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Just six years after millions of people across the country took part in racial justice uprisings after the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, politicians and pundits of all stripes — from reactionaries like President Donald Trump to progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — have turned against demands to decrease funding for police. Those demands were popularized over years of organizing from a broad popular movement against decades of unprecedented mass incarceration.

In this interview, Alec Karakatsanis explains the roots of the backlash, how both Republicans and Democrats have used it to increase the powers of police, and why it’s essential to rebuild the movement to fund communities, not cops. Karakatsanis is the founder and executive director of the Civil Rights Corps, an organization that has pioneered landmark litigation challenging systemic injustices in the punishment bureaucracy, author of the book, Copaganda: How the Police and Media Manipulate our News, and publisher of the Copaganda Newsletter.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ashley Smith: After the police murder of George Floyd, the U.S. exploded in protest, becoming the biggest wave of mass demonstrations in U.S. history with as many as an estimated 26 million people marching across the country. Republicans and Democrats launched a backlash against the movement. What have they argued and done?

Alec Karakatsanis: It’s important to underscore that it’s not just Republicans behind the backlash. It’s a bipartisan establishment assault on the movement that emerged in the decade before 2020. That struggle aimed to reduce the size and power of the punishment bureaucracy, the term I use to describe the institutions the government uses to repress people and the for-profit industries parasitic on them.

“Reforms” Didn’t End Police Violence in 2020 and They Won’t End ICE Violence Now

That bureaucracy’s role is to control and manage inequality, targeting the most oppressed in our society, from poor people to people of color to people with disabilities and immigrants. It also represses the people involved in social movements that struggle for a more equal society in order to prevent those movements from achieving popular power. Both parties denounced the social movement’s demand to decrease investment in the bureaucracies of repression and increase investment in systems of care.

They used three main tactics. First, they whipped up a frenzy over retail theft and street crimes, harms mainly associated in the public imagination with poor and marginalized people. A lot of this was not founded in facts. For instance, the supposed epidemic of shoplifting turned out to be a lie. It wasn’t going up nationally at all.

They used that fiction to deflect attention from the crimes perpetrated by police, prison guards, bankers, pharmaceutical executives, tax evaders, polluters, and health insurance companies. These cause far more death, injury, and harm to our safety than crimes committed by poor people. For example, FBI figures for all property crimes combined in the United States are dwarfed by estimates of corporate wage theft.

Second, as discussed at length in Copaganda, they claimed that crimes committed by marginalized people are increasing across the country. This fearmongering tricked lots of people into thinking that crime is going up. It’s actually plummeted to historic lows.

Third, liberal and conservative pundits and media claimed that the only solution to their manufactured lie of increasing crime is more investment in the punishment bureaucracy. So, dozens of cities expanded budgets for police and prisons each year since the killing of George Floyd.

Trump in particular has dramatically increased funding of the surveillance state. And he’s deploying its institutions like the National Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to collaborate with the police in city after city to crush marginalized people and political opposition.

How do these two parties carry out the same project in different ways?

Republicans deploy one set of arguments, experts, and myths to make their case on outlets like Fox News. They use racist, jingoistic, and misogynistic propaganda that demonizes oppressed people like immigrants, Muslims, poor people, the unhoused, and those with disabilities. They make a straightforward authoritarian case that some people must dominate others.

Because that’s so easy to see for many........

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