Alec Karakatsanis
@equalityAlec
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founder, @CivRightsCorps civil rights lawyer author of usual cruelty (2019) and copaganda (forthcoming 2024)
Washington, DC
Joined February 2014
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Watch this video featuring our work
@CivRightsCorps
to learn about how our case will free almost 20,000 people from jail every year in Houston, Texas.
A judge doubled this woman’s bail because she said ‘yeah’ instead of ‘yes’
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Thread. What is happening right now at the New York Times is important and dangerous. I've tried to document it thoroughly below.
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Behind every cop ticketing an elderly woman for resting, there is a mayor wanting to punish her for her poverty, a lawyer writing an ordinance to make it happen, a judge distorting the law to allow it, and a local news reporter telling viewers why it needed to happen.
Ticket for an elderly woman resting in the shade.
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After the murder of Breonna Taylor, Louisville city council has just voted 24-1 to INCREASE the police budget by $750,000 and to cut $775,000 from local libraries. This is structural violence.
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This is a federal felony committed by the cops. It’s happens every single day, but it’s very important to understand. Pay specific attention to what they do to the man’s father:
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THREAD: It is with sadness that I tell you about Preston Chaney, who died in the Houston jail of COVID. He was trapped there for 3.5 months because he couldn't pay $100 after being accused of stealing lawn equipment and frozen meat. His story is important. (1)
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THREAD: As cops try to spin Uvalde as one bad choice by a bad police commander from a brand new small “cowardly” police department, please remember these facts:
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The police shot the girl they were supposedly trying to rescue after she was kidnapped and then police lied about it and hid the video for two years. It's important to understand that the highest levels of the policing bureaucracy knew about this and attempted to cover it up.
NEW: Video reveals San Bernardino sheriffs fatally shot Savannah Graziano, 15, a reported kidnapping victim, while she was unarmed + following deputies instructions to move to them.
They continued shooting even after one officer said "Stop shooting her"
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THREAD. A 70-year-old man has died in the downtown Houston jail because he couldn't pay $500 cash. No media outlet has deemed it important enough to tell the public about his death, but what happened is horrific and his story matters.
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THREAD. Two Harvard professors published an academic article calling for 500,000 more armed cops, who they say will arrest 7.8 million more people per year. The article reveals alarming flaws in elite academia at a time of rising fascism. This is one of my most important posts.
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THREAD. Today the New York Times responded to a mass subway shooting with a relentless string of copaganda. Let’s look closely at how the NYT used a crisis to boost police talking points and lies in some creative ways:
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THREAD. A woman just died and babies and adults were taken to the hospital in Akron, Ohio after a carbon monoxide leak at an apartment building where the corporate landlord hadn't installed CO detectors as required by law. How do you think the local news and police treated it?
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thread: late last night, our team found another 17-year-old child trapped in the adult jail in houston because he can't pay $1,000 cash. he's been there for almost two months, forgotten. he was arrested after missing court because he was given the wrong date on his paperwork.
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THREAD: One of our clients was an 11-year-old Black child taking a shower before bed when DC police burst into her bathroom, pulled back the curtain, and pointed guns at her naked body. Cops said they found a little marijuana on her dad (who didn't live there) two weeks before.
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THREAD. A rare thing is happening today: we are about to get a window into the secret world of how cops shape the news. There's a hearing this afternoon into how San Francisco cops manipulate the media through “strategic communications.” The internal documents are shocking.
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THREAD. A quiet catastrophe is unfolding in Los Angeles. A group of judges met in secret and decided to require a cash bail schedule starting on June 30. I have been unable to find a single news story about it, so I'll explain what's happening and why it matters.
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THREAD: Yesterday, the New York Times published a headline it knew was false. The implications of this are dangerous for everyone who cares about an informed public. Here’s what happened:
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THREAD. I noticed something fascinating: many of the reporters concocting the new hysteria over "retail theft" are using the *exact same* words and patterns in each story. It's pretty wild. Let's take a look:
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Thread. Have you ever heard of "civil asset forfeiture"? You're never going to think about the police the same way again. (1)
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The leaked Israeli intelligence document planning for fullscale ethnic cleansing and removal of 2.4 million people from Gaza--and how to get Western media and governments to agree to it--is chilling:
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Last week, NYT published a major story that suggested falsely that police prevent murder and that one reason for increased murders during a global pandemic was civil rights criticism of police! The NYT did not disclose that the reporter was former CIA/Palantir/police/DA paid.
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One of the most widely ignored stories in local media is how much overtime cash police extract from their own violence. It’s hardly ever discussed, but every cop out there is thinking about it.
About 50 officers just stepped out front of the justice center in full riot gear. There is no one here.
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This month marks two years since the murder of Breonna Taylor. One of the most revealing facts about her case that the media largely ignored: after her death, Louisville gave the cops a budget increase of $750,000 and cut the public library budget by $775,000.
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A man named Mark Jontz has just died in a jail cell in Omaha, Nebraska. He was thrown in jail because he could not pay $1,068 in fines and court costs from a traffic ticket.
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THREAD: One of our clients was an 11-year-old Black child taking a shower when DC police burst into her bathroom, pulled back the curtain, and pointed guns at her naked body. Cops said that they found a little marijuana on her dad (who didn't even live there) two weeks before (1)
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THREAD. I noticed something fascinating: around the same time in recent days, each major corporate news source began talking about a new crime hysteria: a supposed crisis of theft from the railroad industry. But if you look deeper, something very scary is happening.
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behind every cop who murders a 13-year-old child, there is a city lawyer working to keep the video secret, a prosecutor lying about it in court, a mayor giving cops more money and weapons, and a professor with a consulting firm deciding which "reform" will make the most money.
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What’s happening this morning in Houston should send chills down the spines of every person in this country. Police in uniform packing government hearing to intimidate witnesses, advocates against police violence, and legislators voting on expanding the police budget.
If this isn't bullying I don't know what is. Every inch of the corridors & the commissioners court room is lined up with LEOs. Easily a 100+ cops in here. Deputy in charge is intentionally packing the room w/uniforms and telling the non-uni officers to stay out of the room.
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Thread. You're going to hear a lot about how cops need more resources because "crime is surging" in the next few months. It's propaganda, and here's how you can respond:
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THREAD: There are 9,000 people caged in the downtown Houston jail, most of them solely because they can't pay cash. The situation is getting dire: "We don't have any running water anymore." (1)
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THREAD. Police are rarely forced to talk about what they actually do. This is a failure of journalism and governance. I've updated my list of questions to ask *any* police chief. Do you know a local reporter or anyone in local government? Here are things they can ask:
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Right on cue for the New York Times. Pay attention in the coming days as corporate news coalesces around a narrative that rising opposition to apartheid and genocide is because of Chinese-owned propaganda and not because of simple exposure to facts.
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The first time I asked for an undocumented client to be unshackled in court to hug his family one last time before being imprisoned and deported, a lawyer from the "Department of Justice" stood up and objected "on behalf of the United States."
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BREAKING NEWS: A federal judge in Nevada has just struck down as unconstitutional the main federal law used to prosecute undocumented immigrants because Congress passed the law with explicitly racist motives.
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Do you remember when Israel posted fake audio and fake video to create confusion about who did one of the bombings of a hospital they had previously threatened to bomb? That was several dozen hospital bombings ago.
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THREAD. Something must be said about today’s irresponsible New York Times article about antisemitism. I can’t believe it was published.
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THREAD: Today the New York Times published what might be its worst police copaganda article yet. It's by the same newly hired reporter who I've written about before. I try my best below to explain what happened and why it is so important.
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THREAD: I have studied crime data and police violence for years. I have come away from this work with the firm belief that police commit many more illegal physical assaults than the number of arrests that they make for serious crime.
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According to FBI crime estimates released today, "violent crime" decreased 1% in 2021 and "property crime" decreased 3.8%. Every media outlet should ask itself if this is the impression it gave with its volume of crime coverage and choices of anecdotes.
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Fun fact: none of the millions of felony crimes committed by unnamed bankers at Well Fargo over more than 10 years will be recorded as crimes by police or reported in the media as part of the property "crime rate." The media won't call where they live a "high crime neighborhood."
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Thread: When working on bail in Alabama, we found a man trapped in jail for cocaine possession because he couldn't pay $500 cash. He had been there for 3 years, and the system had forgotten to give him a lawyer. What happened to him is important. (1)
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THREAD. A new scandal is brewing at the New York Times. I try my best below to document the paper's corporate and police union copaganda, and to share actual evidence and research that the NYT ignores. The stakes are huge.
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Today, the NYT doubled down. They ran another major article on the same increase in murder. This time, they *quote as an expert* the same CIA/Palantir/police/DA person! Again, they do not disclose the conflicts of interest as they parade him as an expert.
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THREAD. Today, the New York Times published one of its most dishonest, biased, and dangerous pro-police articles that I have ever read. What's happening at the NYT is important, so I try my best to explain below why it’s so harmful.
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THREAD. Yesterday's events in Houston should serve as a wake-up call for all people of good will in the United States. We saw a mobilized fascist police force take over a local government meeting considering police funding, intimidating and booing legislators and witnesses.
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The U.S. locks up Black people 6 times the rate of South Africa at the height of Apartheid and all people 5 times the global average.
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First, it was federal agents who tackled and handcuffed frantic parents. (Uvalde cops actually convinced feds to stop brutalizing parents.) According to Wall Street Journal, federal cops are still lying about this.
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THREAD. This weekend, the New York Times published misinformation it knew to be false. Because the stakes are so high, I try my best to explain what the paper did why it is so dangerous.
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Second, I cannot say this clearly enough: the actual historical empirical evidence shows that cops in schools makes kids less safe:
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THREAD. What is shown in the Arkansas police beating video is utterly normal. It's what dozens of my own clients and their families described to me over the years. Everyone who works in the system knows about it.
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This morning I'm thinking about how 99.9% of the U.S. still doesn't know that, after they killed Breonna Taylor, Louisville cops managed to get the City to increase their budget by $750,000 and to cut the public library budget by $775,000.
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I wrote a thread criticizing a few of the most obvious flaws in the article, including the failure to disclose the writer's corporate and police conflicts of interest. Instead of engaging, the reporter just blocked me (after the article .
2 days ago, Alec offered deserved criticism & thoughtful critique of the misleading & unfounded claims published by this reporter. The reporter blocked Alec. The opposite of what a reporter should do. Underscores how some “journalists” intentionally support a pro-carceral agenda.
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For each $1 stolen in shoplifting, there's at least $5 in wage theft and $100 in tax evasion. Have you ever heard about a wage theft or tax evasion "crime wave"? What do you think this tells you about how reporters determine what is "news" and what is ignored, and who benefits?
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Fourth, in the hours and days after the shootings, the entire police PR bureaucracy began spewing lie after lie, as it always does.
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These three paragraphs from an article about the wave of jail deaths sweeping the United States will teach you more about the criminal punishment system than anything I've ever posted.
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For ever dollar stolen in shoplifting, there are at least $5 in wage theft and $100 in tax evasion. Have you ever heard about a wage theft or tax evasion "crime wave"? What do you think this tells you about how journalists determine what is "news" and what is ignored?
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THREAD. I've been studying how the New York Times uses sources. If you look at many of its articles together, something disturbing emerges: NYT relies on police and corporate sources to subtly shape how we see social problems and solutions. I try my best to lay it out below.
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THREAD: I have studied crime data and police violence for years. I have come away from this work with the firm belief that police commit orders of magnitude more illegal physical assaults than the number of arrests that they make for serious crime.
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Third, even *after* the shooter was killed, cops began doing what they do: they shot a grieving parent’s body with electric current.
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Even after 14 years working as a lawyer, it’s still amazing to me that this country decides who is in a cage before trial and who is home with their family by whether they have cash
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Imagine letting a reporter write about these issues and not disclosing this:
By the way, this NYT "reporter" also worked as a cop after the CIA, and is prominently featured in this scandal. How is the NYT publishing him without disclosing this (and his many other) conflicts of interest on police and for-profit police corporations?
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Here is a photo of a person in charge of a prison system in which the parole board just denied parole to someone for sharing a Black newspaper.
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UPDATED THREAD. You're going to hear a lot about how cops need more resources because "crime is surging" in the next few months. It's propaganda, and here's how you can respond:
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Whenever you hear the Los Angeles police quoted in the media, remember that LAPD used the acronym NHI ("No Human Involved") in their reports for years to describe crimes where they believed the victim to be a sex worker, gang member, drug addict, or unhoused person.
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To understand the scope of this problem, you should know that cops take more money from people in civil asset forfeiture than all burglaries combined in the U.S. (9)
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Los Angeles police used the acronym NHI ("No Human Involved") in their reports for years to describe crimes where they believed the victim to be a sex worker, gang member, drug addict, or houseless person. This is the institution "reformers" want to keep giving more money to.
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Fifth, these shootings happen only in the U.S. despite the unprecedented investment by the U.S. in police and military weaponry. It’s science denial to think that violence and harm require more police and not addressing root causes like inequality:
UPDATED THREAD: In 2021, we heard a lot about how police and prisons need more cash because "crime is surging." It's copaganda. I’ve made a new thread of threads with resources to help understand the issue and respond.
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THREAD. A quiet scandal is happening in D.C. Biden has nominated three brutal prosecutors as judges for local D.C. courts, including the *same prosecutor* Trump tried (and failed) to nominate to the highest court in D.C. If Congress allows this, it's a disaster for people in D.C.
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THREAD. Many progressives are not paying enough attention to what is happening with Cop City in Atlanta. The level of state violence against local people organizing to protect an essential forest from becoming a training center for militarized cops is escalating.
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You wouldn't know it from the media "narrative," but in Los Angeles there was a candidate for City Controller who had billboards across the city about the outrageous, wasteful police budget and huge mobilization among young people. He trounced the pro-police opponent.
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Imagine being a reporter at the most influential, prestigious news org in the U.S. and writing a major story at a time of rising fascism and just repeating police and corporate talking points about needing more punishment without seeking a single other perspective. Incredible.
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A company just spewed so much chemical fertilizer into a river in Iowa and Missouri that it killed almost 800,000 fish over 60 miles. Have you heard about it? Have you heard the news talking about it as a crime or public safety issue?
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When the history of how fascists came to power in the United States is written, it will be particularly unkind to the liberal academics, journalists, and politicians who fear-mongered about "crime" by the poor and pushed surveillance and state violence as the solution.
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If I had to pick one thing journalists miss in police reporting, it's that cops have tried to surveil, infiltrate, and violently crush every major social, economic, labor, environmental, and racial justice movement since 1900. It's what they spent their budgets on in every city.
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Years of rigorous evidence and social science research show that reducing cash bail dramatically reduces crime for years to come. Here's one recent example of bail reforms from the very period NYT discusses without increase in even short-term crime.
This is HUGE GOOD news: The data is in from Texas, and our
@CivRightsCorps
federal court victory striking down the money bail system has released tens of thousands of people from cages, saved millions of dollars, and made the community safer. Look at these numbers:
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whenever politicians talk about expensive "police reform" training, i think about how happy the cops are in this picture of a quilt the Mobile, Alabama police department made from the signs of poor people they arrested for begging. look at those smiles.
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THREAD: A federal court just affirmed a *9 year* prison sentence for a blind man in Los Angeles for failing to inform authorities supervising him "within five working days" that he had become homeless. (1)
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one of the most revealing but under-reported things that happened in 2020 was that after police murdered breonna taylor, louisville increased the police budget by $750,000 and cut funding to public libraries by $775,000.
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One of the open secrets everyone in the legal system knows but that media does not treat with nightly urgency: the scope of white collar crime in the U.S. is breathtaking, and it’s almost entirely ignored by cops and prosecutors.
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THREAD. We seeing an organized McCarthyist campaign unlike any in decades.
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We sued D.C. police over this case a few years ago and won, but I immediately thought about this story when I saw that Democrats in Congress want to spend billions to arm 100,000 more cops and to give cops more surveillance tech and weapons.
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This is an important moment and point that the corporate media will ignore. When voters are presented with an earnest, highly competent, fun, funny, and transparent campaign about the waste, fraud, and abuse in police budgets, they overwhelmingly respond.
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Los Angeles police used the acronym NHI ("No Human Involved") in their reports for years to describe crimes where they believed the victim to be a sex worker, gang member, drug addict, or houseless person. This is what police have always been.
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THREAD. One of the greatest crime waves in modern New York history is happening right now. You probably haven’t heard about it because police aren’t seriously investigating it and few journalists are covering it. The conspiracy reaches the highest levels of the NYC government.
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THREAD. This email sent by the President of Harvard to all of its alumni is an incredible document. It reveals several of the profound pathological problems of our society and its elite institutions.
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But the article by
@NeilMacFarquhar
gets worse. It cites a parade of police and paid police consultants to opine on the causes (all ---> more $$ for cops). This media practice has to stop: police officials and people who get paid by police are not the only "experts" on policing.
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THREAD. An incredible story is unfolding at Harvard. Private police employed by Harvard University just raided the undergraduate dorm room of four Black students, detaining them at gunpoint based on a hoax phone call. The horrific story has some unbelievable ironies.
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THREAD: While investigating a jail, I met a Black teenager who was taken from the street by armed government agents, put in metal chains, and kept in a cage b/c he couldn’t pay a ticket a cop gave him for “sagging his pants.” This is what's “normal” in the “justice system.” (1)
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THREAD. Sometimes the bias of the New York Times is so outrageous that it surprises even me. Because what the NYT did yesterday in its election coverage is so dangerous, I try my best to analyze it carefully below.
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What Democrats did today is shameful. They negotiated a massive federal spending bill in secret and did not give anyone time to read the 4,000 pages. A small group of them inserted, behind closed doors and without public debate, big increases in cops, prisons, and surveillance.
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Most people have absolutely no idea what the police bureaucracy actually does. Cops commit millions of physical and sexual assaults every year and only spend 4% of their time on what cops themselves call violent crime.
THREAD: I have studied crime data and police violence for years. I have come away from this work with the firm belief that police commit orders of magnitude more illegal physical assaults than the number of arrests that they make for serious crime.
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This is a VERY good time to remember that police always want to talk about a few bad apples to distract you from the most important question:
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I want to say this clearly: if Democrats try to be a "law and order" party, they will lose. Fascists will always do "law and order" better. The only path to Democrats getting power is to be the party that addresses the root causes of violence by giving people what they need.
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In coming months, you will hear a lot from the news media about how "fear of rising crime" means Democrats need to boost police and prisons. This is like saying fear of climate change means people must donate to Exxon.
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About once a week, I think of this photo of two Alabama cops making a quilt for their precinct from the signs stolen from homeless people they had arrested for begging. Neither was fired, both were later commended, and one of them was named "officer of the month." The smiles...
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A bone-chilling development in Atlanta just now: heavily militarized police just arrested bail support and legal defense workers who are providing charitable support to protestors arrested for opposing CopCity in Atlanta. Police are calling "financial crimes."
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If a witness had run over and tackled the cop just in time to save George Floyd's life, the witness would be in prison, George Floyd would have been caged, and the local media would have written about a "surge" in assaults on police.
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It's incredible that the Biden administration--and most news outlets--are not pointing out that huge amounts of federal cash, surveillance, and weapons are flowing right now to police departments that are enforcing abortion bans. Biden and DOJ could stop it tomorrow.
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I wrote about how two Harvard professors accused me of trying to "censor" them when I showed their proposal to add 500,000 cops to arrest 7.8 million more people was riddled with dishonest errors. Then it got weirder. Students sent me the final exam question from Prof. Lewis.
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