Copaganda

Not too long ago, I finished reading Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our Media by Alec Karakatsanis. I saw Alec discuss the book at Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis, and got a signed copy.

It's a short, intense read. I've followed him on social media for a while, so there was a lot that was familiar. Here are some of the things I knew somewhat, or maybe not enough:

• The U.S. confines people at six times "its own historical averages" and five to 10 times the rate of comparable countries. We confine Black people six times as much as South Africa did during Apartheid (p. 6).
• Our incarceration rate decreases U.S. life expectancy rates by two years.
• Copaganda, he says, operates by narrowing the threat and manufacturing a vague state of fear of the other. Narrowing the threat includes this: Police commit 1/3 of stranger homicides, but you don't hear that. Another example: "...federal prosecutors charged 23 people with environmental offenses in 2020, and they charged more than than 23,000 people with drug offenses" p. 20. Wage theft: The total estimated is more "than all other police-reported property crime combined." Tax evasion: 1,672 times the "value of all U.S. robberies combined." The threat of "crime" as reported is small compared to these other things, but we almost never hear about them.
• Daily street crime is always seen as "new" news, but information about prison conditions or bail reform are seen as occasional "reform" stories.
• Selective crime coverage is ramped up before elections (with charts to demonstrate the rate of coverage increasing, while the number of crimes stayed flat) (pp. 27, 28). Or after Eric Adams was elected mayor in New York City, when he wanted coverage of crime. "Public safety 'news' surges when someone wants police-reported crime to be news" (p. 30). 
• He quotes Jacques Ellul on the nature of propaganda: "the curation of true anecdotes leads to false impressions" (p. 53). That phrase, "curation of true anecdotes" will come up again.
  
• The use of moral panics... terms like mugging (which is just a form of robbery) and car jacking were created as part of moral panics. "Professional-class news consumers regularly accuse any skeptic of the moral panic du jour of being an 'elitist' who is 'out of touch' with the most marginalized communities" (p. 56).
• I was shocked, I admit, at the size and growth of the big-city public relations staffs he cites. Chicago PD's PR staff in 2014 was just six (at the time when a cop killed Laquan McDonald). During the time CPD fought to keep the video of his killing out of court, etc., the number increased to 25. By 2023: 48. 2024: 55. In 2020, the LA County Sheriffs had 42 and LAPD had 25, "Some of them made more than $200,000 a year." In 2024, NYPD had 86, twice what it had in 2022. None of these staff numbers include additional consultants, let alone money spent on police swag or events. They use all these resources to create ready-for-TV content that is used to fill air time. It made me wonder how large the PR staffs are for Minneapolis and Saint Paul's departments.

Cash bail
The short section of the book on cash bail and bail reform was a particularly concentrated bit of outrage, and the main reason I wanted to write the book up here.

When you live in the U.S., it just seems normal that people have to "make bail" and that there are bail bondsmen. But this is not normal just about anywhere else in the world, and it wasn't normal in the U.S. until the past 40 years. People are innocent until proven guilty and the fact that those charged with minor crimes, especially, are held because they can't post bail is highly unusual.

In his career, Karakatsanis has been working to change this. Keeping people in jail, pre-trial, is bad for overall safety, but judges are afraid to be the ones to let people out, in case one of theirs is a defendant who does something bad and they (the judge) gets blamed. No one blames them for the people who die or are injured or raped in jail while being detained without bail, though: which is a much more likely outcome.

... if a judge releases a thousand people and they keep their jobs such that their children don't become homeless, no one will tell the public about it on the nightly news. Bad curation of anecdote leads to bad policy (p. 177).

As there was increasing clamor to end cash bail, especially for misdemeanors — after the death of Kalief Browder — Karakatsanis says there was strong pushback from police, prosecutors, and the bail industry. Why? Because prosecutors need detention to coerce guilt please quickly, and the bail industry makes money (obviously).

In Harris County, Texas (Houston), Karakatsanis's organization won a 2017 case that ended cash bail for minor offenses. Convictions (almost all from guilty pleas) dropped by 24,000 per year because "if forced to prove them, police and prosecutors can't" (p. 177). He cites a study on the years of Harris County's experience that found "the decreased number of people jailed resulted in more public safety and huge economic benefits" (p. 177), and that the same was found after similar changes in Los Angeles.

I just have to quote most of the next page:

These are among the most important facts you will ever need if you want to understand the punishment bureaucracy: the U.S. arrests so many people for so many low-level things that it could never provide adequate defense lawyers, investigation services, prosecutors, judges, or jury trials for them all even though the Constitution requires it. The Constitution wasn't designed for mass incarceration. If all people could exercise their constitutional right to a fair trial and a zealous lawyer, the assembly line would grind to a halt....

The crushing volume of cases is what the for-profit bail industry exploits. The industry didn't exist when the Constitution was drafted or in the century that followed it, and before the 1990s, release without requiring cash was more common than release requiring cash. But as court dockets became overwhelming, cash became an efficient point of leverage for bureaucrats to coerce more people to plead guilty quickly. Most of people are released with time served if they plead guilty, and are almost always charged fines and fees that police, prosecutors, and courts then collect as revenue. Thus, the system profits from its own injustice, and tens of millions of poor people are trapped in a cycle of debt collection and jailing for years.

Even on its own terms, this system has nothing to do with "safety" because most people are released immediately if they either pay money, which they don't lose even if they commit a crime, or if they agree to plead guilty and accrue debt. They are typically put on probation for additional fees, and many have their driver's license suspended for unpaid fees, incurring yet more fees. As of this writing, the licenses of 11 million people are suspended solely because of these coerced debts....

Every court to look at the evidence has made an additional empirical finding: ...cash bail does nothing to protect the community or encourage court appearance. In fact, it makes people more likely to commit crime in the future because short periods of detention destabilize people's lives—they lose shelter, jobs, and kids (p. 178–179).

He lists more things that people lose because of jailing without bail, but those three are enough to give you an idea.

When bail reform has been attempted in some places, that "curation of anecdotes" in media he describes has been furious. In New York, for instance, a 2019 reform to release people with misdemeanors was followed by waves of media cherry-picking, which led to the reform being rolled back within a few months in spring 2020.

Another example of media cherry-picking involves the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a bail fund created in Minneapolis in 2016 that saw its profile go national after the murder of George Floyd, when the Fund bailed out people arrested during protests. The Fund was heavily assailed because two of the many people they assisted went on to commit a violent crime (which the offenders had no record of when the Fund bailed them out). The Fund has since stopped providing cash bail and switched its focus to policy work to end cash bail entirely.

As Karakatsanis says, there is no consideration of the counterfactual: what about all of the people who were bailed out, or who were released without bail in New York City (or Houston, Los Angeles) and didn't lose their job, or whose families didn't end up homeless. They don't matter.

Only the few examples where a "newsworthy" crime was committed got notice.

Alec Karakatsanis signing books at Moon Palace in Minneapolis.