt, trespassing by someone who typically is unhoused, drug possession, disorderly conduct. These kinds of cases clog criminal courts and prosecutors have trouble processing all of these low level cases because there’s so many of them. But they’re very profitable obviously because whenever you get a conviction for someone, there’s fines and fees that have been collected, and that money helps fund prosecutors, police, judges, etc. So, everyone has an interest in this bureaucracy churning as an assembly line.
And so, the theory for prosecutors and police was you can actually coerce more people into pleading guilty for these low level offenses if you can collect video evidence of them committing crimes. So, those are the kinds of things, surveillance and increased punishment and obviously, if you reduce the leverage that criminal defendants have to take a case to a jury trial, for example, you also can increase the punishment. You can give them more fees and fines, longer jail sentences, etc. So, those are the kinds of things that all of these people were discussing.
They had a big problem, though. They couldn’t get the government to put in the billions of dollars it would take to outfit every cop in the United States with a mobile surveillance camera that the cops control plus the very expensive computing database storage software that would allow the police to process this data.
Adam: Yeah, it’s a lot of data.
Alec Karakatsanis: It’s so much data. I mean, think about what would happen if there are hundreds of thousands of police recording tens of millions of interactions. That’s a lot of data and very expensive. And so, they had this problem, and they wanted them so badly that they were actually getting people like Steven Spielberg to donate to private police foundations for the purchase of body cameras for the Los Angeles Police. They were getting private rich people to pay for these gadgets for them because they wanted them.
Adam: He just really likes filmmaking. So, in his defense.
Alec Karakatsanis: [Laughs] That’s right.
Adam: He has an ideological commitment to filming. But go ahead.
Alec Karakatsanis: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s very telling that in the mythology that’s been created about them in subsequent years, it’s portrayed as this tool of accountability and reform when it was actually something that they wanted for profit, surveillance, control, punishment, etc. And in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing where much was made in the public and in the news media and even by Michael Brown’s family, right, I mean, understandably, that the story of the police officer didn’t match up, and there was no video. There were no street cameras, the cop wasn’t wearing a body camera. And understandably, people wanted to know what happened. The proponents of body cameras, the policing industry, the surveillance companies, and police chiefs all over the country were very savvy. They saw this as their opportunity, and they engaged in a remarkable public relations campaign really spearheaded by Barack Obama and leaders in the Democratic Party who were very pro-prosecution all over the country who seized on this immediately because it was a kind of “reform” that could be offered to the public, that would make it look like they were doing something about police violence, but that would actually enable them to funnel hundreds and millions of dollars a year into the policing and surveillance industry. And that’s why it became a powerful reform.
Nima: Yeah, Alec, I actually want to pull one of the many threads that you kind of laid out here, this idea that body cams, rather than as you said, be a tool of accountability and documentation, have really been shown to be a tool for police PR. And as you have noted, who controls the footage is a critical central issue here that was largely overlooked in this entire debate especially during the rush to then, as you said, equip every police department, every police officer with their own personal body camera. As you yourself have written, “As public relations specialists understand, controlling the editing of videos and the precise moment of their release can be used to either foment or diffuse a potential scandal.” So Alec, please do dig in a little deeper on this one part of what you teased earlier. This idea of, yes, things may be recorded, but who is in control of that footage and how can that be manipulated even further to be a tool of police PR?
Alec Karakatsanis: This is such an important point. I want to say a few things. First, not only do the police control the footage, but the police create the footage. So, the body camera, and the reason I think James Baldwin’s quote that “the camera is the language of our dreams” is so important. It’s because whoever controls the camera, whoever stands behind the camera gets to decide what is captured in the film. And notice that, you know, many of the most famous videos of police brutality misconduct, the Rodney King video, the Eric Garner video, the George Floyd video, etc, etc. I could go on and on. They were not filmed by police. They’re so powerful because they are filmed by people who are able to capture what the police are doing. In the shot, the body camera is affixed to the officer’s chest. So, not only is it designed to be quite chaotic, but it’s outward looking from the police officer to the person. Also, by the way, police are trained now when they’re on body camera video to say in the background things like, stop resisting, stop resisting. You know, they’re trained to create contemporaneous records that create confusion. So, it’s not a surprise that the federal government and others who have studied this have shown that body cameras actually do not reduce police violence at all.
But once you even create this body camera video, the police are then in possession of the footage. And you could see with the example of Laquan McDonald in Chicago, for example, the police just hid the video of this child’s murder until Rahm Emanuel was reelected mayor, until a court ordered them to release the footage. So, when police don’t want the public to see footage, it’s either lost or it’s never recorded or it’s often edited in very deceptive ways that are designed to prevent the virality of the video because a video going viral immediately when a killing happens versus a video not going viral or there not being a video for weeks or months or even days is the difference between hundreds of millions of people seeing it potentially and a few thousand people seeing it eventually. And this is the whole ballgame for many police departments.
Also, as we talk about in an article, police departments have huge social media teams, PR teams. You know, there are over 50 employees, for example, in the Chicago Police Department doing PR. They’ve got people who edit the videos and when they present it to the public, they sometimes put music on them. They have captions, they have narration, they have deceptive editing. And so, it’s like any filmmaker, when you control what’s being filmed and how it’s then edited and presented and when it’s released, you get to control huge aspects of the public narrative, and that’s another reason why police wanted the body camera.
Nima: Yeah, it’s such a perfect distillation of what we mean when we say framing the narrative. It literally is about what is in frame, what is out of frame, and how to manipulate what we see and what we hear.
Adam: I was just reading this exchange I had with the official Taser Twitter account back in April of 2015 about this. I criticized a YouTube promo video they had, saying they’re basically selling it so police can control the narrative. And they got all mad. How can this promo highlighting the unfounded claim that’s just proved by video be negative? We don’t see the truth. They say in the video that they “want police to tell their story.” Sorry, that’s an aside, but it’s just funny that they were marketing it to police departments specifically to curate narratives, to say you control the information. This was around the time that states were passing laws saying that the police basically had unilateral control over the video footage itself, and that it was subject to these kind of onerous discovery laws on the behalf of the public and journalists, that they sort of would not be able to just FOIA whatever they want. And obviously that depends, that’s a state by state thing. But I just thought that was funny.
I want to zoom out here a little bit and talk about this bigger trend here that we’ve been talking about on this episode, which is framing police bloating policies, increased surveillance, increased carceral policies as reforms just as one frames school privatization as school reform or promotes Ross Perot gutting the federal government as a reform party, right? Reform is this gray generic word. Obviously, this is one of the reasons why there was a pivot to more concrete demands like defund or abolish the police in the wake of George Floyd in 2020 because people had seen where “reform” got you in 2014 and 2015 which is they can kind of be whatever you want it to be. But from the 1994 crime bill that focused a lot on “community policing,” to pushing for “police training” post-Michael Brown, there’s always a framing of more police budgets, more power for police, more gizmos and gadgets for police as reform, which is interesting because it’s kind of an implicit acknowledgement that people know that the police have too much power and control or that they’re too sort of capricious and violent. But then again, it sort of spins it because, you know, they’re not going to say we need more high-tech RoboCop stuff for the cops that would not be very popular, especially in communities that Democrats are supposed to represent like black communities and people of color in general.
So, everything gets framed as this very kind of squishy reform without much specifics, which is why a lot of abolitionist groups and other more grassroots groups especially here in Chicago, for example, and I know other places, their framework is simple. Does this add money to the police? Does this add power to the police? And if the answer is yes, then they reject it. Obviously, there are nuances there, but that’s kind of the general framework, which I think is a really interesting way to clarify it. I know Critical Resistance, this is their framework. I think it’s actually a pretty good framework. I want to talk a bit about this approach to framing everything as reform and very squishy, very liberal. What criteria do sort of you make the determination with an understanding that some reform is good, not all reform is necessarily sinister but do you use a similar kind of resource framework when you analyze these things?
Alec Karakatsanis: I do. I think that’s there’s a couple of different ways to analyze reform. One I would call more substantive, and one I would call procedural. So, as the substantive evaluation of reform, I think that’s the best framework I know, the resource framework. So, you know, you ask yourself a question like, is this reform giving this institution or this bureaucracy more resources and power when it does bad things and if so, then it’s probably bad because it’s probably going to be viewed as a reward actually. I think police and prosecution bureaucracies view body cameras as a reward. And so, it’s very opposite of any kind of accountability. You know, they commit all this violence and do all this stuff that people don’t like, and then they actually get rewarded with more money for more things that they want, right? And you can see that when police celebrate the addition of several tens of millions of dollars to their budget so they can have better surveillance programs. They want total information awareness, right? They want every cop in the country to have a mobile surveillance camera that creates videos they can then put into databases, and they can pay for algorithms to evaluate all that, and they can learn more information about whoever they want to learn the information about.
Keep in mind, the police only enforce some laws against some people some of the time so all of the surveillance infrastructure, even though police are called law enforcement, which, you know, misleadingly gives the impression that they’re, you know, enforcing all laws against all people at all times. It’s very selective. You have to understand that the policing bureaucracy as a whole, leaving aside all the profiteering that the companies are doing, but the policing bureaucracy itself is designed to enforce some laws sometimes in some places against some people in ways that help people who have power in our society. And so, if you live in a really unequal society like ours, the more resources you put into the police are going to be used by the people who control the police, i.e. the people in power, to perpetuate the inequalities that underlie our society.
So, I think one of the most fascinating things about this topic and what I write about, I think one of the most interesting parts of the study is, how did it come to be that all of these liberals and progressives around the country, not radicals, but liberals and progressives supported the greatest expansion of police surveillance in modern history? And how did it come to be that these companies and policing bureaucracies who couldn’t ever have dreamed of getting billions of dollars in state funding for this, convinced a lot of liberal politicians in a lot of different cities all over the country to spend all this money on this technology? Then, how did it come to be that other liberal people, namely, and I write about some of the worst examples of this, professors at certain schools, leaders at certain nonprofit organizations have started appearing in virtually every news article about body cameras as “experts?” And they were chosen as experts by the mainstream media precisely because of their pro-body camera stance.
And so, let me give you an example. It would have been really different if in every New York Times article, every CNN piece, every NBC News article, every Washington Post story, the people advocating for body cameras were the police themselves or were the investors in the police surveillance industry. If those are the people promoting body cameras, many people in the general public might have been a little bit more skeptical but precisely because most of these articles had people who looked like academic experts or even civil liberties experts, right? You know, I write about the same guy from the ACLU who starts popping up in all these news articles talking about how body cameras are a win win for everyone. He’s doing that in the context of research that shows that body cameras do not reduce police violence. And yet, the average person reading these articles is thinking, oh, well, even the people that are supposed to be in charge of our privacy and our civil liberties and thinking about these hard questions that I don’t have the time to think about, even those people support body cameras as a reform so they can’t be that bad.
And so, there’s this whole industry, and this is not limited to policing. It’s a tool of counter-insurgency generally. It’s the kind of counterinsurgency that was really perfected by the French colonial governments in Algeria, Vietnam, and the British colonial governments in a number of places and was incorporated into US Army counter-insurgency manuals throughout the Middle East conflicts. It’s a very common tactic in modern colonial history to co-opt certain elite elements of the population that you’re trying to control as validators of the tactics and strategies and technologies and surveillance systems and control that you are implementing in order to control people. They’re much more effective when you have credible validators from within those communities that you’re surveilling and controlling and monitoring and enacting violence on. And that’s something we have to confront because I do not think that the body camera explosion and the surveillance and profiteering explosion that went along with it would have been possible without the active complicity of many of the liberal elite in academia and in nonprofits.
Adam: Yeah, aside from, I think, the more sinister actors who were pushing this prior to that, in some ways, it’s kind of the perfect, you know, something has to be done liberal solution, right? So, you have all this popular outrage. You have uprisings, you know, obviously CVS is burning, things of that nature, Baltimore. And so, you sort of have to do something, right? And so, people take signals especially from at that point the White House, the Obama White House who came out in support of body cameras because again, it was a win, win, win. And win for performance liberals because they got to go to their donors and say, you know, we change this within a very specific, narrow framework, right? Sort of a partisan framework, a framework Democrats could get behind. It appeals to the kind of liberal ethos of transparency fixes all, right? So, you don’t need to confront power or even take power away from people in power but you need to have better disclosure or transparency. It is a kind of liberal ethos. And so, in some ways, you kind of understand how it fit into this do something liberalism where it’s like, you had to do something because everyone understood there was a problem. And this was kind of the perfect do something, especially because the police union supported it by and large for some rare exception. So, I don’t know, to me, it was kind of like this perfect storm of just easy, inoffensive, generic liberal-looking busy reform.
Alec Karakatsanis: It’s actually more sinister than that because as I write about this in much more depth in the article, but police and leadership and the police bureaucracy and the punishment bureaucracy more broadly wants to associate anything bad that happens with bad apples, with isolated people like, for example, Derek Chauvin who killed George Floyd if at all possible. They want to blame anything bad that happens, particularly anything bad that the public finds out about on one individual bad cop or one cop who made a bad decision in a bad moment. And body cameras actually focus public discussion on particular incidents and away from deeper questions like, why were the police in that neighborhood in the first place? What were they doing? Why is our society using armed government bureaucrats to deal with this particular situation, etc, etc. And I write in the article about all of the different deeper structural, systemic questions that “reform” like body cameras actually helps obscure because it helps police set the narrative about particular incidents that they capture on video that they want released to the public when they’re actually pretty able to prevent body camera video from getting out into the public at least quickly in incidents they don’t want this for. But it enables them to even in the rare cases where what happens on the video is so unambiguously bad that the police have to acknowledge a mistake or an error or even worse, a crime, enables them to focus on the facts of that particular incident and not on deeper questions that I think abolitionists want us talking about.
Adam: It’s the rat in the maze. You very quickly learn what wall not to touch because you get electrocuted. And I think that in the event of mass uprisings, you have so many people kind of looking around for something to do. And then invariably, the thing that, again, is supported by cops and supported by people who want to focus on this kind of bad apple narrative and especially a lot of these vaguely reform-adjacent groups like the Marshall Project, they’re validators. They’re kind of liberal validators. They say, this is actually good, this is going to change. And then, you know, the data comes in, and actually the situation’s much worse.
Nima: Yeah. I mean, these cameras, as you said, Alec, have everything to do with focusing on individual incidents while deliberately decontextualizing and avoiding any kind of systemic or structural analysis, right? I mean, the image begins when the cops decide it begins, right? That’s when their story begins. There’s nothing before that button is clicked to record. And that, you know, as you’ve said, is absolutely deliberate and part of this kind of laundering of pro-police policy through liberal counterinsurgency.
But kind of digging in a little deeper into how body cams really broaden the kind of violence of broken windows policing this focus on the low level. Can we talk a little bit about prosecutors in this scenario? You know, I think we hear a lot about police, we hear a lot about prisons, and there’s this other P in the middle, the prosecutors. And especially at this time, when there is a framing at the highest level of presidential campaigning right now of the felon versus the prosecutor, right? And the cop is supposed to be the more trustworthy one. The pro-cop prosecutor at the top of the ticket, right? All about law and order. Let’s kind of flip that. You know, Democrats, liberals are reclaiming that mantle. Where do you see that being incredibly dangerous? And why are prosecutors such a key component in maintaining this surveillance and kind of carceral system overload?
Alec Karakatsanis: I think the question of prosecutors is a really important one to understand when you’re thinking about body cameras. And I think that the first way of getting into that topic is to understand that when we say that we are concerned about police violence, about state violence generally, we are not just talking about “illegal” violence. So, body cameras are commonly thought of as like, are they depicting or not depicting police misconduct? But that’s missing the rest of the iceberg just below that illegal tip. I mean, the illegal police violence while, you know, extremely pervasive and horrific, is just the tip of a much larger iceberg of state violence that is lawful in a sense, right? And, for example, the millions of arrests for the possession of the marijuana plant every year, right? So, there’s been more arrests in most years this century, more arrests for marijuana possession than all violent crime combined. And tens of millions of people have been separated from their children, have been put in a cage, have been brutalized in many ways for possession of the marijuana plant. That is all legal, right?
There’s also a huge swath of the rest of what police and prosecutors do, which is jailing people for things that all of the evidence shows our society could deal with much better without human caging. And yet, even though human caging is the cause of enormous misery and harm — for example, every year a person is jailed takes two years off their life, and the US jails people at such rates higher than other countries that the entire life expectancy of the entire United States is 1.8 years lower than it would be if we jail people like other comparable countries. So, we’re all being killed. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of life years. The vast bulk of those hundreds of millions of life years lost for all people in the United States is legal violence by police and prosecutors. Body cameras are the oil that greases this machine because as I mentioned earlier, it enables this assembly line to function. It enables police and prosecutors to process way more low level arrests than they otherwise could have and to secure longer sentences of incarceration and fines and fees, etc. by reducing the leverage that criminal defense lawyers have. So, it actually enables prosecutors to prosecute more people because now, the body camera video actually captures a person on video without an attorney, admitting to possessing the drug paraphernalia or admitting to trespassing on the property to sleep somewhere, right? All of the ways in which body cameras simplify prosecution are ways in which we’re actually increasing the ability and power of the government to enact state violence for things that actually are social and public health and economic problems that our society has chosen to handle through punishment.
Adam: I want to ask you about the two other squishy concepts we asked you about earlier because I want to broaden this out a little bit, which is the idea of community policing and police training as this very popular solution. This is something that Biden, Harris, others who sort of nominally gestured towards reform, they always tried out those two concepts: community policing and police training. Now, I will give you and anyone else $100 if you can tell me what the fuck community policing is because when seeking a fixed definition, it’s very difficult to come by. And of course, police training is just this, again, budget-bloating catch-all that operates under the bad apples liberal framework, right? The issue is that they’re just not trained well. And of course, when you look at how they’re actually trained, they’re trained to shoot people. So, the issue is not not training. That’s what they’re trained to do. The issue is that they did it, you know, in a sort of tacky way. So, talk first, if you could, about community policing, how you sort of see that term, how it’s still popular after 30 years, 40 years even, and how you view its partner in reform police training.
Alec Karakatsanis: So, community policing, it’s funny that you say that because I have a similar thing. Whenever I hear someone in any space whether it’s a politician I’m talking to or a nonprofit person or anybody, and they say the word community policing, I ask them to tell me what it means. Because almost nobody in DC in politics, and almost nobody in any city that I go to where I litigate these cases against police, prosecutors, and judges, I’ve talked to city council people, talk to mayor offices, etc, almost nobody understands what that term means, and very few of these people actually have any conception at all of the history of that concept.
Community policing is a counterinsurgency tactic. And this is funny because a couple years ago, there was a scandal where Harvard had an ex-military professor who started offering a class on counterinsurgency where the students were going to help local police in Massachusetts adopt strategies from Iraq and Afghanistan in the US military and apply them in black communities in Massachusetts. And when the Harvard students found out about this course offering, they started protesting and the university canceled the course. That was community policing. I mean, that is what community policing is. It’s a term that describes a series of tactics that are designed to get a heavily targeted and heavily policed community to have nicer, warmer thoughts about the police, to embrace surveillance, to turn some members of a marginalized group against each other for the benefit of policing.
So, that’s one of the key community policing strategies and tactics, is police hosting basketball tournaments for you know, inner-city youth or police around Thanksgiving, driving into a low-income neighborhood and setting up a truck and giving away food. A lot of this stuff is done to cultivate informants, to boost falsely the impression in these communities that the police both care about their material wellbeing and are a main way that the government is actually helping these communities as opposed to, you know, opening food cooperatives and urban farms and grocery stores in these communities, right?
Adam: It also doesn’t help that in every mob movie, this is what the mob boss does too, by the way. That’s not a good sign when you’re just doing what the guy with the white coat in Godfather Part II does.
Alec Karakatsanis: [Laughs] Yeah, and for Democratic politicians, community policing is just a word they can say that makes low information liberals think that something different is being done. Sounds great.
Adam: Yeah, because community. They’re doing barbecues, they’re doing little, you know, face tattoo stickers and henna tattoos. And they’re, you know, I don’t know, doing a Super Bowl pool. I don’t know. Community policing. It sounds good, though, doesn’t it?
Alec Karakatsanis: And police training is similar. I mean, it’s two words that when put together, makes one think good things. Oh, the police are getting trained. Now, anybody who actually knows anything about the police training industry is horrified when they hear those two words together in response to incidents of police violence because the police training industry is one of the most disturbing, violent, fascist, and honestly kind of incompetent areas of our society. It is where police learn how to be warriors, how to be violent, how to break the law, how to cover up their tracks. There’s so many really powerful investigations by even state and local governments into the police training industry. Obviously, it’s become relatively well known now that a lot of US police are trained by the Israeli military. And so, I don’t think we have time to get into the whole scandal of police training. There’s some great documentaries and great research done about it. But the point is, this is a very nefarious industry, and it’s kind of shocking and should be really scandalous that one of the main liberal responses to police incompetence and violence over the last 15 years has been to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into one of the most violent and unaccountable areas of our society which is training police in how to be more military-like warriors. And anybody who proposes increased police training in response to police violence or incompetence is either an extremely nefarious actor who is trying to mislead you or completely and utterly incompetent.
Nima: Alec, this has been so great to talk to you. I feel like we could just keep going and going. But before we let you go, would love to hear about your forthcoming book Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. It is, as one might imagine, if they’re listening to this show, extremely our shit. Please tell our listeners about the book and about what else you have going on and where people can find your amazing work.
Alec Karakatsanis: Absolutely. Well, it has been called by my grandmother the most anticipated book of the year.
Adam: There you go.
Alec Karakatsanis: And so, she’s very excited about it.
Adam: Can’t argue with that.
Alec Karakatsanis: Exactly. She knows what she’s talking about. Yeah, you know, as you guys both know, I’ve been thinking a lot and writing a lot over the last couple of years about the very particular kind of propaganda that we all call copaganda that I think has really three main functions that I try to explore in the book using lots of examples. I try to also infuse the book with humor and funny anecdotes and things like that because it’s kind of a very depressing topic when you actually start to look at the sheer scope and relentlessness of the propaganda that organizations like the New York Times and mainstream news entities are pummeling us with. And I try to give people some tools to fortify their own minds against this relentless propaganda. And I think it has three main functions, really.
And function number one is copaganda in mainstream US news tries to narrow our conception of what safety means. It tries to make us think that our safety is intimately connected with and maybe coextensive with the very particular crimes that the police focus on that are committed by poor people. So, you know, for example, shoplifting. There’s a lot of news articles about shoplifting, and there are whole sorts of moral panics that are created to make us really, really worry about shoplifting. But shoplifting is a drop in the bucket compared to something like wage theft, you know, which takes about $50 billion a year from low-wage workers in the United States. It’s a tiny speck on the drop in the bucket when compared to something like tax evasion, which is about trillion dollars a year or corporate fraud, $800 billion a year. So, even if you’re just going to look at property crime, the scope of the harm in our society dwarfs the narrow kinds of things that the news focuses on as crime. And so, the first major function of propaganda is narrowing that focus. So, you think about all of the types of things that harm us the most like air pollution kills over 100,000 people in the United States every single year. That’s four to five times the number of homicides combined in the United States. Water pollution. Hundreds of thousands of people are getting the most serious illnesses imaginable, death, cancer, rotting teeth for children, etc. And there’s hundreds of thousands of water pollution violations. You never see on the local news every night, the same kind of relentless coverage of those harms because the first function of propaganda is again narrowing our conception of harm and threat and safety to only those things that strangers who are poor do to us.
Second major function of propaganda is through the volume of news and through the framing of stories and through choosing which stories get told and which ones get heard, constantly making us think that those small categories of crime committed by the poor are ever increasing. That’s why, for the last 25 years, if you look at the Gallup polls on crime, everyone always thinks every year that crime is up, even though crime has been down almost every single year in that period.
And then, I think the third and most important major function of propaganda that I try to really get at in the book is it tries to narrow our conception of solutions to these problems that the media has made us really afraid of. And it wants us to think that the solution to all of our fears about our own safety is investing more in the punishment bureaucracy and the corporations that profit from it as opposed to what the evidence says, which is investment in reducing inequality, early childhood education, housing, income for people, the arts, music, theater, poetry, dance, athletics for children, reducing isolation in our society, environmental cleanup. All of these things are far more associated with even what the police call crime, And so, copaganda wants us to think that if you care about violent crime or people harming each other, you have to support increases to the size and power of the punishment bureaucracy. And I think that’s not only false but quite dangerous in a time of rising authoritarianism.
Nima: Yeah, sounds like that’s going to be a good book. It’s always such a pleasure talking to you, Alec. Your work is really vital. We, of course, have been speaking with Alec Karakatsanis, civil rights attorney and founder of Civil Rights Corps. He is the author of the Substack Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter, the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (published by The New Press in 2019), and the recent study, “The Body Camera: The Language of our Dreams,” which was published in the Yale Journal of Law & Liberation. and of course, author of the highly anticipated and grandma-endorsed book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, which will be released early next year also by The New Press. Alec, thank you again for joining us on Citations Needed.
Alec Karakatsanis: Thank you all so much.
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Adam: Yeah, I think this is why the resource model while not perfect and can be a little bit of a blunt instrument, I think, is the right way to approach this issue, which is, are you just giving more money, more power, more surveillance or are you building alternative systems, not to sound like a hippie but of care? Are we being redistributive? Are we building schools? Are we building parks? Are we creating healthcare for people both, you know, postnatal, prenatal maternal care. Are we building systems of giving people support so they can thrive and live? Or are we just giving more money to cops?
Nima: Yeah, exactly. The idea of social determinants of health as it is often known in nonprofitese. But yeah, I mean really just meaning the fundamental building blocks of a functioning society rather than using all of that money, all of those budgets, all of the resources being allocated instead to these already violent wealth and property protecting police departments that are not and will never be integrated into the community in that kind of “community policing: ideal, right? The idea that you know, the cop on the beat is just your buddy, and you’re looking out for him just like he’s looking out for you and your family, right? Rather, what we see is more and more money just funneled into these so-called training programs or to new technologies, going to these businesses that are making plenty of money doing PR effectively for police departments. So, the corporations are getting money, the police departments are getting money, and politicians get to have supported something.
Adam, I think that’s another aspect of this, something that we’ve discussed a lot on this show, the idea of having to do something without doing the thing that is actually necessary because of the way that that challenges power or the way that that advocating for maybe taking money away from police departments would be politically unpopular for some politicians, maybe most politicians, and therefore that is unpalatable, that is not what they can do. But they still need to look serious, be concerned, wring their hands, and do something, and that something winds up being more money for police departments and the tech companies. And the training companies that equip them and provide ongoing resources, bloating police budgets, but of course, still doing nothing for the actual “community.”
Adam: Yeah, because ultimately, 40% of the country is liberal, and they need to have things that sound good and that reform sounds good. So, you just sort of pitch the same things that bloat budgets and provide military equipment and more power and more surveillance. But you can’t make it sound evil so you make it sound good and reform is good, right? It sort of means whatever you want it to mean. And so it mostly works.
Nima: Even though it doesn’t. And so, that will do it for this season eight opener of Citations Needed. Thank you all for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook at Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com/citationsneededpodcast.
Our senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, September 25, 2024.
Transcription by Mahnoor Imran.
