“Police leaders do not want to talk about the everyday brutality of the punishment bureaucracy. Condemning [Derek] Chauvin as a ‘bad apple’ is a safer tactic. But it is not ‘bad apple’ police officers who make 10.6 million arrests every year and who, since 1980, have helped quintuple the rate of incarceration in the U.S. from its historical average. It is not ‘bad apple’ police offers who purchase tanks and grenade launchers for themselves or who enforce cash bail. It is not ‘bad apple’ officers who criminalize people in poverty for not having places to live or treatment for an addiction. And it is not ‘bad apple’ officers who have made the local jail the largest mental health services institution in almost every major city. This destruction is what ‘good cops’ do in the modern U.S.”
Most of us are familiar with the term copaganda, a portmanteau of cop and propaganda, as it manifests in popular culture–movies and TV shows particularly. Alec Karakatsanis’ Copaganda: How Police and Media Manipulate Our News is a systemic dissection of the ways that the mainstream news media is complicit with the criminal justice system, which Karakatsanis more accurately terms the punishment bureaucracy, to foster in American citizens the oft-debunked belief that not only are policing, strict laws, mass incarceration, and cash bail systems needed to keep people safe–an alternative that dismantles racist, classist, ableist and sexist systems is unimaginable in portrayals by NYT, WP, etc.
Throughout the book, Karakatsanis debunks so many myths that fuel the copaganda media machine. He examines the volume of news, the sources cited, the language used, and the tropes repeated systematically to illustrate the many, many tentacles that help to create the mentality that punishment is the only way to treat what the powers that be have decided are punishable crimes. He notes several times that crime stories in the news rarely focus on illegal air pollution, corporate wage theft, and other rarely punished crimes that threaten far more people than the lurid incidents that are positioned to draw eyeballs. He cites a lot of sources and includes many references to support his analysis. But reading this book is anything but a slog: Karakatsanis draws on his personal experience as a civil rights lawyer to infuse his analysis with passion. It’s also quite funny! Karakatsanis shows his disdain for the copaganda-complicit by awarding them prizes for their shamelessness and ignominy: “The paper thereby won the first-ever Copaganda Harry Houdini Award for disappearing the concept of affordable housing from an article about homelessness.” He acerbically discusses a hypothetical situation involving an NYC mayor named “Badams.” The final chapter of his book extensively details ways to resist copaganda. Among many concrete suggestions, he advises to “Build a network of information sources you trust by seeing who other people you think highly of are following or citing; by reading the bibliographies of books you like; and getting recommendations from people whose critical thinking you admire (such as, importantly, people who like cats).”
As soon as I finished this book, I immediately ordered a copy through the publisher, the Free Press. I highly recommend doing so, as I am not sure how long this book will be available in a country where the punishment bureaucracy continues to spread its tentacles.