Resist Copaganda!: Alec Karakatsanis
July 17th, 2025
”Copaganda has us focused on a very narrow range of harms.”
We discuss the main goals of copaganda: narrowing our conception of safety and threat, constantly warning us that those harms are increasing, and telling us that the solution to our fears is more investment in the punishment bureaucracy.
Alec Karakatsanis is the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps and author of Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News.
Your civic action toolkit recommendations from Alec are:
Educate yourself on how copaganda works
Read the Copaganda book in a group!
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Alec Karakatsanis
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast on a mission to spark civic action. I'm
your host, Mila Atmos. I'm a global citizen based in New York City, and I'm
deeply curious about the way our society works. So each week I bring you
conversations to cut through the confusion around today's most important civic
issues and share clear actionable ways for us to build a brighter future
[00:01:00] together.
After all, democracy is not a spectator sport. Tomorrow starts right now. Every
day, Millions of Americans consume what appear to be straightforward news
stories about crime, safety, and policing. But what if these stories are actually
part of a sophisticated propaganda system that's fundamentally reshaping how
we think about justice, safety and democracy itself?
To unpack this question, we're joined by Alec Karakatsanis, founder and
executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and author of Copaganda: how Police
and the Media Manipulate Our News. Alec was last on our show discussing the
usual cruelty of the punishment bureaucracy, and today he's back with insights
about how media manipulation serves that same system.
Alec, welcome back. Thanks for joining us again.
Alec Karakatsanis: Thank you so much for having me back.
Mila: So you were last on the show to talk about the casual cruelty of the
[00:02:00] punishment bureaucracy. To refresh our listeners' memories, and for
those who are new to the podcast, please define the term punishment
bureaucracy, because we'll be referring to it throughout this conversation. So,what is the punishment bureaucracy, and why do you use this term instead of
criminal justice?
Alec Karakatsanis: A lot of people say criminal justice system, but for me, I
don't want to convey that either the purpose or the effect of this system is to do
justice. Really what's, going on is a massive bureaucracy of punishment. When
I use that term, I'm not just talking about all of the police and the prosecutors
and the probation and the parole officers and the judges and the prison and jail
guards and all of the unions that represent them.
I'm also talking about the constellation of multi-billion dollar industries that are
parasitic on every single component of that system. So the people that make and
build the jails, the handcuffs, the tasers, the guns, the software [00:03:00]
programs that do the predictive policing, the Artificial intelligence algorithms
that do license plate readers and facial recognition, The multi-billion dollar
for-profit commercial money bail industry that exists only in the United States
and the Philippines. The multi-billion dollar prison and jail telecom industry, the
prison and jail medical care industry, the commissary that sells all the food and
the other supplies inside jails and prisons.
There's an endless array of interests who benefit from this bureaucracy
constantly expanding. And that serves the interests of people in our society that
own things and that have a lot of power. And, and like any bureaucracy, it is
designed to serve the interests of the people who wield it. And I think it's very,
very important to understand it as a tool of power rather than as some kind of
independent freestanding beneficent entity that is trying in some way to serve
justice or safety. It, it has never functioned like that throughout its entire history,
[00:04:00] and that's neither its purpose nor its goal.
Mila: Yeah. Thanks for laying this out so thoroughly and it's really great to start
here to ground our conversation. So now, enter your second book. As the
Executive Director of Civil Rights Corps, which challenges systemic injustice in
the United States’ legal system, I'm sure there are many other books you could
have written.
So I'm curious about why you chose to write this book and also tell us about the
research that you conducted in order to write it because it's quite thorough and
methodical.
Alec Karakatsanis: I became somewhat obsessed with what stories our society
must be telling itself in order to pursue such, not only ineffective but
catastrophic policies with respect to safety. So the content of our safety policiesis akin to some kind of modern flat earth policy. So we are now putting people
in [00:05:00] cages and separating 'em from their families at rates that are about
six times the steady, historical average of this country from the time of its
founding to about 1980 and about five to 10 times other comparably wealthy
countries. And we also have very high levels of harm and violence in our
society.
So it's not working. So why do we keep investing more and more and more in
it? And as I was going around the country as a civil rights lawyer, over the
years.
I saw in every place I went this extraordinary gap between how the system talks
about itself in its constitutional scrolls and marble monuments. You know, you
think of the, the phrase equal justice under law, inscribed on the United States
Supreme Court. That gap between the words that we use. The daily reality for
the most marginalized people in our society who are experiencing extraordinary
forms of brutality and violence and injustice and kind of incoherent and
irrational and [00:06:00] arbitrary policies.
And I asked myself, how is the public justifying this to itself? What are the
stories the public is telling itself? And I started really monitoring the news. And
this was particularly important in the wake of the 2020 uprisings, where there
was an unprecedented movement in the streets about the injustices and racial
injustices in particular. but more broadly, the injustices and violence of the US
policing bureaucracy and There was a key moment when over half the country
in this big national poll even supported the burning down of the Minneapolis
police precinct. It's almost unthinkable now. when you think about that moment
and what it was like, but corporations, across society, large corporations were
expressing, you know, solidarity and police in military gear were holding hands
with protesters and kneeling. It was a very strange moment, right? But in the
wake of that moment, there was an unprecedented [00:07:00] reactionary
propaganda campaign to prevent anything significant or transformative from
happening. And it was a series of reactionary episodes of fear-mongering unlike
anything I've ever seen. And I wanted to understand it. So I started archiving
news stories and analyzed them looking for patterns. I interviewed hundreds of
journalists and editors and news producers and directly impacted people in jails
across the country, and scholars in economics and political science and history.
And econometrics and criminology, really just trying to understand, what are the
ways in which the system is functioning and how is that different from how
people are told about how it's functioning? And I try to make it funny andaccessible and interesting for ordinary people to read because there's a lot of
scholarship about this that's really boring and hard to access.
And I wanted it to be something that could be taught in high schools and
colleges and law schools and accessible to just ordinary people that deserved to
understand better the propaganda apparatus that's being arrayed against them.
Mila: Yeah. Well, it's definitely very accessible and it is very funny, and I
laughed out loud several times. So let's talk about copaganda. I think we might
instinctively understand that copaganda must be propaganda for cops, but it's
more than that, right? It isn't just spin. What exactly is it? How do you, how do
you define it?
Alec Karakatsanis: I think of copaganda as having really three main
components. The first is that it narrows our conception. Of safety and threat. So
copaganda has us focused on a very narrow range of harms that are supposedly
perpetrated by poor people, people of color, immigrants and strangers. And so,
you might be bombarded with news stories about retail theft [00:09:00] or
shoplifting or armed carjacking or home invasions or something like that. But
the news just almost completely ignores other far more significant harms. So for
example, we don't get front page headlines every day about all the people that
died from air pollution or air pollution crimes, right?
Air pollution kills about a hundred thousand people a year, which is about five
times all homicide combined. Or take, for example, wage theft. So we hear a lot
about property crime in the news by poor people. But wage theft is $50 billion a
year, according to most applicable estimates. That's about five times all other
property crime combined in our society according to Federal data. Or tax
evasion, which is about a trillion dollars a year, right?
So we're talking about crime at a level that is inconceivable, and it's just hardly
ever talked about in the news. And so we don't feel urgently about it. That's
what copaganda does. It narrows our conception of which things we're going to
fear. And then the second thing that it does: It constantly wants us to think that
those narrow [00:10:00] range of harms are increasing. So if you look at the
polling data every year for the last 25 years, people have thought that those
crimes in our society are rising, even though in almost every single one of those
years, those crimes have been going down and we are at historic lows in all of
those crimes in our society.
And this is interesting because if you ask people about crime in their own
neighborhood, they're much more likely to be accurate. So when people'sexperiences is personal and direct, it's less distorted. but when they consume
more news and when they're mediated through the mass media, they're actually
much more likely to have a false impression that crime is going up.
and then the third thing that propaganda does, and this is probably the most
important. Having narrowed our conception of safety and made us constantly
afraid of those things, it tells us that the solution to our fears is more and more
investment in the bureaucracy of punishment.
And this is the solution to every problem, [00:11:00] including police violence
itself. Police violence means, oh, just more investment in training and,
weaponry and technology for the police. This is akin, as I said earlier, to
something like, a modern sort of flat earth theory because when you look at the
actual data and research and empirical evidence from across the world.
The levels of violence in a particular society have nothing to do with the little
policies and the punishment bureaucracy that the news focuses on. So like, are
there 13 police officers on this patrol or eight, or is the sentence for this crime,
nine years or six years? like that stuff has no effect whatsoever on levels of
harm and violence in a society. And in fact,
What actually determines the extent to which a society has a lot of violence and
harm are big features of the society, like levels of inequality and poverty, access
to housing. A huge one is access to healthcare. So one of the biggest factors in
the United States determining [00:12:00] different levels of violence in different
areas is whether they expanded Medicaid.
Or levels of loneliness and isolation versus levels of community. So whether
there are little programs for people like art, music, theater places, for people to
congregate and hang out with each other, these are the things that actually
determine levels of violence in a society.
nd none of them Are the thing that the news media focuses on when it talks
about crime and violence. It's all about investing more in prisons, police and
prosecutors. And, and I think that's the most important and culminating factor of
what copaganda is.
Mila: Mm-hmm. It's a deliberate campaign manufacturing consent for an entire
apparatus of punishment and control as opposed to actually making life better,
like investing in art or playgrounds or healthcare. So. You cite so many
examples of propaganda in the book where the journalist or the academic cites
conflicting statistics, if any, or [00:13:00] uses faulty logic to make theargument for more policing or quotes only prosecutors and mayors and police
chiefs, and importantly, omits key information that would provide more context
for the audience. What's your favorite example that you like to share when you
are in conversation with people to show how propaganda is constructed so that
we can recognize it when we see it.
Alec Karakatsanis: That's like asking me to choose a among my favorite
children or
Mila: Yeah, something like that.
Alec Karakatsanis: many.
Mila: What's the one that comes to mind first?
Alec Karakatsanis: I have hundreds of examples in the book and I think
different examples illustrate different components of the copaganda ecosystem.
But, in terms of how copaganda is constructed, I think sources are a really
important way to sort of understand this issue. I think one of the most important
examples from the last few years is the great retail theft panic. I [00:14:00]
dunno if you remember a few years ago there was a viral video… you know,
tens of millions of people saw this one example of shoplifting in San Francisco.
Walgreens, I think it was, You know, some person was daring escape on their
bicycle as they balanced all the stuff they had thrown in the bag, you know, and
that one shoplifting, in the 28 days after it happened, spawned 309 news stories
across the country.
And this is really, really important to understand how this happened, right? and
many of those news stories as I analyze in the book, had very similar words and
turns of phrase and language and sources, right? People quoted, experts, et
cetera. And that is a hint for you that underneath every story you see in the
news, there is a world bustling below it, and you [00:15:00] have to ask your
questions like, who brought this story? Why is this news now? Who benefits
from this story being told? Who benefits from the language that's being used in
it and the way it's framed and what context is provided versus what context is
left out?
And also who is harmed by the context that is either included or left out. These
stories, a lot of them, had similar sourcing: people from the retail industry and
police associations, et cetera, et cetera, At the same time, there were no national
news stories about the wage theft, allegations against Walgreens, for example,which were far more significant and serious, right? So The context within which
people were experiencing these stories was that there was a barrage of stories
that talked about retail theft. And one of the most amazing omissions from all of
these stories was the fact [00:16:00] that retail theft in our society was not going
up. And in fact, there was a, an early effort among the industry to actually
falsely portray retail theft as increasing. They later admitted, and there was
some great investigative journalism that showed that it wasn't going up, but the
damage had been done. Hundreds of millions of dollars were then allocated, you
know, by Gavin Newsom and Pritzker in Illinois and Hochul in New York.
All these governors and prosecutors and laws were changed and passed in
California to dramatically increase punishment and resources for prosecution
and policing for shoplifting. All of it was premised on a lie. And I think this
example is really good because this idea of what context you include and what
context you don't is something I call in the book the selective curation of
anecdote. so, imagine if you asked me to mentor a young kid who was a
basketball player who has never really watched the NBA, is just learning how to
play and trying to join their middle school or high school team or something
like that. And so I showed them a video of Michael Jordan but, I make a video
of every missed shot in Michael Jordan's career. It's like nine hours long. It's just
Jordan missing shot after shot, after shot, after shot.
Mila: Nine hours!
Alec Karakatsanis: nine hours long, you know, this kid might conclude. This is
not a good basketball player. And might think, well, how did this person even
make the NBA?
Right? And what I've done is I've used true anecdotes like that, shoplifting from
Walgreens, but I've stripped away a lot of the context within which somebody
can understand that anecdote in order to create a false impression that this is not
a good basketball player. That's what the news media did with the retail theft
epidemic. It's stripped away all of the other contexts, like what other crimes are
being committed? Is retail theft even up? How do I understand this problem?
That's what the news media does with crime committed by mostly poor people
and strangers and immigrants and people of color in general.
It strips away a lot of the context and un-moores people from any semblance of
reality to create the false impression of who is most [00:18:00] to fear. And
when and how those crimes are arising and what we can do about it.Mila: We'll be back with Alec in just a moment, so stick around. You won't
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to my conversation with Alec Karakatsanis.You just mentioned that really one of the mainstays of copaganda is that crime
is rising.The media is constantly telling us that there's a crime wave across the
country. But I am curious about what the actual numbers are when it comes to
crime statistics. You just said that actually we have a low crime rate, but I think
that's totally missed, so, so what are the numbers and how can people make
sense of what's actually happening around us?
Alec Karakatsanis: In the book, I have all of the data that the police and the
FBI and the federal government themselves collect, and the data is
unambiguous no matter how you cut it. Now, of [00:22:00] course there's lots of
flaws, which in the very enterprise of these policing institutions collecting crime
data, they only focus on certain kinds of crime committed by certain kinds of
people.
They don't even really report, a lot of crime. like environmental crime or, white
collar crime, because this is a key fact about our society that you absolutely
have to understand. We only know about the crimes where we look for them. So
where the government, allocates resources to investigating crime determines
where the government is gonna find and record and prosecute crime.
So when the government makes a decision, let's say, to dramatically reduce the
number of IRS agents or environmental prosecutors, or, Increase the number of
drug enforcement agents or border patrol agents, et cetera. it dramatically
changes who they're looking for and for what conduct. So this is famously
[00:23:00] the case, you know, for every year, the last several decades, there's
been hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits in police departments across
the country.
Police America just made the decision essentially to not care about Many, many
sexual assaults and instead to focus on nonviolent drug cases for a lot of
reasons. Those cases are much more profitable and simple for the police and,
the people that they target in those cases are a different demographic, et cetera,
et cetera.
but even among those drug cases, they are not sending undercover SWAT teams
to dorm rooms at Yale University. They're sending them to poor black
neighborhoods down the street in New Haven, Connecticut. Police are not
arresting kids for fights at wealthy private schools.
They're arresting kids for fights at public schools where a lot of poor children,
go to school. So these are discretionary choices that are made across thepolicing bureaucracy. So, you have to [00:24:00] understand that with the crime
statistics I'm about to talk about, they are already distorted, right?
Because they represent the deliberate choices of the punishment, bureaucracy,
and people in power in our society about which crimes we're e even gonna look
for and which crimes we're not gonna record at all.
In terms of the crime data, the FBI and, and police mostly track and report what
they call index crimes, which are some of the most major crimes, right. and the
things that you're used to seeing robbery and sexual assault and certain types of
theft, murder. these crimes are near historic lows.
And they have been for the entire period of the post 2020 uprisings way below
what they were 30, 40 years ago, and trending downward. Maybe they're a little
tiny little blips month by month here or there, or by a couple percentage points
in a given year.
But like the general trend is extremely Downward and steady. and this is not just
a US phenomenon. This is happening, you know, in many [00:25:00] places
around the world. it's happening all across the country. so, that's the reality of
the situation. And if you consumed mainstream news post 2020, you were told a
very, very different story based on short term blips that were related mostly to
the pandemic. but tha aren't representative. of sort of broader trends and have
absolutely nothing to do with punishment policy.
They have to do with bigger features of our society.
Mila: Yeah, that makes sense. So future hindsight is a democracy show, and I
wanna pivot here to the philosophical goals of propaganda because of course we
all know that based on this conversation, but from real life experience, that the
actions, for example, of the LAPD, during the anti- Ice protests in June are a
product of decades worth of copaganda.
What kind of political philosophy does copaganda advance, and why [00:26:00]
is it so dangerous?
Alec Karakatsanis: This is gonna sound potentially alarmist to people, but you
have to understand the history. Of the punishment bureaucracy to understand its
philosophy and its goals. It is an authoritarian institution in any given society,
not just the United States, the Security forces, the punishment bureaucracy.
They serve the interests of people who have power in that society. So in a
society where, there's a dictatorship or something, people readily understandwhat the role of the police is. In a society that's more of an oligarchy where
smaller groups of people wield a lot of power and influence, the Punishment
bureaucracy serves their interests. Then there's another layer to this all by the
way, which is that there is a growing and frightening sort of global, authoritarian
movement that is supported by the multi, multi-billion dollar intelligence and
military [00:27:00] industries. So a lot of the same policies and surveillance,
technology and artificial intelligence, technology and policing practices and big
data. Databases you know, whether it's cameras or license plate readers or
digital ID systems. These are being promoted and built by. A relatively small
group of the same for-profit companies.
So there's this,global undercurrent of surveillance and control, that is grafted
onto these traditional nation state punishment bureaucraciesin a way that makes
the developments across all of these countries extraordinarily linked and a lot of
the multi-billion dollar industries are owned by similar interests, right? and they
sell these policies to their populations in different ways. So, one of the most
important points in the book is that much of this stuff in the United States is
sold to a liberal population that thinks of itself as [00:28:00] valuing democracy.
It's sold as kind of like reforms, right? like the police body camera, which the
multi-billion dollar industry desperately wanted for years, which is, I think. The
greatest achievement of modern propaganda selling that to US liberals in order
to get liberal local governments and the federal government billions of dollars
that they then spent on what in other countries was explicitly understood to be
sort of authoritarian, total surveillance holy grail.
Um, but I think the general point is At every single moment in US history, the
punishment bureaucracy has mobilized to serve the interests of people who have
power, and it has attempted to crush every major social movement that sought.
Greater equality or progressive change in some way. So obviously the origin of
modern policing was in slave patrol and militias and in much of the rest of the
country in gangs that would target [00:29:00] striking laborers, right? And
immigrant workers. but it evolved especially after World War II, it began using
this propagandistic framing more about public safety.
And as opposed to being about preserving inequality. But if you look at
anti-slavery movements, if you look at women's suffrage, if you look at anti-war
movements, if you look at the Civil rights movement, and the modern
environmental movement, on and on and on and on and on, at every single
movement… The full force of the punishment bureaucracy was arrayed against
and tried to crush these movements. If you look at the civil rights movement,take Chicago alone had 500 police officers working undercover to infiltrate and
sabotage. The Civil Rights Movement in Chicago, and that was going on all
over the country. We don't even know the full extent of it. Some scholars
estimate there's hundreds of thousands of police officers and way more
informants who were working at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI and,
Local and, and state and federal police [00:30:00] agencies across the country to
crush the civil rights movement.
And this is happening to this day. And that's what you're seeing in Los Angeles,
right? You're seeing a wide range of mythologies and the traditional role of
police and the attempt to, I think it's kind of ham handed and very transparent.
Mila: it's transparent.
Alec Karakatsanis: Yeah. You know, deploying the military and they're not
even trying to hide it. you know, maybe, the Democrats in LA government tried
to sort of hide the nature of what the LAPD is doing, but it's a lot harder for
Trump because people understand and see him as more of an authoritarian
figure.
But make no mistake, these institutions are authoritarian institutions and they
always have been.
Mila: Right, right. So one of the things that you write about is how copaganda
obscures how politics and power work.
And so if you're growing up today as opposed to, let's say in the fifties,
[00:31:00] forties, sixties, you know. A lot of readers really don't understand
why things happened and you argue that copaganda depoliticize us, which is to
say. and I'm gonna quote you here that “copaganda distracts people from the
material conditions of our society that both produce and ameliorate crime.
”
Tell us more how copaganda transforms all of us into passive consumers of fear
rather than active democratic participants.
Alec Karakatsanis: One of the most important. And things to understand is if
you don't have a good sense of how power works, if you don't have a good
sense of how or why policies come to be, you won't have a good sense of how
to change them. And the news media does an incredible job deceiving people
about how policies come to be, especially punishment [00:32:00] policies.So for example. You might read in the news, governor Hochul vetoes Bail
Reform right?. The news kind of in a very simplistic way, portrays all policy as
the product of deliberate debate and rational thinking, Like, oh, you know. these
are the arguments for this thing, and those are the arguments for that thing. And
so, you know, the better policy will win. You know, something like that or the
policies of the result of the intentions and the personalities of the people in
power and not this longer causal chain.
And this is, I think, one of the most important chapters in the book which I call
the big deception. You know, how the news media. Simplifies and distorts our
understanding of how change happens and how power works so that it gets
people, particularly liberal people. Right? 'cause my book is really focused on
people who I think are well-intentioned, liberal minded people who want a
society with more equality and less violence and more, uh, human flourishing
and [00:33:00] autonomy, et cetera.
so I'm not gearing this book toward the far right. But one of the most important
components of Democratic participation is actually understanding how things
work. So, the issue that I've worked on for most of my career in the last decade
has been the money bail system in the United States.
So there's hundreds of thousands of people jailed on any given night in this
country, separated from their kids solely because their families lack small
amounts of cash. Okay? This is horrific injustice. It's devastating. It actually
increases crime. It is one of the most scandalous features of our legal system.
and we've been winning these cases across the country, striking down these
systems. Now if the money bail system worked, like the news makes it sound, I
could just walk up to the local judges or the mayor and the chief of police and
the DA and, and the governor, right? Or Congress, and I could say,
‘Hey, you
know what? Let's look at all the empirical evidence here.
’ [00:34:00] and I
could show it to them and they would say, oh my goodness, you're right. This is
a really ineffective policy. We're so sorry. We're gonna not do that anymore.
Right. I'm being crude and simplistic, but that's kind of the narrative that is spun
for people and that makes people passive.
And it also tricks people into the kinds of things that they do to make change are
not effective because they're not actually focused On confronting power or why
things are happening in our society. So in the context of the money bail system,
for example, the money bail system does not exist because anybody thinks that
it's actually better for safety. That is just completely untrue. I mean, if youactually said that to police officers and prosecutors and, and judges, they would
laugh at you. Everybody knows that
Mila: It's for the money.
Alec Karakatsanis: Well, it's for a lot of reasons. I think, one, there's a
multi-billion dollar industry.
but this is more important: The United States Punishment Bureaucracy is trying
to arrest, depending on how you count, 10 or 11 million people every year. No
[00:35:00] society in the recorded history of the modern world has ever tried to
take so many people from their schools and jobs and families, and.
Homes, churches every single year, and process them through a government run
system of courts and jail cells and cages, et cetera. And this system would
entirely break if the rights in the Bill of Rights were being followed. So the Bill
of Rights in the US Constitution, was never conceived for a society of mass
incarceration.
Every one of those people is supposed to be entitled to a zealous defense and
investigating their case and a lawyer to represent them and motions and
hearings and, a jury trial, right? But why do you think between 95 and 98% of
all people's convictions are the result of guilty pleas? And why do you think so
many cases are dismissed?
Well, the system would completely break if people insisted on their right to a
jury trial. We just couldn't have, hundreds of millions of people participating in
juries every year. Right. It would break our society. So [00:36:00] we're
arresting so many people that it's impossible to follow. Alright. Right.
And so that's what money bail system is actually doing. if you put someone in a
jail cell, they're much more likely to plead guilty 'cause they're so desperate that
they plead guilty right away to get out. So if you take our case in Houston, for
example, 20,000 people before we sued them we're jailed every single year
because they couldn't pay a few hundred dollars in misdemeanor cases and they
were pleading guilty and getting released in a median of 3.2 days. So they were
being brought to jail. They were being brought to court, and they were being
told, Hey, you know, you can plead guilty and Promise to pay us some money
and go on probation, which is another whole issue, fund our system for us and
we'll let you out. We'll let you back to your job and your family, and your home
and your medication, et cetera. But if you wanna fight your case, okay? And if
you're poor, you're just gonna be staying in jail. Maybe you'll win your case.Maybe you'll get acquitted, but you're gonna have spent all this time in jail and
your life is gonna be ruined. So what do you think people do?
Mila: they plead guilty.
Alec Karakatsanis: They plead guilty., and that's how the system works. That's
why the money [00:37:00] bail system exists the way that it does. And when we
won that case and they were no longer able to do that, they actually started
dismissing the vast majority of cases because they were not able to have all the
witnesses and they couldn't prove their cases.
and they had to actually choose which cases are serious enough for us to
prosecute. so your understanding as a democratic participant in society. Of why
the punishment bureaucracy looks the way that it does is gonna impact what you
do about it. And if you think thatthe punishment bureaucracy is doing the things
that it does because it's pursuing some kind of safety, which is what propaganda
tells you, then you're gonna be totally lost when you're trying to figure out how
to change it.
Mila: Well, that's why I think a lot of people clinging to this idea that we are
doing serious court reform or. Implement other ways to hold police accountable.
For example, body cams, you just debunked that myth that body cams are.
Better and safer for people., [00:38:00] as it turns out, of course, this is all like a
sham, a euphemism, and a slight of hand.
So, for example, you mentioned this also in the book, that the George Floyd
Justice in Policing Act has not actually made a difference. And what's more,
there are in fact more killings by police per year since George Floyd, how does
Cop. Obscure the way we understand quote reforms, because all they're doing
really is nibbling at the edges, if you could even call it that.
Alec Karakatsanis: This is one of the areas of the book that I think will really,
hopefully blow people's minds because it's the most important
counterinsurgency function of copaganda the way that it acts on progressives
and liberals, the way that the system gets liberal minded people, progressive
people who actually want to see less police violence, the way it gets them to
support the very policies that lead to more violence is [00:39:00] incredibly
important.
So, so why is it that after all those people were in the streets in 2020
complaining about police violence in Thousands of towns and cities and
counties across the country that police killed more people in 2021 than in 2020.And they killed more people in 2022 and 2021. And they killed more people in
2023 than they did in 2022.
And they killed more people in 2024 than they did in 2023. And for every
killing, we're talking about thousands and thousands. Of other forms of police
brutality and violence and and we're not just talking about illegal police
violence, we're also talking about all of the unnecessary and incredibly
disruptive forcible arrests that happen that don't happen in other societies, and
that didn't used to happen in this country.
And those are important to understand too, when you're thinking about police
violence, it's all of the legal police violence that's happening too. So, You know,
what do we make of why [00:40:00] so many progressive people in a
Democratic party, leading academics,, nonprofits. And a huge part of my book
is sort of exposing the really Silly but dangerous world of the pro-police
professors and scholars, right? how do we come to support policies that have the
exact opposite effect of what so many well-meaning people who care about
democracy and, liberty inequality believe, and, I think the body camera is really
the best example.
This is technology that is understood in much of the rest of the world to be
Authoritarian and, incredibly powerful tool for the police. And the police
desperately wanted body cameras for years, and so much so that they raised
private money from people like Steven Spielberg to outfit police with privately
funded body cameras.
Mila: wow, Stevens Spielberg, that's unlikely. I mean, for me, as an unlikely
person to be funding this.
Alec Karakatsanis: yeah, I mean, these police foundations were [00:41:00]
desperate. But the reason that police and especially prosecutors want body
cameras is that they love the idea of a mobile surveillance camera that looks
away from the police officer, that the police control when it's turned on, it
records, How it's edited. and they thought this would be extremely powerful
evidence in low level cases like, arresting unhoused people or drug offenses, et
cetera. This is really strong evidence that can get people to plead guilty really
fast so it can actually speed up the punishment, bureaucracy, and enable this.
Assembly line guilty plea system to work. If we had video evidence, now
everybody understood that it would almost never be used against the police for avariety of reasons, and that's true. It's used every single day across the country
against poor people. It's almost never, ever, ever used against the police.
Secondly, they saw it as, protection from liability for the police. The police
could control and videotape things, right? And they're trained. Obviously, if
you've ever seen these [00:42:00] videos, they look very chaotic, which is part
of the police narrative. Like,
'cause they're affixed to the chest.
And so they're obviously bouncing up and down. It's very hard to tell what's
actually happening. And then from off the camera, the police are trained to say
things like, stop resisting, stop resisting, stop resisting. So they create this,
Mila: Yeah, they create a video that's like a, it's like a TikTok video. They
create it, as opposed to capturing something in real time.
Alec Karakatsanis: Absolutely. and, and the title of my separate, scholarly
article, in the Yale Journal of Law, liberation on Body Cameras. It comes from a
great James Baldwin quote about how the camera is the language of our dreams
because it captures the reality only of the person who's behind the camera and
what they want you to see.
but more importantly, and this is why the multi-billion dollar surveillance
industry really wanted it, companies like Axon, which used to be called Taser,
Microsoft, Amazon, and you know, Axon value went up by the billions after
this, right? So they all viewed this as a huge play for big [00:43:00] data
contracts with police across the country and linking it to predictive policing,
software and algorithms.
And now you need somebody to, store all that data that's created by these
hundreds of thousands of police generating all this data you need. Artificial
intelligence algorithms to be linked to it for facial recognition and voice
recognition and transcripts, and you need people to analyze it and software
coders, and then you need people to train all the cops on this.
So it's, it's this perpetual multi-billion dollar way to get new contracts, right? It's
not the cameras themselves, it are only a few hundred dollars. It's all of the jobs
and the profit that can be created and the surveillance that can be. Embedded
through hundreds of thousands of police officers now carrying a mobile
surveillance camera with them.
And this was the holy grail. And they were unable to sell people on this vision.
They couldn't get local governments to spend billions of dollars on this untilMichael Brown's killing. they had this incredibly brilliant idea in the wake of
the 2014. Michael Brown killing. They were like, well, what if we, [00:44:00]
instead of pitching it as a surveillance tool that the police want, what if we pitch
it as a reform to liberals?
And so they just shifted their marketing and Obama proposed hundreds of
millions of dollars and body cameras. All these democratic governors started
proposing it. It became one of the pillars of the Democratic party and,police
professor. Reform movement when it was trying to be sold as an authoritarian
thing that the police wanted, like maybe in like the United Arab Emirates or
Israel or India or other places where the surveillance tools didn't need to be
accompanied by a reform narrative.
Right. it's obvious to the public that these are authoritarian tools. But in this
country, even the articles that rightly told the public that body cameras in all of
the meta studies that have been done, they actually don't make police less
violent at all, which is obvious 'cause they were never intended to do that.
Even those articles portray the body camera As a good faith attempt to reform
police, and they all erase this history pre 2014 of [00:45:00] the actual origin of
the body camera and, and the reason that they're being promoted around the
country, which is not accountability and transparency, but they were actually
being pedaled to us as a surveillance tool.
Mila: Well, obviously we need to break the cycle. So every week on future
hindsight, I ask my guest to share a civic spark. One small step we can all take
to be more empowered and ignite collective change. What's a good way to turn
the insights that you've shared with us into action and to resist propaganda?
Alec Karakatsanis: The last chapter in the book is about resisting propaganda,
and there's so much that we can all do. And I think the most important thing is
educating ourselves about how this actually works. And, you know, to that end,
I'm helping people set up reading groups and, and we have free copies of the
book for anyone in prison, free copies of the book for any teacher who wants to
teach the book in their classes? And I'm zooming into book [00:46:00] clubs,
uh, around the country. If people wanna read the book together, And I also have,
really helpful guides in the book about what you can do with your local
legislators and city council people, and county council people and prosecutors
and sheriffs and police chiefs. These are tools that anyone could use at any
community meeting or any journalist could use in questioning them and starting
to evaluate and understand how they're spending their money and what policies
they're implementing and And why. Also, there's so many other ways forordinary people to get involved in their own community. I talk in the book about
different ways that different people with different skills, whether you're a
teacher or a nurse or a public defender or if you're a retired person, like my
mom, who, when she retired, she, along with people like Fiona Apple, tarted
doing court watch
Mila: Court watching. So powerful
Alec Karakatsanis: Yeah. And they watch what's going on and then they report
on it to the public. and those reports lead to news stories. They lead to civil
rights lawsuits, et cetera. There's participatory defense hubs you can get
involved with around the country [00:47:00] where you can help work with
people who are being charged with crimes.
but the most important thing is doing it with other people. Because this
propaganda is so relentless, it's really hard to fortify our minds against it.
And we have to build, communities of people that are helping us because the
propaganda is really all around us.
Mila: Yeah, that's true. So last question, looking into the future, what makes
you hopeful?
Alec Karakatsanis: I think I've been really, really excited about all the people
that are coming together in this time and refusing to give in, refusing to accept
not just authoritarianism, but Horrific genocide and violence across the world.
People who are building even in their own small community, solidarity and
comradery and hope and mutual aid.
And there's just incredible will for people in communities across the society to
create a better world. and the thing that's really hopeful is that it's actually so
easy. We know what [00:48:00] policies make life. Better and safer for people.
It's not rocket science, it's just changing. The nature of some of the priorities in
our investments and it's organizing and coming together with other people in
our communities to build enough power to demand that the people in power do
that.
And, that's our task. And what gives me hope is that that's also really fun. It's
really fun to come together with other people to participate in a much more truly
democratic way of organizing our society. And, and that's what life's all about.Mila: Yeah, I agree. You're here. Thank you so much for joining me on the
podcast again. It was really a pleasure to have you back.
Alec Karakatsanis: Thank you all.
Mila: Alec Caranas is founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps and
the author of Kagan, how Police and the Media Manipulate Our News.
Remember, civic action doesn't have to be complicated.
It's about small steps that spark progress, like [00:49:00] sharing this episode
with a friend, let's recap this week's civic, spark and fire up our collective
power. Educate yourself about propaganda, and as we've said many times
before, do it in a group. Then find ways to get involved in your community
based on whatever skills you have.
maybe you can court watch like Alec's mom, but whatever you do, do it with
other people.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by James Fishkin. He holds the
Janet M. Peck chair in international communication at Stanford University and
is the director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab.
His work focuses on deliberative polling, and his latest book is Can Deliberation
Cure the Ills of Democracy?
James Fishkin: But there's another kind of motivated reasoning, in addition to
the partisan or directional kind, and it's called evidence-based motivated
reasoning.
And it's when people are engaged together to [00:50:00] get to the bottom of the
issue and really figure it out. and it also lowers the temperature, it lowers the
affect of polarization and the, the dislike members of the two main parties have
for each other.
Mila: That's next time on Future Hindsight. Now be sure to follow us on your
podcast app so you'll never miss an episode. We are your resource for all the
tools you need to stay engaged. So follow future hindsight now, and we'll come
right to you every week.And if you want to support future hindsight and all the work we do as an
independent pro-democracy podcast, join the Civics Club on Patreon. Head to
patreon.com/future hindsight. Now to join. Thanks for tuning in and until next
time, see clearly, act boldly, and spark the change you want to see.
This episode was produced by Zack Travis, and me.