Police Budgets Quotes

“If you're an amateur, professional, or aspiring journalist in any city in the U.S., a good story for you would be to dig into the budget and number of employees that your local police department devotes to all forms of public relations. There's a reason they try to hide it.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Over the years, numerous local officials have told me they cannot support reducing police budgets because they are terrified of retaliation by police, including of cops raiding their homes or stopping and harassing their loved ones. Such intimidation is a pervasive fact of daily life for local progressive politicians--and even of numerous judges who have confided in me about their fear of retaliation against their families by police.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“The "police shortage" articles assuming the need to preserve or increase the current number of armed police officers are really about something else: the question of whether our society wants to reduce key forms of inequality or not.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Copaganda goes into overdrive when the punishment bureaucracy encounters threats to its size, power, and profit. The punishment bureaucracy crafts stories about its own violence and ineffectiveness to get people to support "reforms" that do not challenge and--even worse--often increase its size and power.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Ignoring her election victory as evidence that a lot of voters liked her positions, the journalists quoted one person on the street to prove her unpopularity. The random person stated that police were "underpaid," that they were necessary to "keep order," and that he was opposed to their abolition. Where did the intrepid Times reporters unearth this supposedly ordinary person? Outside a memorial for the two police officer at a police station.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“In my years as a civil rights lawyer, I have seen virtually all the same cycle in city after city: Politicians respond to the fallout from an incident of police violence by pledging various "reforms" that are either meaningless or things the police had been asking for anyway. These pledges are followed by increases in police budgets. Overall police violence grows, and the cycle repeats.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News