citationsneededpodcast

Episode 208: How US Media Repackages Pro-Police Policies as "Reform"

Added 2024-09-25 14:13:51 +0000 UTC

Welcome to Season 8 of Citations Needed. Thank you so much for supporting the show.

“Citizens to Aid Police in New Program,” reported the Los Angeles Times in 1975. “Community Policing: Law Enforcement Returns to Its Roots,” declared the Chicago Tribune in 1994. “Obama Calls for Changes in Policing After Task Force Report,” announced The New York Times in 2015.

Periodically, US officials propose some type of police “reform,” usually after a period of widespread protest against ongoing racist police violence. Police, we’re told, will improve their own performance and relationships with the public with a few tweaks: better training on use-of-force and equipment, upgraded technology like body cameras and shooting simulators, and deeper integration into the “community.”

But, every time a new “reform” is introduced, it almost always serves as justification for bigger police-department budgets and fawning media coverage over police, painting the image of a scrappy force for public safety that just doesn’t have the right training and resources. Meanwhile, levels of police harassment and police violence remain the same, and, in many cases, even increase. Indeed, 2023 was the worst year for fatal police shootings in decades despite – or perhaps because of – all the post-Ferguson “reforms."

On this episode, the Season 8 Premiere of Citations Needed, we’ll discuss the media-enabled phenomenon of how pro-police narratives, programs and budget bloating busy work are spun as “reform,” how they are used to stem public anger and placate squishy politicians and nonprofits, and look at the decades-old practice of turning public opposition to, and victimization from, US policing into an opportunity to expand and enrich the security state.

Our guest is civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis.

Guest

Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec) is a civil rights attorney and the founder of Civil Rights Corps. He is the author of Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter, the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (The New Press, 2019), the Yale Journal of Law & Liberation study “The Body Camera: The Language of our Dreams,” and the forthcoming book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, which will be published early next year by The New Press.

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Show Notes

The Body Camera: The Language of our Dreams

Alec Karakatsanis | Spring 2024 | Yale Journal of Law & Liberation

The history of police body cameras is more complex and troubling than we’ve been told

Tara Sarai | July 16, 2024 | Prism

Four years after George Floyd killing, police reform slow to follow

Bianca Flowers and Stephanie Kelly | May 25, 2024 | Reuters

2023 saw record killings by US police. Who is most affected?

Sam Levin | January 8, 2024 | The Guardian

How Police Have Undermined the Promise of Body Cameras

Eric Umansky, with Umar Farooq | December 14, 2023 | ProPublica

Bodycam footage hasn’t brought the police accountability advocates thought it would

Josiah Bates | December 12, 2023 | The Grio

More Than Two Years After George Floyd’s Murder Sparked a Movement, Police Reform Has Stalled. What Happened?

Jake Pearson | October 24, 2022 | ProPublica

How Media Copaganda Hides the Truth about the US Punishment Bureaucracy

Alec Karakatsanis and Nathan Robinson | September 15, 2022 | Current Affairs

Why We Don’t Say “Reform the Police”

Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie | September 2, 2022 | The Nation

Police Departments Spend Vast Sums of Money Creating “Copaganda”

Alec Karakatsanis | July 20, 2022 | Jacobin

From Black Power to Broken Windows: Liberal Philanthropy and the Carceral State

Sam Collings-Wells | July 2022 | Journal of Urban History

The Failure of Police Reform

Micah Herskind and Tiffany Roberts | January 31, 2022 | New York Magazine

Liberals Never Cared About Substantive Criminal Justice Reform, They Just Liked Slogans

Adam Johnson | November 30, 2021 | The Column

Why Police Reform Tactics Fail Over and Over Again

Robert Klemko and john Sullivan | June 10, 2021 | The Washington Post

The Long History of Failed Police Reform

Michael Brenes | April 26, 2021 | Boston Review

The House Always Wins — How Every Crisis Narrative Enriches the Security and Carceral State

Adam Johnson & Nima Shirazi | March 10, 2021 | Citations Needed

The High Price of Police Militarization

Mike Kuhlenbeck | September 22, 2020 | The Progressive

The Invention of the Police

Jill Lepore | July 13, 2020 | The New Yorker

Policing the World

Andrew Lanham | June 25, 2020 | Boston Review

Beware of Police “Reforms” That Reinforce the Very System Killing Us

Janaé Bonsu | June 12, 2020 | In These Times

Research on Body-worn Cameras: What we know, what we need to know

Cynthia Lum, Megan Stoltz, Christopher S. Koper & J. Amber Scherer | 2019 | Criminology & Public Policy

The 1968 Kerner Commission Got It Right, But Nobody Listened

Alice George | March 1, 2018 | Smithsonian Magazine

The Bombshell Political Report So Shocking a U.S. President Tried to Pretend It Didn't Exist

Jelani Cobb | May 10, 2024 | PBS

Body Cameras Have Little Effect on Police Behavior, Study Says

Amanda Ripley and Timothy Williams | October 20, 2017 | The New York Times

Police Shootings Database

The Washington Post

Mapping Police Violence

Campaign Zero

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Transcript

For a full transcript of this episode, go here. You can also find transcripts of past episodes, live shows, Beg-a-Thons, Interviews and News Briefs here.

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