Latest news with #Copaganda
Yahoo
26-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘Authoritarian playbook': DHS accuses critics of assaulting officers when videos say otherwise
After New York City comptroller Brad Lander this week became the latest prominent Democrat to be arrested while monitoring and protesting US immigration authorities, the Trump administration trotted out a familiar refrain to justify his detention. The mayoral candidate had 'assaulted' law enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asserted, warning 'if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will face consequences'. The accusation, which DHS has also recently leveled against a member of Congress and a high-profile union leader, have sparked consternation, particularly as videos of the incidents did not show the officials attacking officers and instead captured officers' aggressive behavior and manhandling of the officials. In several cases, DHS's public accusations of assault were not followed by criminal charges. Civil rights advocates and scholars on policing say the government's assault claims against well-known members of the opposing party, and the repetition of those accusations, nonetheless are troubling indicators of rising authoritarianism. They argued the US government is blatantly misrepresenting events captured on footage in an effort to intimidate powerful officials and ordinary citizens alike who seek to challenge the White House's policies. And Alec Karakatsanis, the founder of Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, argued: 'By relentlessly telling the population that 'two plus two equals five', it helps determine who is willing to go along with 'two plus two equals five' and deny basic truths. 'It's also about a longer-term and more profound assault on the very notion of truth – to get people so confused that they don't know what is what,' said Karakatsanis, author of Copaganda, a book about false narratives promoted by police. 'This is the classic propaganda tactic of George Orwell's 1984,' he added Lander was arrested by federal agents inside an immigration court building on Tuesday, as he asked officers whether they had a judicial warrant to detain an immigrant he was accompanying. He was released after four hours, and so far, no charges have been filed against him. Video of the encounter shows plainclothes officers, some in masks, pinning Lander to a wall, handcuffing him and escorting him away. Lander had held on to the arm of the immigrant who was being targeted. Still, DHS assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement to the press and on social media soon after the incident that it was Lander who had assaulted officers. The accusations echo those against US congresswoman LaMonica McIver, a Democrat, who, DHS claims, assaulted and impeded law enforcement when she and two other representatives arrived at a privately run Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center to inspect the facility on 9 May. Representatives are authorized to conduct this oversight without prior notice, and McIver said she wanted to ensure the facility was clean and safe and detainees had access to their attorneys. Shaky videos of the encounter, some released by DHS, showed a chaotic scrum where McIver and others were surrounded by officers, some masked, as law enforcement and the representative pushed against each other. Soon after, she was given a tour of the facility, but a month later was indicted for assault, a charge she has strongly denied. In Los Angeles, David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) of California, was arrested on 6 June when he showed up to document an immigration raid at a garment factory. As he stood outside, blurry footage showed officers pushing him to the ground, with multiple agents on top of him as he was put in handcuffs. US attorneys charged him with conspiracy to impede an officer. He was not charged with assault, but even after the complaint was filed, DHS has continued to respond to questions about his case with a statement that says: 'Huerta assaulted Ice law enforcement.' Huerta was hospitalized after his arrest, before being transported to jail. And last week, California senator Alex Padilla was handcuffed and forcibly removed from a DHS press conference as he attempted to ask a question, with the FBI accusing him of 'resisting' law enforcement. He was not charged with a crime. In a statement to the Guardian on Thursday, McLaughlin said Democratic politicians were 'contributing to the surge in assaults of our Ice officers through their repeated vilification and demonization of Ice', adding: 'This violence against ICE must end.' DHS has repeatedly asserted in recent weeks that it has seen a major increase in assaults on its officers. Since May, the department has often cited the claim that Ice officers, who are part of DHS, are facing 'a 413% increase in assaults against them'. Spokespeople for DHS have repeatedly refused to respond to questions about the source of the statistic, how many assaults have occurred and what time periods it was comparing. In April, a press release had referred to a '300% surge in assaults'. McLaughlin, of DHS, said in an email late Thursday that Ice officers were 'now facing a 500% increase in assaults', but again did not respond to inquiries about the figure. Some experts on US law enforcement said DHS's narratives were rooted in a long legacy of law enforcement demonizing its critics, though the Trump administration's claims seemed increasingly brazen in their deviation from the truth. Andrea J Ritchie, co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, a group of organizers that advocates against incarceration and other forms of criminalization, said US law enforcement has frequently prosecuted people who had been abused and injured by officers. 'How many videos exist of cops yelling, 'stop resisting', while someone has their hands up and the cops are beating them?' she said. Civil rights lawyers who take on police misconduct cases often refer to the 'trifecta' of charges – resisting arrest, assault on an officer and obstruction of justice, she said: 'The harder you get beaten, the more likely you'll get those charges.' What's new under Donald Trump, she said, was the frequency of these kinds of accusations against high-profile figures. Lauren Regan, an Oregon-based civil rights lawyer who has represented activists facing prosecution, said she saw arresting elected officials as part of an 'authoritarian playbook' designed to make people widely afraid that they, too, could be targeted, regardless of their backgrounds. 'You keep it chaotic and random so no one thinks they're safe,' said Regan. 'When elected officials with privilege, power, education and training get thrown to the ground and cuffed or jailed, then what is going to happen to us? Everyone is at risk.' It's a point that wasn't lost on Padilla, who said after his detention: 'If they can do this to a United States senator who has the audacity to ask a question, just imagine what they're doing to so many people across the country.' Indeed, since the recent protests against immigration raids began in LA, hundreds of demonstrators in southern California have been arrested by local police. Federal prosecutors have formally charged a handful of them assaulting officers – though soon after moved to dismiss two of the first cases they filed. In an incident of two protesters arrested at a 7 June demonstration, a video of the chaotic scuffle showed one of the protesters being shoved by an agent just before the arrests, and officers taking both protesters to the ground. US prosecutors charged both men with assaulting officers, but filed a motion to dismiss the charges a week later after one of them told the Guardian he had not attacked the agents, and was himself severely injured in the confrontation. Others have been blasted by DHS amid immigration enforcement actions in LA. Last week, the Los Angeles Times published video of border patrol agents detaining a 29-year-old US citizen outside his car repair shop. In the footage, the man repeatedly said he was an American citizen, but an agent pushed him into a metal gate. He was eventually released. After the LA Times published a story documenting rising 'fears of racial profiling', DHS sent out a press release calling it 'fake news', including a screenshot of video of the man's arrest, and saying: 'THE FACTS: 'The facts are a US citizen was arrested because he ASSAULTED US Customs and Border Protection Agents.' DHS did not respond to the Guardian's questions asking for clarification on what constituted assault in these incidents, instead re-sending the statements it had originally posted and shared on social media in the immediate aftermath of the arrests. Alex Vitale, sociology professor and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, said that while the public thinks of 'assault' as causing injury, in the context of arrests and prosecution, it can be a 'nebulous category' that includes 'unwanted physical conduct'. Cases can drag on for months, he added, no matter the strength of the evidence the government is presenting: 'Police understand that the arrest and the process is the penalty even if there's no conviction in the end.' Mike German, a former FBI agent and fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit, said that the government's repeated misinformation about violence against officers risks backfiring: 'Officers do at times get assaulted, but if agencies continue to make patently false claims and suggest that any physical contact is an assault, you're going to undermine legitimate cases.' He said he was also concerned about the impacts of officers using heavy force in arrests that don't require it: 'Three or four agents tackling a US senator clearly isn't necessary. That kind of force compels resistance. It's hard to let yourself be violently attacked without your natural reaction of trying to defend yourself, and then if officers say that's assault, that undermines public trust.' Ritchie, author of Invisible No More, a book about police violence against women of color, said she was not surprised that out of the recent prominent arrests, the only politician who continues to be prosecuted for assault is McIver: 'Black women get punished for speaking up and it's framed as assault.' She said it was crucial that communities continue to forcefully reject law enforcement narratives: 'They are trying to manufacture reality. It is upon us to say the government is lying to us. This is a message they are trying to send and we're not accepting it and certainly not normalizing it.'
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How to Sniff Out ‘Copaganda': When the Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take I wrote the book Copaganda based on my years of being a civil rights lawyer and public defender representing the most vulnerable people in our society. I watched as the police and the news media distorted how we think about our collective safety. Copaganda makes us afraid of the most powerless people, helps us ignore far greater harms committed by people with money and power, and always pushes on us the idea that our fears can be solved by more money for police, prosecution, and prisons. Based on the evidence, this idea of more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer is like climate science denial. This excerpt is adapted from an important part of the book on how by selectively choosing which stories to tell, and then telling those stories in high volume, the news can induce people into fear-based panics that have no connection to what is happening in the world. It's how public polling can show people thinking crime is up when it is down year after year, and how so many well-meaning people are led to falsely believe that marginalized people themselves want more money on surveillance and punishment as the primary solutions to make their lives better. All royalties from the book are donated to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which works with unhoused people against police violence. Free books are also available for anyone in prison and for any teachers who want to get copies for their students to discuss the book in class. By manipulating the volume of stories at particular times, the news media creates a society-wide frenzy concerning particular kinds of behavior by particular groups of people. Scholars call them 'moral panics.' When a moral panic is created, it almost always leads to the expansion of government repression. That's what happened during the 'crime waves' reported by the press in Victorian England, and in more recent U.S. moral panics like the 1980s panic about 'crack babies,' the 1990s panic about 'super predators,' the 2021–23 panic about 'retail theft,' and the ongoing multiyear panic about 'fare evasion' by poor people on public transit. Moral panics can also be acute creations of a particular news moment, such as the fabricated 'Summer of Violence' in Denver, in which violent crime went down but increase in media stories about juvenile crime in 1993 led to expansion in the incarceration of children; the viral 'train theft' story; the scientifically debunked panic about police officers overdosing on fentanyl by touching or being near it; and the 2023 panic about 'carjacking' in Washington, DC. In each case, there were almost immediate policy responses that increased the budgets of punishment bureaucrats, passed more punitive laws, and diverted the system's resources from other priorities. For example, the shoplifting panic led California state lawmakers to furnish $300 million more to police and prosecutors so they could punish retail theft more aggressively. A few months later, the California governor announced yet another measure, the 'largest-ever single investment to combat organized retail theft,' adding another $267 million to fifty-five police agencies. Justifying the move, the governor said: 'When shameless criminals walk out of stores with stolen goods, they'll walk straight into jail cells.' So, how do moral panics happen? During the 1960s and 1970s in England and the U.S., the news focused on Black people, poor people, and immigrants as the source of uncontrollable 'crime waves.' Their stories were nearly identical to what we see today: media panic about 'crime waves' and quotes from police, prosecutors, and judges about the need to roll back so-called reforms framed as too lenient. The rhetoric of current punishment bureaucrats and pundits echoes almost verbatim the opinions voiced by conservative white business and police groups of the 1970s, although now there is more of an effort, as I'll discuss later, to portray such views as 'progressive' and demanded by marginalized people themselves. In each case, minor tweaks in bureaucratic policy or marginal reforms that could not, as a matter of empirical reality, have a significant impact on society-wide violence are vehemently debated. The evidence of the root causes of interpersonal harm—like that marshaled by the Kerner Commission, which studied U.S. crime in 1968 and recommended massive social investment to reduce inequality—is ignored. And the cycle continues: moral panic is followed by calls for more police surveillance, militarization, higher budgets for prosecutors and prisons, and harsher sentencing. Because none of these things affect violence too much, the problems continue. The selective curation of anecdote is an essential mechanism of copaganda. Imagine two scenarios. A city had ten thousand shoplifting incidents in 2023, down from fifteen thousand shoplifting incidents in 2022. But in 2023, a local news outlet ran a story every day about a different shoplifting incident, while in 2022, the news ran only fifteen stories all year on shoplifting incidents. In which city do you think the public is more likely to believe shoplifting is a greater problem, even a crisis? In the city with more shoplifting, or the city with twenty-five times more stories about shoplifting? By cherry-picking anecdotes—indeed, even by using isolated individual pieces of data as misleading anecdotes—news reports can distort our interpretation of the world. Using a similar process, they can also distort our understanding of what other people—particularly people with whom we don't interact—think about the world. Because one can find anyone to say essentially anything, reporters have leeway to select which 'true' views of 'ordinary people' to share and which to ignore. One of my favorite examples comes from Copaganda Hall of Famer Martin Kaste, who for some reason National Public Radio still permits to cover the police. (I awarded Kaste this honor in absentia during a private ceremony attended by two cats and my research assistants in my basement.) In 2022, Kaste published an article and widely disseminated radio piece about a rise in shootings and murders during the pandemic. Murders were down nationally in 2022 when he published the stories but they had increased in 2020 and 2021. As with much of Kaste's police reporting, the article is a buffet for the copaganda gourmand. Under the bolded heading 'Less Risk of Getting Caught,' Kaste asserts that there is now 'less risk of getting caught' for shooting someone in the United States. The support for that assertion was an ordinary person in Seattle: Anthony Branch, 26, got into trouble for carrying a gun when he was a teen. Watching the gun culture in his neighborhood, he thinks more minors and felons are carrying guns illegally now for one simple reason: 'Defund the police,' as he puts it. Kaste reports as national news—without context or skepticism—a single person blaming 'defund the police' for more shootings. Without presenting any contrary views, NPR delivers Branch's views, accurately conveyed though they may be, as implicitly representative of other people who've been prosecuted and incarcerated and who live in poor neighborhoods. In fact, police budgets were (and are) at all-time highs nationally. And a review of hundreds of police budgets showed that they received the same share of overall city budgets in 2021 as in 2019. So, the police were not defunded after the 2020 George Floyd protests. Their budgets have increased overall each year, including the year George Floyd was murdered. Thus, reduced police budgets could not have led to it being easier to get away with shooting someone in 2021 than 2019. The article's thesis is impossible. Knowing this national causal connection is unsupported, Kaste nonetheless boosts the claim by immediately noting that Seattle has 'lost hundreds of officers after the protests that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd.' But even in Seattle, which was an outlier in slightly reducing its police budget by about 10 percent, the reduction didn't affect relevant police operations, and police executives themselves in internal memos identified non-essential duties that armed officers could cut without affecting enforcement of violent crime (such as parking meter ticketing). Indeed, as the local NPR station reported, debunking the 'myth' that Seattle police were defunded, 'not a single sworn officer has lost their job or pay due to budget constraints.' Even if we ignore that the NPR piece purported to draw national lessons and if we focus only on Seattle, there is no evidence that the kind of small reduction to unrelated categories in Seattle's police budget in 2021 could have led to widespread changes in murder. Most damning to Kaste's thesis, though, is that murders decreased in Seattle in 2021 even though the police budget decreased, which undermines the article's thesis. Indeed, the police budget was larger in 2020 when murder increased the most. No person with a contrary view is quoted, nor is anyone included to explain the actual empirical evidence. I do not doubt that the source gave these quotes to the reporter, but by selectively choosing which people's views to represent and which people's views to exclude, the news can distort our perceptions. This is one of the pernicious functions of NPR here: to give liberal news consumers intellectual permission to support more funding for more police because, although it is baselessly connected to less murder, even marginalized people targeted by police supposedly want it. This is how the curation of true anecdotes leads to false interpretations of the world. Copyright © 2025 by Alec Karakatsanis. This excerpt originally appeared in Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission. Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue Want to read more Teen Vogue history coverage? 6 of the Most Famous Cults in U.S. History This Deadly Georgia Lake Holds Secrets About U.S. History Helen Keller's Legacy Has Been Sanitized Why We're Still So Obsessed With the Salem Witch Trials
