08-05-2025
How to Sniff Out ‘Copaganda': When the Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
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I wrote the book Copaganda based on my years of being a civil rights lawyer and public defender representing the most vulnerable people in our society. I watched as the police and the news media distorted how we think about our collective safety. Copaganda makes us afraid of the most powerless people, helps us ignore far greater harms committed by people with money and power, and always pushes on us the idea that our fears can be solved by more money for police, prosecution, and prisons. Based on the evidence, this idea of more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer is like climate science denial.
This excerpt is adapted from an important part of the book on how by selectively choosing which stories to tell, and then telling those stories in high volume, the news can induce people into fear-based panics that have no connection to what is happening in the world. It's how public polling can show people thinking crime is up when it is down year after year, and how so many well-meaning people are led to falsely believe that marginalized people themselves want more money on surveillance and punishment as the primary solutions to make their lives better.
All royalties from the book are donated to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which works with unhoused people against police violence. Free books are also available for anyone in prison and for any teachers who want to get copies for their students to discuss the book in class.
By manipulating the volume of stories at particular times, the news media creates a society-wide frenzy concerning particular kinds of behavior by particular groups of people. Scholars call them 'moral panics.'
When a moral panic is created, it almost always leads to the expansion of government repression. That's what happened during the 'crime waves' reported by the press in Victorian England, and in more recent U.S. moral panics like the 1980s panic about 'crack babies,' the 1990s panic about 'super predators,' the 2021–23 panic about 'retail theft,' and the ongoing multiyear panic about 'fare evasion' by poor people on public transit. Moral panics can also be acute creations of a particular news moment, such as the fabricated 'Summer of Violence' in Denver, in which violent crime went down but increase in media stories about juvenile crime in 1993 led to expansion in the incarceration of children; the viral 'train theft' story; the scientifically debunked panic about police officers overdosing on fentanyl by touching or being near it; and the 2023 panic about 'carjacking' in Washington, DC.
In each case, there were almost immediate policy responses that increased the budgets of punishment bureaucrats, passed more punitive laws, and diverted the system's resources from other priorities. For example, the shoplifting panic led California state lawmakers to furnish $300 million more to police and prosecutors so they could punish retail theft more aggressively. A few months later, the California governor announced yet another measure, the 'largest-ever single investment to combat organized retail theft,' adding another $267 million to fifty-five police agencies. Justifying the move, the governor said: 'When shameless criminals walk out of stores with stolen goods, they'll walk straight into jail cells.'
So, how do moral panics happen?
During the 1960s and 1970s in England and the U.S., the news focused on Black people, poor people, and immigrants as the source of uncontrollable 'crime waves.' Their stories were nearly identical to what we see today: media panic about 'crime waves' and quotes from police, prosecutors, and judges about the need to roll back so-called reforms framed as too lenient. The rhetoric of current punishment bureaucrats and pundits echoes almost verbatim the opinions voiced by conservative white business and police groups of the 1970s, although now there is more of an effort, as I'll discuss later, to portray such views as 'progressive' and demanded by marginalized people themselves. In each case, minor tweaks in bureaucratic policy or marginal reforms that could not, as a matter of empirical reality, have a significant impact on society-wide violence are vehemently debated. The evidence of the root causes of interpersonal harm—like that marshaled by the Kerner Commission, which studied U.S. crime in 1968 and recommended massive social investment to reduce inequality—is ignored.
And the cycle continues: moral panic is followed by calls for more police surveillance, militarization, higher budgets for prosecutors and prisons, and harsher sentencing. Because none of these things affect violence too much, the problems continue.
The selective curation of anecdote is an essential mechanism of copaganda. Imagine two scenarios. A city had ten thousand shoplifting incidents in 2023, down from fifteen thousand shoplifting incidents in 2022. But in 2023, a local news outlet ran a story every day about a different shoplifting incident, while in 2022, the news ran only fifteen stories all year on shoplifting incidents. In which city do you think the public is more likely to believe shoplifting is a greater problem, even a crisis? In the city with more shoplifting, or the city with twenty-five times more stories about shoplifting?
By cherry-picking anecdotes—indeed, even by using isolated individual pieces of data as misleading anecdotes—news reports can distort our interpretation of the world. Using a similar process, they can also distort our understanding of what other people—particularly people with whom we don't interact—think about the world. Because one can find anyone to say essentially anything, reporters have leeway to select which 'true' views of 'ordinary people' to share and which to ignore.
One of my favorite examples comes from Copaganda Hall of Famer Martin Kaste, who for some reason National Public Radio still permits to cover the police. (I awarded Kaste this honor in absentia during a private ceremony attended by two cats and my research assistants in my basement.) In 2022, Kaste published an article and widely disseminated radio piece about a rise in shootings and murders during the pandemic. Murders were down nationally in 2022 when he published the stories but they had increased in 2020 and 2021. As with much of Kaste's police reporting, the article is a buffet for the copaganda gourmand.
Under the bolded heading 'Less Risk of Getting Caught,' Kaste asserts that there is now 'less risk of getting caught' for shooting someone in the United States. The support for that assertion was an ordinary person in Seattle:
Anthony Branch, 26, got into trouble for carrying a gun when he was a teen. Watching the gun culture in his neighborhood, he thinks more minors and felons are carrying guns illegally now for one simple reason: 'Defund the police,' as he puts it.
Kaste reports as national news—without context or skepticism—a single person blaming 'defund the police' for more shootings. Without presenting any contrary views, NPR delivers Branch's views, accurately conveyed though they may be, as implicitly representative of other people who've been prosecuted and incarcerated and who live in poor neighborhoods.
In fact, police budgets were (and are) at all-time highs nationally. And a review of hundreds of police budgets showed that they received the same share of overall city budgets in 2021 as in 2019. So, the police were not defunded after the 2020 George Floyd protests. Their budgets have increased overall each year, including the year George Floyd was murdered. Thus, reduced police budgets could not have led to it being easier to get away with shooting someone in 2021 than 2019. The article's thesis is impossible.
Knowing this national causal connection is unsupported, Kaste nonetheless boosts the claim by immediately noting that Seattle has 'lost hundreds of officers after the protests that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd.' But even in Seattle, which was an outlier in slightly reducing its police budget by about 10 percent, the reduction didn't affect relevant police operations, and police executives themselves in internal memos identified non-essential duties that armed officers could cut without affecting enforcement of violent crime (such as parking meter ticketing). Indeed, as the local NPR station reported, debunking the 'myth' that Seattle police were defunded, 'not a single sworn officer has lost their job or pay due to budget constraints.'
Even if we ignore that the NPR piece purported to draw national lessons and if we focus only on Seattle, there is no evidence that the kind of small reduction to unrelated categories in Seattle's police budget in 2021 could have led to widespread changes in murder. Most damning to Kaste's thesis, though, is that murders decreased in Seattle in 2021 even though the police budget decreased, which undermines the article's thesis. Indeed, the police budget was larger in 2020 when murder increased the most. No person with a contrary view is quoted, nor is anyone included to explain the actual empirical evidence.
I do not doubt that the source gave these quotes to the reporter, but by selectively choosing which people's views to represent and which people's views to exclude, the news can distort our perceptions. This is one of the pernicious functions of NPR here: to give liberal news consumers intellectual permission to support more funding for more police because, although it is baselessly connected to less murder, even marginalized people targeted by police supposedly want it.
This is how the curation of true anecdotes leads to false interpretations of the world.
Copyright © 2025 by Alec Karakatsanis. This excerpt originally appeared in Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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