[News] Police Departments Spend Vast Sums of Money Creating “Copaganda”

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 Police Departments Spend Vast Sums of Money Creating “Copaganda”
<https://www.blackagendareport.com/police-departments-spend-vast-sums-money-creating-copaganda>

<https://www.blackagendareport.com/police-departments-spend-vast-sums-money-creating-copaganda>
Alec Karakatsanis <https://www.blackagendareport.com/author/Alec
Karakatsanis> - 27 Jul 2022
[image: Police Departments Spend Vast Sums of Money Creating “Copaganda”]
<https://www.blackagendareport.com/sites/default/files/2022-07/copaganda.jpg>
AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File

*US police departments spend tens of millions of dollars every year to
manipulate the news, flooding the discourse with “copaganda.” These
aggressive tactics give the public a distorted view of what public safety
means, what threatens it, and how to solve it.*

*This article was originally published in the Economic Hardship Reporting
Project
<https://economichardship.org/2022/07/police-departments-spend-vast-sums-of-money-creating-copaganda/>.*

In May of this year, I testified at a hearing
<https://missionlocal.org/2022/05/supervisors-question-sfpd-on-partiality-of-press-communications/>
in
San Francisco where city leaders questioned the police department’s funding
and use of public relations professionals. That funding was heavier than
you might expect.

According to police department documents provided to the County Board of
Supervisors, budget items included a nine-person full-time team managed by
a director of strategic communications who alone costs the city $289,423;
an undisclosed number of cops paid part-time to do PR work on social media;
a Community Engagement Unit tracking public opinion; officers who intervene
with the families of victims of police violence and who are dispatched to
the scenes of police violence to control initial media reaction; and a
full-time videographer making PR videos about cops.

San Francisco is not unique. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has forty-two
employees doing PR work
<https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-30/police-public-relations>
in
what it calls, in Orwellian fashion, its “Information Bureau.” The Los
Angeles Police Department has *another *twenty-five employees devoted to
formal PR work
<https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-30/police-public-relations>
.

Why do police invest so much in manipulating our perceptions of what they
do? I call this phenomenon “copaganda
<https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1476221720621166601>”: creating a
gap between what police actually do and what people think they do.

Copaganda does three main things. First, it narrows our understanding of
safety. Police get us to focus on crimes committed by the poorest, most
vulnerable people in our society and not on bigger threats to our safety
caused by people with wealth and power
<https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-punishment-bureaucracy#_ftnref14>.

For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime
combined — from burglaries, to retail theft, to robberies — costing some $50
billion <https://perma.cc/88YU-PDN7> every year. Tax evasion steals about
$1 trillion each year
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-13/tax-cheats-are-costing-u-s-1-trillion-a-year-irs-estimates>.
There are hundreds of thousands
<https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-punishment-bureaucracy#_ftnref222> of
Clean Water Act violations each year, causing
<https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/13water.html> cancer, kidney
failure, rotting teeth, and damage to the nervous system. Over 100,000
people in the United States die every year
<https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-04-08/100-000-americans-die-from-air-pollution-study-finds>
from
air pollution, *five times* the number of all homicides.

But through the stories cops feed reporters, the public is encouraged to
measure a city’s safety by whether it saw an annual increase
<https://twitter.com/petercalloway/status/1510032517876764674> or decrease
of three homicides or fourteen robberies — rather than by how many people
died from lack of access to health care, how many children suffered lead
poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by illegal eviction or
foreclosure, or how many thousands of illegal assaults
<https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2014/07/22/newark_findings_7-22-14.pdf>
police
committed.

The second function of copaganda is to manufacture crises or “crime
surges.” For example, if you watch the news, you’ve probably been bombarded
with stories about the rise of retail theft. Yet the actual data shows
<https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/shoplifting-holiday-theft-panic/621108/?utm_source=feed>
there
has been no significant increase. Instead, corporate retailers, police, and
PR firms fabricated talking points and fed them to the media
<https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1470089954428551173>. The same is
true of what the FBI categorizes as “violent crime.” All told, major “index
crimes” tracked by the FBI are at nearly forty-year lows
<https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-convinced-crime-is-rising-in-the-u-s-theyre-wrong/>
.

The third and most pernicious function of copaganda is to manipulate our
understanding of what solutions actually work to make us safer. A primary
goal of copaganda is to convince the public to spend even more money on
police and prisons. If safety is defined by street crime, and street crime
is dangerously high, then funding the carceral state leaps out to many
people as a natural solution.

The budgets of modern police departments are staggeringly high and ever
increasing
<https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-city-budget-police-funding/?sref=vxSzVDP0>,
with no parallel in history
<https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/criminal-justice-police-corrections-courts-expenditures>,
producing incarceration rates unseen around
<https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2021.html> the world. Police and their
right-wing
<https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21290981/police-union-contracts-minneapolis-reform>
unions
(which have their own PR budgets) want bigger budgets
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/03/how-police-unions-fight-reform>,
more military-grade gear
<https://inthesetimes.com/article/fop-police-unions-military-gear-donald-trump-1099>,
more surveillance technology, and more overtime cash. Multibillion-dollar
businesses have privatized nearly every element of these bureaucracies for
profit, from the tasers and AI software sold to cops to the snacks sold at
huge markups to supplement inadequate jail food. To obtain this level of
spending, they need us to think that police and prisons make us safer.

The evidence shows otherwise. If police and prisons made us safe, we would
have the safest society in world history — but the opposite
<https://www.vera.org/publications/for-the-record-prison-paradox-incarceration-not-safer>
is
true. There is no link
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/07/over-past-60-years-more-spending-police-hasnt-necessarily-meant-less-crime/>
 between more cops
<https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/why-crime-isnt-the-question-and-police-arent-the-answer>
and
decreased crime, even of the type that the police report. Instead,
addressing
<https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/why-crime-isnt-the-question-and-police-arent-the-answer>
the
root causes of interpersonal harm like safe housing, health care,
treatment, nutrition, pollution, and early-childhood education is the most
effective way
<https://civilrightscorps.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Getting-Smart-On-Safety.pdf>
to
enhance public safety. And addressing root causes of violence also prevents
the other harms that flow from inequality, including millions of avoidable
deaths.

The insistence that increased policing is the key to public safety is like
climate science denial. Just like the oil companies, the police are running
an expensive operation of mass communication to convince people of things
that aren’t true. Thus, we are left with a great irony: even if what you
most care about are the types of crimes reported by police, those crimes
would be better reduced by making our society more equal than by spending
on police and prisons.

Powerful actors in policing and media both manufacture crime waves
<https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-punishment-bureaucracy> and
respond to them in ways that increase inequality and consolidate social
control, even as they do little to actually stop crime. Copaganda not only
diverts people from existential threats like imminent ecological collapse
and rising fascism, but also boosts surveillance and repression that is
used against social movements
<https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1528740868550807552> trying to
solve those problems by creating more sustainable and equal social
arrangements.

Hearings like the one I testified at in San Francisco are needed across the
country. Local councilmembers should scrutinize the secretive world of
police PR budgets, because the public deserves to know how police are
spreading misinformation. It is possible to achieve real safety in our
communities, but only if we end the copaganda standing in its way.

*Alec Karakatsanis is a civil rights lawyer and the founder of Civil Rights
Corps. He is also the author of the book Usual Cruelty and a weekly
newsletter called Alec's Copaganda Newsletter.*
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