Crime News is Bad News

Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

I’d bet you a ham sandwich that, if you surveyed a reasonable sample of Americans, most would agree that we expect too much of the police. We expect them to investigate violent crimes, enforce traffic laws, provide crisis intervention, control wild animals, protect the environment, and safeguard private property. It’s unreasonable. Yet after the 2020 George Floyd protests and “Defund the Police,” most metropolitan police departments are even more overfunded and expected to perform miracles.

American police critics often say “copaganda” to describe mass media entertainment, particularly police dramas, that make law enforcement look both more necessary and more effective than they are. Defense attorney Alec Karakatsanis shifts focus onto mainstream journalism, which he accuses of papering over not only the police, but also any reasonable alternative suggestions. Our news media have the ability to decide what facts their audiences know, and what ideas the public considers “acceptable” or “mainstream.”

Why, Karakatsanis asks, do news outlets consistently lead with murder, sexual assault, and robbery? Police spend less than five percent of their time and budget on these crimes. Journalists regularly omit reporting on tax evasion, wage theft, or environmental degradation, which are crimes. But scary stories of violence sell precious ad space and keep audiences glued. Police know this, too; many PDs, hungry for voters and resources, have vastly increased public relations budgets since 2020.

Growing police budgets direct resources away from tools to address the root causes of crime. Attempts to redress poverty, housing scarcity, structural racism, and collapsing communities, seem abstract and squishy when crime leads the headlines. Indeed, many news consumers don’t know such attempts to redress even exist, because journalists cover them superficially, compared to the in-depth analysis that street crime regularly receives. What journalists bother to cover, winds up being what lives in audiences’ minds.

Karakatsanis sees three fundamental problems with crime reporting. First, journalists report words from politicians, police spokespeople, property owners, and other defenders of the status quo without meaningful analysis. Second, use of weasel words and deflections conceal the writers’ opinions behind seemingly neutral language. Third, news consumers lack critical reading background necessary to spot the first two problems. This leaves a voting populace frequently unaware that alternatives to the status quo exist, and have been tried.

Alec Karakatsanis

Scholars write extensively about law enforcement, and its alternatives. Karakatsanis describes many approaches to addressing crime without involving what he calls the “punishment bureaucracy.” (He finds the phrase “criminal justice system” falsely anodyne.) Some alternatives are strictly hypothetical, while others have been applied, mostly with success. But newspaper readers or basic cable watchers seldom see them. As Karakatsanis writes, “The news consistently fails to explain the substance of legitimate critiques of police, prosecutors, and prisons.”

Some readers might expect Karakatsanis’ analysis to have a partisan bent. Republicans have persistently made bank with “tough on crime” posturing. But journalistic defense of police has a bipartisan history. Nominally progressive politicians, and the reporters who support them, often use police to bolster their legislative bona fides. At least on “law and order” matters, there’s little daylight between the two major parties. Despite this, journalists frequently present any alternative as a Mad Max hellscape.

Worst, the problem is circular. Journalists lead with crime reportage, even now, when crime statistics are at near-record lows. Which crimes reporters consider worth covering, become the crimes politicians campaign and legislate on. The public’s perception of crime, irrespective of real-world conditions, justifies draconian police interventions, which wind up contributing to further crime. The statistically meaningless incident becomes the justification for crackdowns. Or, as Karakatsanis puts it, “Bad curation of anecdote leads to bad policy.”

These outcomes aren’t inevitable. Karakatsanis makes suggestions for how journalists could better handle volatile stories, though he admits that’s unlikely to happen under the current system of perverse incentives. Until then, Karakatsanis describes a more engaged, critical approach to news consumption. That includes a better understanding of the language, sourcing, and references which journalists use, and a willingness to seek what the current story omits. It also means asking who’s helped by the current framing.

The situation is indeed bleak. Karakatsanis makes a persuasive case that we have an incomplete, blinkered understanding of our justice landscape. The stories which define our knowledge and explain our opinions, are frequently slanted or poorly representative. But beneath it, he maintains an optimism that conditions could change, if we, the masses, consume our news more critically. We aren’t beholden to the news industrialists who distribute our stories. We can take control, if we want.

“Debate” Forever, Accomplish Anything Never

Charlie Kirk

Of the numerous encomiums following Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week, I’ve seen many writers praise his love of “debate.” They’ve extoled his supposed fondness for college speaking tours where the largest feature was his open-mike question sessions, where he used his proven acumen to dismantle undergraduates’ post-adolescent leftist idealism. He died under a banner emblazoned with his speaking slogan: “Prove Me Wrong.”

Recent public-facing conservatives have enjoyed the appearance of “debate.” Like Kirk, Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder have made bank playing college campuses, inviting ill-prepared undergrads to challenge their talking points. Crowder’s notorious “Change My Mind” table banner turned him into one of the most eminently memeable recent public figures. And almost without fail, they mopped the floor with anyone who dared challenge them.

Smarter critics than me have shown how these “debates” are, at best, fatuous. Kirk, Shapiro, and Crowder arrive better prepared, often carrying reams of supporting research that undergraduates just don’t have. Shapiro is an attorney, a graduate of Harvard Law School, while Crowder is a failed stand-up comedian, so they’re simply better trained at extemporaneous speaking. Kirk’s training was informal, but his mentor, advertising exec Bill Montgomery, coached him well.

Myths of Socratic dialog, high school and college debate clubs, and quadrennial Presidential debates, have falsely elevated the ideal of “debate.” The notion that, if we talk long enough, we’ll eventually overcome our differences, underlies the principles of American representative democracy. College freshman comp classes survive on the notion that we can resolve our disputations through language. As a former comp teacher, I somewhat support that position.

However, we’ve seen how that unfolds in real life. As Rampton and Stauber write, defenders of the status quo prevent real change on important issues by sustaining debate indefinitely. As long as reasonable-sounding people keep discussing how to handle racism, war, police violence, global warming, and other issues on basic cable news, they create the illusion that controversies remain unresolved. Conservatives need not win, only keep the debate alive.

Public-facing conservatives on college campuses are the reductio ad absurdum of this reality. When men in their thirties, trained to speak quickly, and notice fiddling verbal inconsistencies, try to tackle wide-eyed undergrads, they look victorious. But that’s an illusion, created by the fact that they control the field. Just because an attorney can conduct cross-examination, or a comedian can do crowd work, doesn’t mean they’re correct.

Plato and Aristotle, depicted by Raphael

Just as importantly, the changing technological landscape means students have less information in reserve for extemporaneous discussion. Back in my teaching days, technological utopians claimed that students having information in reserve was less important than being able to access information on an as-needed basis. But these “debates” prove that, in the marketplace of image, knowing your subject matters when your opponent is stuck Googling on their smartphone.

Since I left teaching, ChatGPT and other “large language models” have diminished students’ need to formulate ideas in any depth. As I told my students, we don’t write only to communicate our ideas to others; writing also crystalizes our vague, ephemeral thoughts into a useful form, via language. But if students delegate that responsibility to artificial “intelligence,” they can’t know their own ideas, much less defend them on the fly.

Higher education, therefore, leaves students ill-prepared not only to participate in Charlie Kirk-style “debates,” but also to judge whether anybody has deeper ideas than supported by street theatre. I don’t blame teachers; I’ve known too many teachers who’ve resisted exactly this outcome. Rather, it’s a combination of bloated administration, regulations handed down by ill-informed legislatures, and a PR campaign that made Kirk look more erudite than he actually was.

Socrates saw his dialectical method, not as an abstract philosophical good, but as an approach to civic governance. In works like Republic and Phaedrus, he declared his belief that deep thinking and verbal acumen trained up worthy, empathetic rulers. But his approach required participants whose approach went beyond mere forms. It required participants sophisticated enough to admit when they were beaten, and turn words into substantive action.

Charlie Kirk was an avatar of a debate structure that prizes fast talking over deep thinking. His ability to steamroll students barely out of high school looks impressive to people who watch debates as spectator sport. But his approach favors form over substance, and winning the debate over testing the superior ideas. He was exactly the kind of rhetorician that Socrates considered an enemy of the Athenian people.

This produces a society that’s talked out, but too tired to act.ac

Return to Tim Burton’s Gotham

Sam Hamm and Joe Quinones, Batman ’89

Gotham reels with the Penguin’s recent death and Max Schreck’s disappearance, and a gang of Batmen are ready to step into the gap. But Batman himself doesn’t want the civilian help, especially when the Joker gang uses the crowd to create chaos after an armored car heist. Fortunately, the hero the city really needs emerges: District Attorney Harvey Dent. Sure, Batman offers the city blunt-fisted justice, but Dent offers what the city really needs: justice.

Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie and its 1992 sequel were commercial successes, but their downmarket approach divided comics purists. Warner Brothers especially tarnished the movies’ legacy by replacing Burton with the more pliable Joel Schumacher, turning the franchise into a merchandise factory. Probably the greatest loss was Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent, whose story began in the first movie before vanishing. So DC brought original screenwriter Sam Hamm aboard to complete the unfinished arc.

This version of Harvey Dent is ambitious, hoping to apprehend both Batman and Commissioner Gordon. (Notwithstanding that he’s engaged to Gordon’s daughter Barbara.) He’s also proudly, assertively Black, having worked his way out of Gotham’s chronically impoverished Burnside neighborhood. But Dent isn’t Burnside’s only Black hero. A young martial artist, clad in black and yellow, has begun defending the neighborhood’s streets by night. Just in time, too, because the city has mobilized the National Guard.

Movie and comics fans alike already know Dent is doomed to become Two-Face, a criminal whose morality relies on a literal coin flip. Hamm’s interpretation resembles Aaron Eckhart’s performance from The Dark Knight, in that it’s driven not merely by crime, but by a belief in absolute binary justice. Importantly, in this story, Two-Face isn’t his name; he never stops being Harvey Dent, a local hero who believes in bringing justice to Gotham’s unrepresented side.

Hamm’s story owes a visible debt to Frank Miller’s 1986 revisionist classic The Dark Knight Returns. Not only the Joker and Batman gangs, or a city that requires intervention while resenting those who intervene. Hamm also pilfers Miller’s theme of Batman getting older, questioning his ability to save anyone. Unlike Miller’s Batman, Hamm’s version is introspective enough to question whether he might be making circumstances worse. Especially when his brute-force justice gets poor Gothamites killed.

A splash panel depicting some of artist
Joe Quinones’ preliminary sketches

Hamm’s pacing straddles the difference between movies and comics. His cinematic swoop carries him from talky exposition scenes, straight into choreographed action, never hammocking in just one style. But he also recognizes the importance of maintaining the momentum not only within the story, but between issues. This story originally ran as a six-issue limited series, and Hamm inserts cliffhangers that would’ve carried the story between issues, but which vanish seamlessly in the collected single volume.

Movies differ from comics for one important reason: actors get older. Recent comics-based movies have required Hugh Jackman to have the same body at age 55 that he had at thirty. In movies, characters can’t recur forever; story arcs, once complete, must end. Artist Joe Quinones draws Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne getting grey around the temples, wheezing with exertion, and planning for his legacy as a hero. Time, in this notably timely comic, clearly passes.

Quinones doesn’t just draw Batman as Michael Keaton. He also includes remarkable depictions of franchise actors like Billy Dee Williams, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Michael Gough as they appeared in the middle 1990s. Marlon Wayans and Winona Ryder, who reportedly had handshake deals to appear in further Batman sequels, also appear. Quinones’ attention to detail emphasizes not only who the actors are, but what unique traits they could’ve brought to this story, had it been filmed.

Between them, Hamm and Quinones recapture Tim Burton’s rococo style. They depict Burton’s comedically tall buildings and close-packed streets, the kind of art-deco frippery that gives his earliest work its distinctive style. Hamm’s dialog captures Burton’s trademark lilt, while Quinones draws scenes from Dutch angles that give still images a high-speed dynamic. I can’t quite determine who involve Burton was in creating this story, but it really looks like something he might’ve shot around 1995.

Not that it’s a lifeless time capsule. It addresses politics, economics, and racial dynamics that were implicit in the original movies, but went largely unaddressed. In that regard, it looks like a hybrid of two different stories which might’ve been written twenty-five years apart. I realize not all comics fans like Burton’s movies, or the coarsening effect they had on the comics market. But for his fans, this is the sequel Joel Schumacher should’ve made.

Opening the Door to Violence

Charlie Kirk

Nobody cares what I think about Charlie Kirk’s recent public assassination, nor should they. Thanks to the internet, our public discourse is littered with opinionated cranks whose ad hoc platforms give them space to spew unbaked viewpoints and soak up citizens’ dwindling attention. Kirk himself might’ve become one such purveyor, had marketing copywriter Bill Montgomery not mentored and bankrolled him. Also, Kirk might still be alive.

I face two conflicting impulses regarding Kirk’s death. Historically, I’ve been a longtime advocate of nonviolent resistance, believing that shows of force only give powerful people the justification they need to instigate draconian crackdowns. Therefore, I would never advocate anyone actively assassinating Charlie Kirk, no matter how reprehensible I find his opinions. Anyway, that’s my longstanding historical opinion, which I still broadly believe.

Recent political trends, however, force me to evaluate my position. We saw, during the summer protests of 2020 and after, how the police used routine, lawful protests as justification for attacking American citizens like a Greek hoplite phalanx. More recently, we’ve seen ICE agents swarming over workplaces, businesses, and whole communities, in such number that Gandhi-like responses would be thoroughly impotent, and possibly even get people killed.

Concisely, you can’t hug it out with the fash.

Nonviolent resistance always contains within it the prospect of violence. Dietrich Bonhoeffer reached the point where he objectively needed to participate in the plot to assassinate Der Führer. Dr. King’s resistance to state authority always implicitly held groups like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam in reserve. Whenever we assert the primacy of nonviolent resistance, we tacitly also say: “For as long as that works.”

Demonstrations, language, and semiotics won’t work under current conditions. We can’t afford the time necessary to convince a critical number of Americans to withhold their support from an administration that shows thorough disrespect for the law. Not only the upper echelons of power, the White House or the complicit Congress, but also the boots-on-the-ground functionaries who get their limited scraps of social capital from helping enforce the administration’s goals.

Thus we hit my first impulse: the necessity, in dire times, for direct action. We must do something. Not just generating symbols or waving placards; these only work under normal conditions. Rather, we must strike at those who misuse their power for selfish, harmful, or venal ends. When the Einstatzgruppen invade, you don’t inaugurate a committee to build consensus. You shoot back.

But there’s my second impulse. Who or what gives us the authority to exercise violence? Under whose orders to we fire and reload? Mine? I’d make a terrible generalissimo; I can easily imagine getting so lost in my personal mythology that I forget the cause or ignore my allies. As Brian Klaas writes, power corrupts good people, but power also attracts those already vulnerable to corruption. And I’m Christian enough to know my vulnerability to Original Sin.

Revolutionary violence frequently starts well, but it seldom ends that way. Robespierre, the rhetorician of the French Revolution, couldn’t accept that he’d won, and launched the Reign of Terror. Chairman Mao called for perpetual revolution, which precipitated sectarian infighting after the Kuomintang collapsed. Contra Marx’s trust in collective wisdom, there’s no evidence that the next revolution will resolve any better.

Whenever we commence a campaign, we cannot anticipate where it will conclude. Society has too many moving parts to allow simple point-to-point planning. We can, at best, try to anticipate contingencies and make allowances. But the more people involved, and the more sweeping the social consequences we pursue, the more likely it becomes that we’ll unleash a monster we cannot control. The likelihood of that beast consuming us is high.

As I was drafting this essay, news broke that law enforcement had apprehended the probable shooter. Far from a leftist revolutionary, Tyler Robinson is apparently a conservative and a Nick Fuentes follower, who felt Kirk was too accommodationist. All reports are preliminary, and the accused deserves a fair trial, notwithstanding today’s political currents. But this only supports my belief that once you permit violence, you don’t get to stop it.

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes that strongman dictators generally only leave power in chains, or in a coffin. Either way, they require somebody, inside the country or outside, to oppose them. Nobody outside America can challenge our military, suggesting we’ll need insiders to take initiative. But history isn’t on our side; once we allow violence into politics, we can’t eject it easily, and the price may be steeper than we anticipate.

The Return of the Towers and the Fellowship of the Ordinary King

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 86
Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards! (Discworld Book 8)

Captain Samuel Vimes, of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, serves an institution that has outlived its purpose. An honest man in cynical times, he performs the actions of police work, knowing the city-state administration doesn’t need or respect police anymore. But deep within the city’s bowels, a movement is festering, with an eye toward overthrowing Ankh-Morpork’s ensconced hierarchy. Soon, Vimes and his men may be the only thing standing against anarchy.

Readers can enjoy this novel in two ways. First, this dry-witted satire of paperback fantasy takes the city guards, who usually exist so our muscular protagonist can kill them like redshirts, and foregrounds their story. In a genre often dominated by “great doings of great men,” author Terry Pratchett reverses the lens, retelling the story from among the people, the pedestrians whose workaday peasant lives fantasists often ignore.

Second, Pratchett directly lampoons the publishing business. In 1989, when Pratchett published this novel, three editors—Donald A. Wollheim, Lester and Judy-Lynne Del Rey, and Betty Ballantine—controlled the fantasy genre. And they largely worked from a beat sheet that Lester Del Rey derived from reading Tolkien, Terry Brooks, and Fritz Lieber. If fantasy felt repetitive in the 1970s and 1980s, that’s exactly why. Pratchett poked the publishing establishment in the eye.

Vimes, and his vestige of men, listlessly repeat the motions of the City Watch, walking the nighttime rounds and proclaiming “all’s well.” But the City Patrician has actively collaborated with the thieves and assassins, giving their guilds a legal status (a nod to Fritz Lieber’s cynical world-building). Therefore, there’s no crime for the City Watch to apprehend, since criminals are now above-board. Law, and law enforcement, have become meaningless ceremonies.

Until a massive dragon, long thought extinct, appears over the city skyline.

The Ankh-Morpork population progresses from denial to paranoia, and finally to acceptance of a world where dragons exist again. Only Vimes somehow keeps his head, managing to wrangle his City Watch comrades to investigate where the dragon came from, and who benefits from its appearance. From the depths of the city’s cesspits to the towers of the royal palace, Vimes determines to root out the truth through old-fashioned gumshoe work.

Sir Terry Pratchett

One can spot the stereotypes Pratchett satirizes. From Tolkien, he spoofs intricate world-building, through his fondness for explanatory footnotes on immaterial topics. He also mentions the restoration of the monarchy, but makes it so silly that the would-be king doesn’t even get a name. From Brooks, he spotlight’s specifically male heroism, which, in Pratchett’s world, inevitably comes to nothing. Heroes, in Ankh-Morpork, are a dime a dozen.

Ankh-Morpork is a city built entirely of shopworn genre stereotypes. Secret wizarding societies proliferate so often, it’s possible to stumble into the wrong one accidentally. Magic artifacts are so ubiquitous, they’re basically litter. Giant dragons that need slain may be extinct, but in the city’s finer quarters, one high-born aristocrat breeds their tiny cousins like champion poodles. Pratchett’s world depicts fantasy when the genre’s components have become banal.

To judge by the word count he dedicates to it, though, Pratchett plainly most enjoys the civic aspect. With assassins and thieves organized into guilds, a beloved Fritz Lieber boilerplate, politics has become the domain of backstabbers and pickpockets. Pratchett envisions a world governed by shifting alliance and skullduggery, that would make the Borgias seem listless and timid. In his luridly described prose, this terrifying edifice becomes hilarious.

Sam Vimes handles heroism diffidently. In a world flush with magic, he uncovers the truth through Poirot-like doggedness. After years on the sidelines, the City Watch must rediscover how to perform investigations. The learning curve is slow, and sometimes descends into slapstick. In the final reveal, however, these very human qualities, not the splendor of wizards or the glory of kings, make Vimes and his men heroic.

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw increasing rebellion against the genre style sheet. George R.R. Martin and Gregory Maguire thought, to resist the editors’ dominion, they needed to wallow in violence and sex, glorifying low behavior in high places. But the response, especially in mounting sequels, is cynicism and despair. Pratchett instead chose to present his rebellion through the medium of friendly teasing. The difference is palpable.

This was Pratchett’s eighth Discworld novel (of forty-one), and the first of his City Watch subseries. However, fans agree Pratchett needed several books to find his voice and the setting’s message. This novel makes a good entry point for genre fans and newbies alike, and Pratchett’s voice rings like an old friend.

Reviewer's note: Part 86 of my 1001 Books series used to be Pratchett's novel with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens. In light of the revelation of Gaiman's crimes, I no longer count that book on the list, and hereby completely replace it with this one.