The Three Functions of Copaganda

Yesterday I published a short essay in Jacobin explaining what copaganda is at its most basic level. My essay was inspired by testimony I gave as an expert at a Board of Supervisors hearing in San Francisco a few months ago:

Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

THREAD. A rare thing is happening today: we are about to get a window into the secret world of how cops shape the news. There's a hearing this afternoon into how San Francisco cops manipulate the media through “strategic communications.” The internal documents are shocking.

Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

The Director of the propaganda unit at the San Francisco Police Department costs taxpayers $289,423.

Local officials in San Francisco were investigating how much money and time San Francisco police spend trying to manipulate public opinion. Even local elected officials are up against a sophisticated PR machine and an entrenched culture of police secrecy about their own surveillance and propaganda efforts. Ultimately, after my testimony, the Mayor replaced an outgoing elected member of the Board of Supervisors with the very same unelected head of the police propaganda unit who was the subject of my testimony.

But in the process of testifying in San Francisco and writing the essay published in Jacobin, I realized it was important to lay out what I see as the main functions of copaganda. Here’s what I wrote in the essay about the three biggest roles copaganda plays:

(1) Copaganda narrows our understanding of safety.

Police want 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 power. For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined — from burglaries, to retail theft, to robberies — costing an estimated $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. That’s over 60 times all the wealth lost in all FBI reported property crime combined in the entire U.S. There are hundreds of thousands of Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, and damage to the nervous system. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year 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 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, how many people couldn’t pay utility bills because of fraudulent overdraft fees, or how many thousands of illegal assaults police committed.

(2) The second function of copaganda is to manufacture crises around these narrow categories of crime. 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 there has been no significant increase. Instead, corporate retailers, police, and PR firms fabricated talking points and fed them to the media. 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, despite constant media attention paid to “crime surges” and “crime waves.”

(3) 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. Although such a view is like climate science denial, the core goal of copaganda is to link safety and crime to things that police, prosecutors, and prisons do.

If police and prisons made us safe, we would have the safest society in world history — but the opposite is true. There is no link between more cops and decreased crime, even of the type that the police report. Instead, addressing the root causes of interpersonal harm like safe housing, health care, treatment, nutrition, pollution, and early-childhood education is the most effective way to enhance public safety. And addressing root causes of violence also prevents the other harms that flow from inequality, including millions of avoidable deaths.

Powerful actors in policing and media thus define crime, manufacture crime waves, and then 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 trying to solve those problems by creating more sustainable and equal social arrangements.