alec karakatsanis

THREAD. Did you know that Minneapolis police deployed 101 personnel to a 7-person vigil held one morning at Renee Good's memorial? The cops generated $1.92 million in overtime cash for themselves.

You can read the full investigation here, and you can get a tiny glimpse into the world of surveillance, profiteering, and overriding focus of U.S. policing on crushing any remotely progressive social movements. www.thisisbydesign.com/how-mpd-buil...

THREAD. Did you know that Minneapolis police deployed 101 personnel to a 7-person vigil held one morning at Renee Good's memorial? The cops generated $1.92 million in overtime cash for themselves.

At this vital time in understanding propaganda and authoritarianism, a reminder that we have free copies of Copaganda for teachers, students, and anyone who sends books to people in prison. If you want copies, link is in next post! My grandma says the book is amazing.

THREAD. This past week marks the 10-year anniversary of Civil Rights Corps. We have pioneered landmark civil rights litigation that has liberated hundreds of thousands of people from illegal confinement in jail cells.

We have also won $10,000,000s for the most vulnerable people in our society, pioneered political education and narrative strategies to change the way our society thinks about mass incarceration and family separation, and built innovative solutions to make our communities safer.

This is one consequence of the left not being clear about reducing budgets for state repression. Every Democratic Party politician going on about “training” and “body cams” and every Jacobin author vaguely saying the left should not talk about repressive budgets leads to this:

With all the talk on the center-left about supposedly needing to commit to existing levels of repression by preserving existing police, prison, and surveillance budgets, everyone seems to be forgetting ICE's new detention budget is 60% greater than entire federal prison system.

There is no moral, empirical, or politically strategic argument for the left to support existing expenditures on the bureaucracies of repression. Anyone telling you candidates must pretend to support extant budget allocations between repression and care is not being serious. bsky.app/profile/equa...

With all the talk on the center-left about supposedly needing to commit to existing levels of repression by preserving existing police, prison, and surveillance budgets, everyone seems to be forgetting ICE's new detention budget is 60% greater than entire federal prison system.

There are people writing in Jacobin magazine who are telling socialists not to oppose police contracts for stuff like this giving money to people like this.

The lack of seriousness in places like Jacobin on these issues is alarming. Basically it’s just incredibly superficial, wrongheaded slop about how it’s not “popular with the people” to question waste, fraud, and abuse in the profitable policing and surveillance bureaucracies.

There are people writing in Jacobin magazine who are telling socialists not to oppose police contracts for stuff like this giving money to people like this.

Private prisons making $1.4 billion charging corrupt ICE bureaucracy $307,000 “per bed” as top 15 cops in San Francisco make average of $700,000 is why shifting resources from systems of incarceration to systems of care is one of the most popular policies in 40 years of polling.

One of the fundamental truths being erased by the recent pro-police rhetoric among fancy liberals is that there is no coherent way to draw a line between the horrors of contemporary policing and ICE.

The same people who weaponized identity politics to avoid talking about material, structural reduction in inequality (e.g. liberals) are now leading a charge to lump the backlash to neoliberal identity rhetoric in with popular and important things like reducing state repression.

This sleight of hand enables key elites to capitalize on how annoying/unstrategic some leftists and liberals have been (e.g. how unwelcoming and jargony some are), and generally how unsatisfying identity-based grievance is in a world where the problems are with racial capitalism.

The same people who weaponized identity politics to avoid talking about material, structural reduction in inequality (e.g. liberals) are now leading a charge to lump the backlash to neoliberal identity rhetoric in with popular and important things like reducing state repression.

The new slogan "woke 1" is subtly being used to invoke extremely different things and then to dismiss it all. For example, never let anyone lump in public discomfort with neoliberal identity politics with **correct and popular** opposition to repression: bsky.app/profile/equa...