News media, public officials, and the police themselves keep telling us that public safety requires ever more policing, despite all evidence to the contrary. In Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News (New Press, 2025), civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis analyzes centrist-liberal news reporting from 2020-2024 to show how media and police narrow our understanding of threats, manufacture fear, and promote punishment as a solution.
Karakatsanis is founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, a non-profit organization dedicated to challenging systemic injustice in the US legal system. He has also written widely on this topic, including the 2019 book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System; and a 2024 article in the Yale Journal of Law and Liberation on how the body camera movement has further entrenched the police state. Since 2022 he's been writing Alec's Copaganda Newsletter, "about how police and the media distract us from what matters," from which his new book draws. He's on BlueSky at https://bsky.app/profile/equalityalec.bsky.social. Royalties from Copaganda are being donated to the charity Stop LAPD Spying, at the Los Angeles Community Action Network. He talks here with Frann Michel about police budgets, the punishment bureaucracy, and his new book.
Alec Karakatsanis will be appearing at Powell's City of Books
1005 W Burnside St. Portland, OR 97209
Sunday, May 18th
7:00 PM PDT
Image: Cover of Copaganda, title and author in white lettering on blue background, used with permission.