Copaganda with Alec Karakatsanis [TEASER]

Crime rates are at historic lows, yet year after year, people say that they feel unsafe and believe crime is rising. You can thank the news media with help from corporations and law enforcement narratives. We speak with civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis about his new book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. If you're not a 5-4 Premium member, you're not hearing every episode! To hear this and other Premium-only episodes, access to our Slack community, and more, join at fivefourpod.com/support http://fivefourpod.com/support. 5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Leon Neyfakh provides editorial support. Our researcher is Jonathan DeBruin, and our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Transcriptions of each episode are available at fivefourpod.com http://fivefourpod.com Follow the show at @fivefourpod on most platforms. On BlueSky, find Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social, Michael @fleerultra.bsky.social, and Rhiannon @aywarhiannon.bsky.social. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information. Our Sponsors: * Check out Mint Mobile and use my code mintmobile.com/fivefour for a great deal: https://www.mintmobile.com * Check out Quince and use my code FIVEFOUR for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Hey, everyone. This is Leon from Prologue Projects. On this subscriber-only episode of Five to Four, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are talking to civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis about his new book, "Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News." In his new book, Alec takes a wide-ranging look at the ways in which news coverage of crime and public safety is shaped by corporate interests and law enforcement talking points, and contributes to a climate of fear that in turn justifies repressive public policy. This is Five to Four, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court and the punishment bureaucracy suck.

• 0:45Peter Shamshiri?

  Welcome to Five to Four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have attacked our civil rights, like our neighborhood cat attacking the chipmunks in my backyard.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Aww.

• 0:54Peter Shamshiri?

  I'm Peter. I'm here with Michael. Hey, everybody. And Rhiannon.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Hello. Hi, everyone.

• 1:00Peter Shamshiri?

  And we are joined by Alec Karakatsanis, civil rights lawyer and founder of Civil Rights Corps.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  Hi, everybody.

• 1:06Peter Shamshiri?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Hi, Alec.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me back.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Maybe our most frequent... No, that's gotta be J. Willis or Josie Duffy Rice.

• 1:17Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, but Alec is up there. He's in contention.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. This has gotta be... I wanna say this is like the third appearance by Alec on Five to Four.

• 1:26Peter Shamshiri?

  That sounds right. White Boy Hall of Fame.

• 1:29Speaker 03

  We had exciting conversations about younger abstention, if I recall correctly, and the criminalization of poverty.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35Peter Shamshiri?

  That's right. And now we're only two weeks before it's officially illegal, give or take.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  To be, to be poor, is what you're saying.

• 1:45Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, to be poor, to be poor. I won't elaborate on the cat in my backyard. I will say, though, I'm in the process of defending the chipmunks without harming the cat, so everyone calm down. Don't worry about it.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, no screaming about animal rights stuff.

• 1:58Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. Now, today, we are going to talk a bit about police propaganda, nicknamed "Copaganda", which Alec just wrote a book on, also titled "Copaganda." So we're gonna talk first about what this is, why you started researching it, Alec, and we can turn to some of the topics in your book: how it manifests in the media, what the incentives behind it are, maybe how to spot it, and some of the beefs you've had with various academics over the last several years. So I'll sort of leave defining it up to you, Alec. But, you know, I think the way that you put it in your book is that during the George Floyd

• 2:40Peter Shamshiri?

  protests in 2020, you notice what looked like a sort of police PR campaign. And this sort of sent you down a path of researching police PR, police propaganda, and led you to this book. So can you sort of bring us there to 2020, when you sort of saw this?

• 3:03Speaker 03

  We're recording this interview, actually, a couple of days before the five-year anniversary of the burning down of the Minneapolis Police Precinct. And I think that was a very important moment because there were some public polls that came out around that time that showed over half the country supported the burning of that precinct. That was a very scary time for a lot of people in the establishment. And I think we saw an incredible reactionary backlash to those uprisings that was characterized by wall-to-wall fear-mongering propaganda in support of the policing and punishment bureaucracies. I don't think this is particularly unique. As I talk about, this is a longstanding feature of news coverage.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  There's nothing particularly new about this period, but it was sort of the period that I was living through and that I was watching in city after city in the course of doing our civil rights work. And I became kind of obsessed with tracking all of the ways in which the mainstream news was distorted.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  Hey, folks, if you want to hear the rest of this episode, you're going to have to subscribe. This episode is one of our premium Patreon-only episodes. Membership starts at just $5 a month. So if you want to hear the rest, join us at patreon.com/54pod. That's 54pod, all spelled out. Members get a bunch of stuff. Not only do you get access to the premium episodes, but access to subscriber-only events, discounts on merch. And at the $10 a month level, you get bigger discounts on merch and membership in the incredibly rowdy 54 Slack. So again, that's patreon.com/54pod, 54pod, all spelled out. Become a member today.