alec karakatsanis

@equalityalec.bsky.social

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founder, Civil Rights Corps civil rights lawyer author of usual cruelty (2019) and copaganda (2025) any views expressed here are my own, and not those of civil rights corps

The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with the manufacturer of the weedkiller Roundup, overturning a jury award for a Missouri man who claimed the widely used herbicide caused cancer in a decision that could have sweeping impacts on thousands of other Americans who similarly claim the product sickened them. In the 7-to-2 decision, written by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the majority found that a federal law that regulates pesticides barred the Missouri man’s lawsuit.
Hacked list of Peter Thiel secret society including musk and Kushner and Ted Cruz and Ezra Klein.
Screenshot of Chronicle headline "why a progressive prosecutor just left DA Chesa Boudin's office and joined the recall effort."
Raj parikh responding to tweet about using state troopers at Delaney hall: This misses the point. @GovSherrillNJ eliminated the ability of the Trump admin to create a pretext to make NJ into the next Minnesota for an ICE “surge”. This is exactly how to protect our neighbors from illegal Federal overreach while also ensuring safe free speech & protests.
screenshot of order for private reprimand described in text of post from Eleventh Circuit.
screenshot of headline about IRS being prohibited from auditing trump and family
Wapo headline calling trump tax settlement an "unusual deal" that creates a $1.8 billion fund that could help trump allies.
Headline about DA Brooke Jenkins warning CA supreme court decision unleashing crime wave
Conservative justices “see” progress on racism while black southerners “say” the voting rights act ruling missed the mark and “felt” like an end to racism progress.
Given the evidence, suggesting that mass-incarceration advocates are being “tough on crime” when they push for policies that do not make people safer is like praising fossil fuel profiteers for mitigating global warming. It is one of the great achievements of modern copaganda that police, prosecutors, prison guard unions, bail bond companies, private equity firms, surveillance corporations, for-profit prisons, and politicians have convinced news outlets to call the policies that benefit them “tough on crime.” But it gets worse, because “tough on crime” groups are among the biggest proponents of shifting “law enforcement” resources away from investigating and prosecuting millions of much more threatening crimes by powerful people
21 Hours in Pakistan: How Vance Tried and Failed to End a War He Opposed
When necessary, such as with the LAPD after the Rampart scandal or Ferguson after the 2014 uprisings, police themselves will support this narrative that entire departments are in need of “reform.”266 After the 2020 uprisings, many liberal politicians pointed to Camden, New Jersey as a model because the town had “disbanded” its police force after repeated police violence. (What is often left out of this story is that the city simply rehired far more officers on lower salaries, expanded lucrative surveillance contracts, and made even more arrests of almost exclusively poor people in the subsequent years for low-level crimes.)267 Similarly, it is common for powerful local or state officials to ask the Department of Justice to investigate an entire troubled police force in their area.268 Dozens of mayors, governors, and even police chiefs have done this in recent years, not out of a belief that federal intervention will make their police force behave differently in fundamental ways, but to distract from local attempts at more radical solutions. Cooptation like this routinely happens through federal intervention because of the well-understood, well-trodden periods of delay, expert consulting, rationalization of more resources which often becomes court- ordered additional spending, and pacification of liberal residents who are only passively interested in knowing that something is being done. In this political and narrative act, the
Failure to de-escalate the use of force. A statistical trend analysis demonstrates that the most severe level of use of force has remained stable while other levels of use of force have increased. Clearly, there is no evidence of de-esca- lation in the use of force. The Police Reform Agreement, prompt- ed by the USDOJ’s (2011) documentation of unreasonable use of force, was unable to curb the frequency with which officers use force. Moreover, an official PRPD report acknowledges that the annual trend of use of force has increased. 2. Failure to eliminate racial bias in use of force. Statistical evidence demonstrates that the PRPD disproportion- ately directs use of force against racialized communities. The department’s failure to track racial data creates a blind spot that precludes it from identifying its own bias. Using census racial data, an area-based statistical analysis confirms that nonfatal police shootings occur more frequently in neighborhoods with higher concentrations of Black and low-income households. 3. Failure to identify and correct deficiencies in the use of force. There is a systematic practice of under-registration, under-re- porting, and under-counting of police use of force. Under the notion “no data, no problem,” the PRPD uses ignorance as a strategy to avoid or obstruct the production and dissemination of the necessary information that makes police violence visible, measurable, and accountable. The PRPD has failed to identify the excessive use of electronic control devices among its officers and deceived the public by under-counting the number of ECD-associ- ated deaths
Ok after some reflection and talking to people (including locals) that are smarter than me, points 3 and 4 seem way too cynical/galaxy brained. There are local factors at play, and it’s probably not some strategic 4D chess to triangulate a middle path to the nomination between El-Sayed and Stevens. I had completely forgotten that the West Bloomfield Temple Israel attack — where 140 preschoolers could have been blown up — was two weeks ago. And that for many for whom that is still raw — even in a mostly very progressive Jewish community like that — Piker’s presence nearby (both are within about an hour drive) would be raising the temperature, not lowering it. I think the difference in encouraging people to go on a guest on Rogan/Piker type streams — who have said controversial things in the past — and actively campaigning with them is an important distinction. Some may infer the latter as an endorsement of their views. Which, no matter what you think of Hasan, you have to admit that some of what he has said could be hurtful to some Jews at a time when many are already deeply concerned for the safety of them and their children. For those who think McMorrow is bought and paid for by AIPAC, I would like to remind them that they are expressly backing Stevens in this race, and that McMorrow has stressed that she has not and will not take money from AIPAC. Anyway, I’m willing to bet it’s not a strategic move, it’s a line in the sand for her. If you disagree with what she said, that’s fine. Your voice will be louder than those that appreciate what’s she’s doing because that’s what algorithms do — promote conflict. Important to remember that Twitter is not real life. I like Abdul, and totally get why people are voting for him. But let’s not jump to the worst conclusions about other candidates just because tensions are high.
Picture of french book cover: la bureaucratie de la punition
Phoenix police won’t discipline any officers in massive scandal of testing fake gangs and charging protestors falsely as members in 2020.
Judges in one of the nation’s largest court systems have started using artificial intelligence, testing a tool that can rapidly distill hundreds of pages of legal motions and use samples of a jurist’s writing style to help reach conclusions and even draft tentative rulings.
Screenshot of video of children burning Lionel Messi jerseys
On March 7, 1965, white police in Alabama beat hundreds of civil rights marchers—including fracturing the skull of civil rights icon John Lewis—as they walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on “Bloody Sunday.” The very next day, President Lyndon Johnson announced an unprecedented expansion of funding for U.S. police departments, including for “improved training of policemen.”8 In his history of U.S. policing,
In fact, tens of thousands of brazen acts of criminality were intentionally committed by thousands of police officers of all ranks. Many of them were coordinated and planned at all levels of the policing bureaucracy. 6 Police leaders in city after city then chose not to discipline officers for their brutality or for lying about it. The police were doing what they were trained to do. The widespread training, planning, and coordination of police officers is one reason video archives compiled from tens of thousands of ordinary people in the streets show eerily similar intentional acts. All these officers and all these commanders across all these departments were well prepared and following time-honored strategies to crush a popular movement against injustice. None of this is new. It resembles the tactics presented in counterinsurgency manuals and the colonial repression of protests across the world by police forces trained by U.S., British, and French military counterinsurgency specialists.7 And it bears a striking resemblance to archival videos, audio recordings, oral histories, whistleblower testimonies, and written witness accounts of police violence and repression of social justice movements from the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. When I hear about calling for
Hewlitt hall room 128 at 4pm in Oswego today.
Ice planning to acquire $38 billion in warehouses to create detention centers all over the U.S.
Under no circumstances do police want the public to entertain conversations about problems with policing itself as a method of social, racial, and economic control. In fact, conversations about each of the other categories are designed to avoid the deeper conversations. “Bad apples” can be thrown under the bus, fired, and occasionally even sent to prison. Bad squads and units can be scapegoated and temporarily disbanded, as happened with the cartoonishly corrupt gun squad in Baltimore and the SCORPION Unit after its murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis.23 Bad police departments can also be singled out—indeed, one of the remarkable and darkly humorous observations I have made from my years of work across the country is that local clients of mine in each city assume that their local police force is generally recognized as one of the worst nationally. People assume that police must be better elsewhere. When necessary, such as with the LAPD after the Rampart corruption scandal or Ferguson after the 2014 uprisings, police themselves will support this narrative that entire departments are in need of “reform.”24 As noted earlier, after the 2020 uprisings, liberal politicians pointed to Camden, New Jersey, as a model because the town had “disbanded” its police force after repeated police violence, but then left out the part that the city rehired more officers on lower salaries, expanded surveillance
Two screenshots of news articles from oxnard and minneapolis showing ICE lying and charges dismissed against people who had themselves been victims of ICE violence.
“When body cameras got rolled out to C.B.P., the technical capability of the camera got rolled out,” Rodney S. Scott, the commissioner for Customs and Border Protection, said at a congressional hearing on Tuesday. “But the funding for the personnel to support the programs and the data, that can drain basically all your other operations. So fund the entire program.” Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was more explicit. “We’re still in the process of deploying body cameras for all law enforcement officers,” he said in a Fox News interview in January. “Unfortunately, in the last administration, we didn’t have the funding.”
chart showing that fewer than 14% of ICE arrests are someone accused of violence.
Secretary Kristi Noem @Sec_Noem I just spoke with @RealTomHoman @ICEDirector @CBPCommissioner . Effective immediately we are deploying body cameras to every officer in the field in Minneapolis. As funding is available, the body camera program will be expanded nationwide. We will rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras to DHS law enforcement across the country. The most transparent administration in American history—thank you @POTUS Trump. Make America Safe Again 🇺🇸
Two images from NYT about ICE tracking protestors with facial recognition and cancelling Global Entry and TSA precheck for protesters.
Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT We should not fund DHS without serious reform. We could return CBP to border. We could require warrants for immigration arrests. We could beef up training and require identification. The list of possible reforms is long. What's unacceptable is the current lawless status quo.
The seven Democrats who voted in favor of the homeland security spending measure were: Representatives Don Davis of North Carolina, Henry Cuellar of Texas, Laura Gillen of New York, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, Jared Golden of Maine and Tom Suozzi of New York.
“What are they supposed to do?” he said. “Are they supposed to let a 5-year-old child freeze to death? Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America?”
Think for a moment about what it would look like if the news adopted a historically accurate framing of police violence rather than dismissing it as accidental or incidental. If the New York Times had framed the 2020 police violence as the impressive execution of a strategy to crush racial justice protests, then readers might conceive of different public policy responses to it. If the widespread police violence in the U.S. is instead framed as the product of counterinsurgency training, the coordination of tactical units in similar ways across hundreds of cities
Back then, the government pacified an uneasy public with assurances that police would receive better “training” and funding so that organized politicized violence wouldn’t keep happening. They poured money into “training” to combat pervasive law-breaking by police, prison guards, prosecutors, and judges. But police training instills misconduct
On March 7, 1965, white police in Alabama beat hundreds of civil rights marchers—including fracturing the skull of civil rights icon John Lewis—as they walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on “Bloody Sunday.” The very next day, President Lyndon Johnson announced an unprecedented expansion of funding for U.S. police departments, including for “improved training of policemen.”8
Booker confidently announcing demands for more training and body cameras for a ice. In a slick video
Two Minneapolis residents who have been monitoring immigration officers’ actions during the Trump administration’s latest crackdown say they were detained without charge for several hours in distressing conditions, denied phone calls, and pressured to rat out protest organizers and people living in the country illegally. The accusations leveled by Brandon Sigüenza and Patty O’Keefe suggest that the Department of Homeland Security is employing similar tactics in Minneapolis and St. Paul as it did during the crackdowns in Los Angeles, Chicago and New Orleans. Federal officers are again using roving patrols, warrantless arrests and aggressive tactics such as spraying chemical irritants, breaking car windows and recording protesters, including Renee Good and her vehicle in the moments before an ICE officer fatally shot her.
excerpt from opening page of chapter 2 of Copaganda.
EPA to stop considering lives saved when setting rules on air pollution.
Adam Johnson tweet: NYT as well is mindlessly adopting the framework that Trump's motive is "suppressing demonstrations" in Iran. This would mark the first time in his 10 year political career Trump has expressed motivations of defending human rights but their job is court stenography not reporting
The coverage of the ICE execution by PBS has been shameful. It's a case study in copaganda. They brought on Obama's former ICE director to distract from core issues, sow confusion about whether what happened was justified, and promote more $$ for police/ICE "training" industry.
The problem is the time and cost involved when judges have to consider each person's circumstances at arraignment hearings, said Yolo County District Attorney Jeffery W. Reisig, a former CDAA president. "What Civil Rights Corps is doing is not helpful, and I look at it with a high degree of skepticism," he said in an interview. "Proponents of zero bail want to cut corners to reach the end result that people remain out of custody. Arraignment courts are packed. They bring 'em in by the busload. It's a cattle call."