Copaganda Quotes

“An emerging vanguard of copaganda is rebranding repressive policies as compassionate. Politicians around the country are increasingly using the concept of "care" to describe policies of violence that jail unhoused people and criminalize people for their mental illness.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Here's a fact omitted in many article about growing numbers of poor people living on the street: if the U.S. had remained as equitable as it was in 1975 for the next forty-three years through 2018, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would have earned an extra $47 trillion. Instead that money went to people already at the top, who use that money, among other things, to influence the political system and to hoard real estate.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Copaganda distracts people from the material conditions of our society that both produce and ameliorate crime.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“In my years as a civil rights lawyer, I have seen virtually all the same cycle in city after city: Politicians respond to the fallout from an incident of police violence by pledging various "reforms" that are either meaningless or things the police had been asking for anyway. These pledges are followed by increases in police budgets. Overall police violence grows, and the cycle repeats.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Copaganda frames police violence as the product of "bad apples," which it contrasts with the supposedly benevolent behavior of most police.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Ignoring her election victory as evidence that a lot of voters liked her positions, the journalists quoted one person on the street to prove her unpopularity. The random person stated that police were "underpaid," that they were necessary to "keep order," and that he was opposed to their abolition. Where did the intrepid Times reporters unearth this supposedly ordinary person? Outside a memorial for the two police officer at a police station.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“When police violence reemerges as a sustained news theme every few years, the words "accountability" and "transparency" are sprinkled into story after story and used as a substitute for informed discussion about the terrible track record of specific policies and broader discussions about how and whether it's even possible to make armed police forces less violent and corrupt as they are currently constituted.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Rendering the public unable to distinguish between change and the status quo is one of the main goals of copaganda.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“tough on crime" prosecutors do not lower crime, and more right-wing states with harsher sentencing policies have higher murder rates.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“The framing of the police body camera as a means of "reform" is one of the most significant achievements of copaganda in contemporary history.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“It benefits the LAPD to have the news describe recommendations for lavish new police spending as the judgment of neutral experts. Imagine what it would look like if an "internal" LAPD report or a report by the company selling police spyware had been the one to recommend more money for more spying on protesters in the wake of the LAPD's widespread crimes. The news's portrayal of the commission report about the LAPD as "independent" is an example of how reporting on police violence becomes a stage in the cycle of police violence.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“If one views police as sophisticated agents who have effectively infiltrated and repressed progressive social movements for 150 years, then their violence and spying on 2020 protesters cannot be mystified as anomalous or the result of a lack of "preparation," "training," or "resources." And you can see the obfuscation in one of the most glaring omissions in the articles: they make no acknowledgment that police committed many thousands of intentional crimes. If the news acknowledged those acts as crimes, it would have to turn a piece about a lack of "training" into one about why police, prosecutors, and federal authorities in virtually every city largely chose to ignore those crimes. And what would that story get people thinking about?”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Copaganda goes into overdrive when the punishment bureaucracy encounters threats to its size, power, and profit. The punishment bureaucracy crafts stories about its own violence and ineffectiveness to get people to support "reforms" that do not challenge and--even worse--often increase its size and power.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Because of the fearmongering about poor people and unhoused people through around-the-clock coverage of anecdotal stranger crimes, the news has conditioned people to misunderstand the nature of risk and vulnerability.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“The "police shortage" articles assuming the need to preserve or increase the current number of armed police officers are really about something else: the question of whether our society wants to reduce key forms of inequality or not.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Copaganda obscures the active role police play in doing bad things. Many people have criticized the police-invented term "officer-involved shooting" because it obscures who is responsible.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“In every place I have worked on civil rights and economic justice issues, police have organized to oppose us. They have lied in court and in the news; they have made threats to me, my family, and my friends; they have intimidated vulnerable allies of mine seeking progressive change for their communities, and they have spent huge sums organizing against even modest changes that are backed by evidence. To take one example, a police chief I had publicly criticized once grabbed the back of my neck in a public hallway, looked at his hand, smiled, and commented that he now had my DNA before telling me the make and model of my rental car”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Over the years, numerous local officials have told me they cannot support reducing police budgets because they are terrified of retaliation by police, including of cops raiding their homes or stopping and harassing their loved ones. Such intimidation is a pervasive fact of daily life for local progressive politicians--and even of numerous judges who have confided in me about their fear of retaliation against their families by police.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“In addition to the authoritarian role that U.S. police play by selectively enforcing rules made by those with power in an unequal society, they also have a long history of both overtly supporting and actively being infiltrated by the far right.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Apart from their role in destroying those organizing for progressive social change, the police are and have always been central to protecting private concentrations of wealth through selective enforcement of the law; gentrification, unlawful redlining; evictions; immigration enforcement and the management of migrants fleeing the effects of global U.S. policy; civil forfeiture; and many other forms of exclusion and predation. And they are preparing to play a central role in the enforcement of anti-democratic voter restriction laws sweeping the country, as well as laws banning books from libraries and anti-trans laws.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“A primary function of police for 150 years has been to surveil, infiltrate, and crush progressive social movements seeking to reduce inequality. It's why police spied on, infiltrated, brutally repressed, and continue to crush labor, feminist, civil rights, anti-war, LGBTQ, environmental, reproductive rights, indigenous, and economic social justice movements.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“For decades, studies have found that families of police officers experience domestic violence at astronomical rates: between 24 and 40 percent of all families with a police officer report criminal domestic violence. That is a rate of domestic violence up to 400 percent of that of the general population.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Philando Castile, a school cafeteria worker who frequently paid for the lunches of kids who couldn't afford to eat, was stopped for minor traffic issues fifty-two times before he was stopped for a broken tail light and shot to death by police with his girlfriend filming.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“If you're an amateur, professional, or aspiring journalist in any city in the U.S., a good story for you would be to dig into the budget and number of employees that your local police department devotes to all forms of public relations. There's a reason they try to hide it.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Police employing video propagandists has become more common after the murder of George Floyd.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“On the day Chicago police murdered Laquan McDonald, a seventeen-year-old Black teenager, in 2014, Chicago cops had six full-time public relations employees. As the city fought in court to keep evidence of the child's murder secret and then later to control the uproar when a judge ordered it to release a video of the shooting, Chicago increased its police budget to pay for twenty-five full-time positions devoted to manipulating public information. The 2024 budget funded fifty-five.

Chicago is not alone. Cities across the country spend enormous amounts on police PR, and even elected officials are often kept in the dark about it.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“The concept and terminology of "mugging" as opposed to, say, "robbery" was created as part of the panic, even though there was no evidence that this ill-defined activity was increasing. This is similar to the creation of the term "carjacking" in Detroit in the early 1990s.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“The entire genre of police procedurals mythologizes punishment bureaucrats and the allegedly sophisticated technologies they wield. And it's not just Hollywood--fictional copaganda planned and paid for by the police and their industry allies is on TikTok and Youtube, and it's behind many community groups, online posts, neighborhood listserv emails, and charitable campaigns that seem genuine to the unassuming public.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Cultural copaganda is all around us--from the CIA , starting in the 1950s funding projects like the Iowa Writers' Workshop or fronting literary magazines to influence modern journalism and fiction writing, to the DEA paying Hollywood in the 1990s to insert drug war propaganda into popular television shows, to the vast array of police and military consultants who shape every fictional TV series, podcast, or movie that touches on crime. Shows like COPS and Law & Order have done a lot to distort society's understanding of what the punishment bureaucracy does.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“The third job of copaganda is to convince the public to spend more money on the punishment bureaucracy by framing police, prosecutors, probation, parole, and prisons as effective solutions to interpersonal harm. Copaganda links safety to the things the punishment bureaucracy does, while downplaying the connection between safety and the material, structural conditions of people's lives.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News