Copaganda Distorts Our Treatment of Crime

The following is from the introduction to Alec Karakatsanis' book Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. He call propaganda about the "punishment bureaucracy" (the American "justice" system) "copaganda," and spends considerable time documenting his experience as an attorney encountering its distortions of reality. The bracketed numbers are his footnotes. Book excerpt: 

So, how does copaganda work? It has three main roles. 

Job #1: Narrowing Our Understanding of Threat 

The first job of copaganda is to narrow our conception of threat. Rather than the bigger threats to our safety caused by people with power, we narrow our conception to crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society. For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined--such as burglaries, retail theft, and robberies--costing an estimated $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. That's over sixty times the wealth lost in all police-reported property crime. There are hundreds of thousands of known Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, damage to the nervous system, and death. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, about five times the number of homicides. At the same time most sexual assaults, domestic violence crimes, and sex offenses against children go unreported, unrecorded, and ignored by the legal system. [20] 

Punishment bureaucrats feed reporters stories that measure "safety' as any short-term increase or decrease in, say, official homicide or rob­bery rates, rather than by how many people died from lack of health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by eviction or foreclosure, how many people couldn't pay utility bills because of various white-collar crimes, how many thousands of illegal assaults police and jail guards committed, and so on. Sometimes the rates of various crimes go up and down, and we should all be concerned about any form of violence against any human being. But the first job of copaganda is getting us focused almost exclusively on a narrow range of the threats we face, mostly the officially-­recorded crimes of poor people, rather than the large-scale devastation wrought by people with power and money. 

Job #2: Manufacturing Fear 

The second job of copaganda is to manufacture crises and panics about this narrow category of threats. After the 2020 George Floyd [killed by police] uprisings, for example, the news bombarded the public with a series of "crime waves" concerning various forms of crime committed by the poor even though government data showed that, despite some categories of police-reported crime rising and others falling at the beginning of the pandemic, overall property and violent crime continued to be at near historic fifty-year lows the entire time. [21] As a result of continual news­-generated panics, nearly every year of this century, public opinion polls showed people believing that police-reported crime was rising, even when it was generally falling. [22] 

Copaganda leaves the public in a vague state of fear. It manufactures suspicion against poor people, immigrants, and racial minorities rather than, say, bankers, pharmaceutical executives, fraternity brothers, landlords, employers, and polluters. Copaganda also engenders fear of strangers while obscuring the oppressive forces that lead to interpersonal violence between acquaintances, friends, and family members. (Police themselves commit one-third of all stranger-homicides in the U.S., but these figures are generally excluded from reported crime rates.)[23] This matters because when people are in a perpetual state of fear for their physical safety, they are more likely to support the punishment bureaucracy and authoritarian reactions against those they fear. 

Job #3: Promoting Punishment as the Solution 

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 things the punishment bureaucracy does, while downplaying the connection between safety and the material, structural conditions of people's lives. So, for example, a rise in homeless people sleeping in the street might be framed as an economic problem requiring more affordable housing, but copaganda frames it as "disorder" solvable with more arrests for trespassing. Instead of linking sexual assault to toxic masculinity or a lack of resources and vibrant social connections to escape high-risk situations, copaganda links it to an under-resourced punishment system. Like a media-induced Stockholm syndrome, copaganda sells us the illusion that the violent abuser is somehow the liberator, the protector, our best and only option. 

If police, prosecutions, and prisons made us safe, we would be living in the safest society in world history. But, ... greater in­vestment in the punishment bureaucracy actually increases a number of social harms, including physical violence, sexual harm, disease, trauma, drug abuse, mental illness, isolation, and even, in the long term, police­-recorded crime. [24] Instead, overwhelming evidence supports addressing the controllable things that determine the levels of interpersonal harm in our society, including: poverty; lack of affordable housing; inadequate healthcare and mental wellness resources; nutrition; access to recreation and exercise; pollution; human and social connection; design of cities, buildings, and physical environments; and early-childhood education. [25] 

Addressing root causes like these would lower police-reported crime and also prevent the other harms that flow from inequality that never make it into the legal system for punishment, including millions of avoidable deaths and unnecessary suffering that exceed the narrow category of harm that police record as "crime." ...and we hardly see anything else, we become different people. It is the ubiquity of copaganda that requires us to set up daily practices of individual and collective vigilance. 

The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities. It also promotes the surveillance and repression of social movements that are trying to solve those root structural problems by fighting for a more equal and sustainable society. [26] 

Copaganda thus contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying. ... ask yourself: what kind of public is created by consuming such news? If we see one of these articles once, we may not notice anything odd, or we may shake our heads at how silly, uninformed, and nefarious it is. But if we see thousands of them over the course of years...
 
This book focuses on copaganda in the news. I'm not going to ana­lyze other common types of copaganda, including fictional copaganda in television, movies, and music. Cultural copaganda is all around us­from 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.[27] Shows like COPS and Law & Order have done a lot to distort society's un­derstanding of what the punishment bureaucracy does.