How the Media Enables Violent Bureaucracy ~~ Alec Karakatsanis

 Part 1 - https://equalityalec.substack.com/p/how-the-media-enables-violent-bureaucracy

Part 2 - https://equalityalec.substack.com/p/how-the-media-enables-violent-bureaucracy-4e0

~~ recommended by newestbeginning ~~

How the Media Enables Violent Bureaucracy

An important general theme of government propaganda is how bureaucracies shape narratives about their own failures in order to get more resources.  In the copaganda context, these narratives are almost always targeted at getting well-intentioned but low-information people who feel bad about overt state violence to support various “reforms” that do not challenge the size or power of the punishment bureaucracy.

In our society, with the largest infrastructure of police, prosecution, and prisons in world history, an important part of this process is how the media manufactures the consent of well-meaning but low-information people to support this endless cycle.

Today, as we prepare for the public release of the video showing the brutal police murder of Tyre Nichols, I’m beginning a two-part series about the two main New York Times articles covering the police response to the George Floyd protests. These two articles are among the best examples of how police and their allies turn their own violence and failure into more money and power by shaping public narrative about the causes and solutions. It was my meeting with some of these reporters in 2021 that began my interest in working closely with journalists to change how our society talks about these issues, as well as my acute interest in publicly critiquing copaganda that poses a threat to our safety.

Background

Let’s start with a few questions:

• How is it that U.S. police killed more people in 2021, the year after the mass public uprisings in response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, than they did in 2020? 

• How is it that U.S. police then killed even more people in 2022 than in 2021? 

• How is it that overall U.S. police budgets and revenues for related for-profit industries grew to records each year? 

• How is it that police training, surveillance technology, and weaponry reached all-time record spending levels each year?

• How is it that police have used this technology and weaponry disproportionately against racial minorities and immigrants every year and in virtually every city in which records are kept despite innumerable annual “reforms” to their internal policies?

• How is it that police in nearly every U.S. city have disproportionately stopped, searched, arrested, beaten, tased, and killed Black people every year since records have been kept despite huge, continuous increased expenditures on “training”?

One of the core truths about the punishment bureaucracy is that police, prosecutors, prisons, probation, parole, courts, and the constellation of multi-billion dollar industries that evolve in symbiosis with them use their own violence, waste, and ineffectiveness to justify getting more resources in an endless cycle of “reform.” Each failure becomes a reason to spend more trying the same things harder.  This cycle is not accidental.  Luminaries from Michel Foucault to David Graeber to my one-eyed cat housemate have pointed out the connection between perpetual growth of bureaucracy and narratives around “reform.”

Most people would prefer a society with less state violence, surveillance, and fiscal waste, and yet they all keep increasing. How exactly does this happen?  Let me give you a few concrete examples to get us grounded:

Body Cameras: In the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, one of the key liberal responses were coordinated national calls to get body cameras for police. A lot of news outlets and ordinary people—following the lead of Barack Obama, who ensured $100,000,000s in federal grants to pay for body cameras—championed these devices as a “reform” in direct response to Brown’s homicide. Body cameras were portrayed as a solution to make police more “accountable” and, as a result, as a solution for police violence. 

What many people don’t know is that internal documents, public statements, and industry materials reveal that police (and the for-profit manufacturers of the devices and related software) had been desperate to get them for years.

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Police were unable to get local governments, however, to spend the billions of dollars needed to outfit every cop in the U.S. with a mobile surveillance camera that the cops themselves control. Police and carceral tech companies were also unable to procure the money to fulfill their dream of integrating vast amounts of surveillance data into new cloud-based computing systems that would connect reservoirs of police surveillance data to sophisticated (and expensive) facial and voice recognition software.

But after Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown, these sophisticated actors were smart, and the media was willing: they used the moment of public outrage and calls for change to get liberals in local government and well-meaning people in the general public to support the most expensive expansion of police surveillance technology in modern history.  They did this by portraying surveillance infrastructure as some sort of promising “reform” for police violence, almost always cutting out of any media coverage the views of experts, social movement leaders, or directly impacted people who were warning that mobile surveillance cameras, cloud computing networks, and proprietary biometric algorithms controlled by police themselves would have no effect on police violence but instead usher in a new era of state repression.

Police and their allies used the media to focus on the need to capture events that police still created, curated, and controlled on video and relentlessly used talking points about how they simply lacked funding for appropriate technology that could hold them accountable and that could provide the public with answers. In reality, in addition to massive new surveillance tech, everyday police officers wanted body cameras because it gave them the most powerful new form of evidence: an outward looking camera that the officers themselves control both in terms of what it captures and when video is publicly released.  These body camera videos are now routinely used in every courtroom in the U.S. as evidence to convict poor people of things like drug possession and trespassing and almost never used against police officers.  It is exactly as police chiefs and corporate sales representatives from the companies discussed the devices over a decade ago when formulating their plans. 

Most importantly, in the process, police were able to avoid the public asking deeper questions like: “Why are the police patrolling this neighborhood and not that one?” “Why are police only enforcing some "crimes" against some people and not other crimes against other people?” “Do we need police to deal with this wide range of social issues?”  “Why is police violence, filmed or not, consistently for over 100 years targeted at progressive social movements seeking greater equality?” And so on.

Bail: When the much-heralded federal Bail Reform Act went into effect in 1984, about 24% of people charged with federal crimes were too poor to afford cash bail and were thus detained in jail even though presumed innocent. Liberal reformers from politicians to judges to prosecutors to law professors championed the Act because it largely eliminated money-based detention in federal court by containing language designed to prohibit setting cash requirements that resulted in detention. The liberal “reform” was to require courts to make transparent decisions about whether a person truly needed to be detained or not and to stop detaining people just because they were poor.

But by 2020, over three decades into the “reform,” 72.4% of people charged with federal crimes were detained in cages before being convicted of anything. The “reform” to cease jailing people just because they were poor, when left in the hands of punishment bureaucrats, had tripled the size of the pretrial detention bureaucracy in federal courts, and the people detained were even more disproportionately poor, more disproportionately Black, and more disproportionately immigrant.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, whole new industries—like the multi-billion dollar jail/prison telecom industry—had even worked to get in-person visits and things like the ability to hug one’s child or spouse eliminated on the theory that it would result in more cash spent by desperate families on jail calls.  That’s quite a “reform.”

Probation and Parole: These innovations were pitched as modern liberal “reforms” that would be alternatives to incarceration. It sounded great in the media and to well-meaning people who would prefer a society with fewer human beings in cages: instead of confining people in concrete cells away from their families for as long, we can give them a chance to be in the community subject to strict conditions.  However, probation and parole have now become a leading cause of incarceration: 25% of all people in state prisons are there because of a technical violation of probation or parole—i.e. not even the commission of a new offense. And another 15% (so, a total of 40%) are there on minor violations of parole or probation. 

Decades of research shows that probation and parole supervision do not serve any public benefit: they do not increase public safety at all. But, they have led to an absolutely massive, union-backed bureaucracy of hundreds of thousands of employees who regulate peoples lives in profoundly onerous and increasingly bizarre ways, including: watching people pee into cups, tracking people’s movements with GPS, forcing people to answer questions about their family lives or sexual interest under penalty of jailing them, excluding people from large geographic zones, requiring billions of dollars in fee payments, regulating how and with whom people can socialize, and even requiring people to behave according to particular Christian moral standards.

The New York Times and George Floyd

In my opinion, understanding this cycle of failure, “reform,” and bureaucratic expansion is vital to understanding how the corporate news media covered the 2020 racial justice uprisings, and how the media will continue to cover instances of rampant police violence like the recent murders of Tyre Nichols and Keenan Anderson. It helps explain how they framed the problem, which solutions they suggested for it, which sources and experts they chose to present to the public, and which points of view they excluded.

I have never before written about the woeful media coverage of the George Floyd protests. But in Part 2 of this post next week, I will use the following two examples from the New York Times to show how corporate media helps the punishment bureaucracy use its own violence to get more money and to prevent genuine public education and meaningful change.

The first article is about an official report concluding that LAPD “mishandled” the racial justice protests.

The second article appeared nine days later. It is about the release of numerous similar reports criticizing the police response to 2020 racial justice protests in “city after city.” Notice that I did not say the articles were about the police conduct. They were explicitly, as one of the reporters pointed out to me afterward, articles about what the official government reports said about police conduct. As we will see, this distinction matters.

As I will demonstrate with an analysis of the language, framing, sources, and naked ideological perspective, this reporting constituted a harmful, misleading, ahistorical, head-in-the-sand view that the police who brutalized people in 2020 were just trying to do the best job they could to help people protest for equality. The problem, according to the news media? Police just didn’t have enough money, “training,” “preparation,” and fancy technology to do it.

To be continued…

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How the Media Enables Violent Bureaucracy: Part 2

In Part 1 last week, I provided background context for how the punishment bureaucracy has used its own failures to get low-information people who feel bad about overt state violence to support various “reforms.” The key point: the “reforms” sanctioned by powerful bureaucrats do not challenge the size or power of the punishment bureaucracy, and almost always increase both. In this way, violent, wasteful bureaucracies shape popular narratives about the reasons for their own failures in order to get more resources.

All of this is enabled by editorial decisions about how journalists describe the problem of police violence and about whose perspectives to include in media stories about what the solutions are.

In Part 1, I introduced two key New York Times articles that represent the corporate media’s attempt to describe and explain how police responded to the 2020 racial justice protests in Los Angeles and nationally. Here, in Part 2, I discuss why the framing of those articles was so dangerous.

The New York Times and the Art of Framing

I want to first highlight the language that the NYT used.  Both articles framed the police response to racial justice protests as a series of “mistakes” and “missteps” that resulted from a lack of “training” and “preparation” and insufficient resources.  Here is how the first article framed the problems of police violence against protestors in its own words:

• “ill-prepared”

• “mishandled”

• “botched their handling”

• “untrained officers”

• “there was a lack of preparation, a lack of planning”

• “commanders admitted to the authors of the report that they lacked experience in managing peaceful protests and said they did not receive enough training to maintain order”

• “police Department should prioritize the training [in crowd control] going forward”

• “their confidence resulted in them failing to plan.”

Similarly, here is the language chosen by the reporters in the second NYT article:

• “poorly trained”

• “stunningly unprepared”

• “mistakes”

• “police officers nationwide were unprepared to calm the summer’s unrest” 

• “almost uniformly, the reports said departments need more training in how to handle large protests.”   

• “not planning for protests”

• “the lack of adequate planning and preparation” 

• “they lacked resources devoted to intelligence and outreach that would have put them in better touch with their communities” 

• “American police simply were not prepared for the challenge that they faced in terms of planning, logistics, training and police command-and-control supervision” 

• “failing to train officers to de-escalate conflict, control crowds and arrest large numbers of people” 

• “kits were sometimes outdated,” “did not have enough computers,” “police did not have enough buses”

• “did not plan appropriately for field jails” 

• “planning anti-racism training for all officers”

• “missteps”

This language is just a bizarre way to describe what happened.  If I went around illegally beating, shooting, kidnapping, running over, chemically poisoning, torturing, mocking, and caging my political opponents before lying about it all repeatedly until video proved otherwise, would the NYT say I “mishandled” it and made some “missteps”?

But the media framing was far more problematic than that. The two NYT articles reveal highly ideological framing that poses a real danger to anyone who wants progressive social change. In this ahistorical, head-in-the-sand view spread to millions of liberal-leaning readers by the NYT, the police are just trying to do the best job they can to help people protest for racial equality, but they just don’t have enough money, training, and technology to do it well. This framing accepts premise that police were trying to keep everyone safe, but they made some unintentional whoopsies. On this view, it’s not that police and ruling class interests benefit from violent repression of social movements seeking more equality or that the entire systemic policing bureaucracy has always been designed to repress social movements that challenge distributions of wealth and power. Instead, the NYT is making well-meaning but low-information readers think that the police violence that we all witnessed on video was a problem insufficient “training,” “intelligence,” “preparation,” and budgets that weren’t large enough. Importantly, the solution to the problems framed this way isn’t to reduce the power of the police, but to give the police more and more stuff.

Compare the NYT’s framing language to the video evidence. Here is a twitter thread collecting just several of many compilations of such videos from the spring and summer of 2020:

I had a different perspective than the NYT on the violence that I witnessed in person and on video. There were tens of thousands of brazen acts of criminality committed by thousands of police officers of all ranks—many of them coordinated and planned in advance. Even more police officers lied or allowed other officers to lie about this violence in subsequent reports without correcting the lies. The videos from tens of thousands of ordinary people show eerily similar intentional criminality, including thousands of federal felony crimes committed by police in virtually every major U.S. police force. It’s almost as if they were well prepared and following consistent training… And this is a vital point: these videos bear striking resemblance to videos and witness accounts of police violence and repression of social justice protests from the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. Why might that be?

In these prior historical eras, an uneasy public was often pacified by government assurances in the media that the police would receive better “training” and funding so that it wouldn’t happen again. And they did: U.S. police have spent and continue tospend enormous sums on an unprecedented amount of training, much of it training them how to be more violent and to spy on dissidents more effectively. To take just one relevant example, Stuart Schrader has documented how, in the wake of prominent public inquiries into police violence against racial justice protesters in the 1960s, police got funding to adopt numerous “reforms,” including new “nonlethal weapons” and widespread “riot-control training.” The result? Police killed more people than ever before after 1967. The idea underlying the NYT’s framing—that these systems are interested in genuine introspection, accountability, safety, democracy, and improvement—is a core lie at the heart of liberal media coverage of police violence, and a core lie that we have been told throughout U.S. history.

This media framing of well-meaning institutions trying to support safety and democracy that will be effective with just a little more cash thus plays a role in manufacturing consent among readers for very particular policy responses. If the problem is diagnosed as a “lack of training” then the logical solution is more training.  If the problem is a lack of “preparation” or “coordination,” then the logical solutions are to invest in the personnel, costly consultants, and IT/personnel systems that would help police “prepare” better (whatever that means) or the communications technology/platforms that would help police “coordinate” better.  If the problem is understood as a lack of “intelligence” or a lack of computers, handcuffs, or buses for mass arrests, the logical solution is to invest more in those things.  This focus on “intelligence” failures is how, for example, police departments parlayed prior failures into more money for spying on people. And so on. 

Think for a moment about what it would look like if the New York Times adopted a different, more historically accurate framing. If the New York Times had framed the problem as impressive execution of a historically common and coordinated plan to crush racial justice protests with violence, the logical solutions people think about start to change.  If the widespread police violence is instead framed as the product of decades of sophisticated counterinsurgency training, precise coordination of tactical units in similar ways across hundreds of cities, and expert use of military surveillance/weaponry to punish social dissidents in ways that the U.S. and European military theorists perfected in their colonies through the world (especially Algeria and Vietnam), then readers might make far different conclusions about whether the solution is to pay for even more of that “intelligence” and “training.”  

If one views police as highly sophisticated agents of wealth protection who have been very effective at infiltrating and repressing progressive social movements for 100 years, then none of this violent behavior becomes anomalous or the result of a lack of “preparation” or “training” or “resources.” And you can see this from one of the most glaring omissions from the NYT’s framing: there is no acknowledgment in the articles that police themselves committed massive crimes. 

If the paper acknowledged that police committed intentional crimes, it would have to turn from a piece about a lack of training to a piece explaining why police, prosecutors, and federal authorities in virtually every city largely ignored those crimes.  As usual, the NYT ignores some of the most interesting questions. What are we to make of the fact that police, prosecutors, and politicians have made almost no effort to investigate or arrest the thousands of officers who committed those crimes.  This is the clearest possible evidence of their actual perspective on what happened and why. You can tell much of what you need to know by how powerful institutions respond to a particular crime. If it hurts their interests, they will crush the people who commit it. Hence the recent “terrorism” charges for forest defenders trying to block the demolition of a beautiful forest to build a new faux-city for police weapons training in Atlanta. If it helps them, they will ignore or even justify and celebrate a crime, as the NYC Mayor did after police deliberately ran over racial justice protestors in 2020. As usual, remember: you can learn a great deal about a society by looking at which of its laws it chooses to enforce against which people, and by looking at which of its laws it chooses to ignore, on behalf of which people.

Simply put, how one talks about what went wrong shapes how one thinks we should fix it.  But by misleading people about what went wrong, the NYT obscures what should be a central question of public debate: do we want armed, violent state bureaucrats to spend billions of dollars preventing people from organizing to call for progressive social change?  It’s a question similar to that posed by the Church Committee in the wake of the police repression of the civil rights movement. It’s also an important question, and I think one reason the corporate media obscures it so often is that powerful institutions do not like how well-meaning people would answer it.

But it wasn’t just the framing that editors and reporters chose, the articles also had major problems with facts, language, sourcing, and context that have continued in the corporate media’s coverage this week of the Tyre Nichols murder in Memphis. In Part III, I will describe some of those recurring problems as a way of understanding what to make of the Tyre Nichols coverage last week and going forward in the next few weeks, including some troubling dishonesty by the New York Times for which it has never been held accountable.