As calls grow to defund and abolish ICE, author Alec Karakatsanis warns that activists should take care to not fall for “copaganda,” which “takes ordinary people who are outraged over what’s happening and converts them into supporting meaningless reforms that actually don’t reduce the size or power or budget of these bureaucracies.” Karakatsanis is the author of Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. He breaks down many of the myths about crime and policing that arose in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests over the past decade, including the reformist myth of police body cameras and the so-called crime wave. Police-tracked crime, “contrary to what you have been told in the news every single day for the last several years, is actually down,” says Karakatsanis, but fearmongering mainstream media narratives are “designed to make people so afraid that they support repressive institutions that infringe on their own liberty, that don’t make them safer, but that give people in power in our society more ability to control and manipulate.”
