Moderator: Sandra Susan Smith (Harvard Kennedy School)

Speakers: Robert Vargas (University of Chicago), Alec Karakatsanis (Civil Rights Corps), Cerise Castle (Independent Journalist), Ramzi Kassem (CUNY School of Law)

[Panelist Ramzi Kassem did not wish to be recorded and therefore his excellent remarks have been omitted from the video and from the transcript of the recording.]

Summary: In the spirit of media critique, this panel opened with questions about what mainstream news media get wrong on criminal system reporting and how this produces a kind of propaganda and mythos about law enforcement success, the true incidence of crime and violence in communities, and trends over time. The panel then turned to the incentive structure and deeply embedded relationships between academics and law enforcement agencies, and how some of the same individual academics may be serving as contractors and evaluators, a conflict of interest that is rarely acknowledged and which may fundamentally influence the direction of scholarship. Panelists also spoke about the difficulty of digging into patterns of criminal behavior and misconduct committed by law enforcement officers and how challenging it can be to access what should be public information about public institutions. Finally, panelists spoke about the need to scrutinize media sources, academic funders, the source of scholarship, the sources of journalists, and individual biases in understanding the close-knit relationships between media, academia, and law enforcement and how these relationships prefigure the available policy landscape, commonly repeated tropes, and dominant narratives of race and crime.

 

Click here to download the transcript of Panel 2

Highlights from the panel:
 

  • “[W]hat we should be doing... I think what we're trying to do… the panelists here are trying to do is push people to be more transparent about their values. … Jason Stanley defines it as masking propaganda. And that's what academic copaganda is. It's using the liberal democratic ideal of science and objectivity to hide political interest in the background. And I think it's the duty of academics and journalists to try to untether that to do something about it.” – Robert Vargas
     
  • “It's like piecing together these webs of institutions that I think we need to scrutinize more and the networks, consulting firms, PR firms, police foundations, police departments and the researchers. It truly is [] multi-institutional. I'm thinking of calling it… somebody mentioned John Mearsheimer's work, something similar to a police lobby that is at work here.” – Robert Vargas
     
  • “I don't think that the mainstream news media is just trying its best and is just failing nonetheless. But I think that we have to apply some of the power mapping and organizing strategies that we do in our legal work to thinking about copaganda. So one of those things is… I was trying… I did this because a lot of the grassroots groups, whether they're jail closure campaigns, mutual aid groups, participatory defense hubs, groups in the M4BL ecosystem, abolitionists, whatever, actually student groups a lot of them. I prepared these resources that look like they could be and should be for journalists, but they also are actually organizing tools, they're toolkits.” – Alec Karakatsanis
     
  • “Your contribution is not just doing research to identify the evidence for this proposition. It's also your own institutions are places where certain forms of power get enacted and certain forms of violence get sanitized. And so you have to be thinking much more like an organizer in your own institutions and these institutions have to be holding each other accountable within it. And the news media is the same thing. I just cannot for the life of me understand why some of the unions in these journalist organizations are not taking these issues seriously and demanding accountability for coverage that is destroying people's faith in the mainstream media generally.” – Alec Karakatsanis
     
  • “[P]eople of integrity in our society have an obligation not just to understand and cultivate in their own mind and fortify their own minds against propaganda and do all the things that that are very difficult but -- and that require a lot of time and energy because we're propagandized -- but they have an obligation to seek out others and to form community and relationships and to be strategic in how they fight back against it.” – Alec Karakatsanis
     
  • “[Journalists should be] seeking out alternative sources of information; talking to people in communities (just as we were talking about on the last panel); building those relations; getting sources from people that have the lived experience, that have been in these neighborhoods for years. One of the best sources for the reporting that I've done, looking back at things that happened before I was alive, was going to these neighborhoods and talking to long-term residents that actually saw this stuff happen in front of them and giving me places to follow up that maybe you wouldn't necessarily find when looking at the data.” – Cerise Castle
     
  • “[T]he simplest suggestion, which is that as journals are requiring authors to upload their data and code for replication, one simple thing would be for journals to require authors to post the MOUs or data use agreements that made their evaluation possible.” – Robert Vargas, on the need for disclosure of academics’ dual roles as contractors for and evaluators of policing agencies
     
  • “I think what we need to focus on is holding funders accountable, holding philanthropy accountable. And you know there are wings of philanthropy that are explicitly devoted to incremental change and some that are more towards transformational. And for those invested in incrementalism, I think you just have to point out the hypocrisy of how the vast majority of police surveillance technologies that are adopted undergo no evaluation whatsoever before they get implemented in Black and brown communities. There are legal scholars like Elizabeth Joh who argue that is literally human subjects experimentation on Black and brown people. It is Tuskegee in 2024. And so what I'm trying to convince people in this world is to embrace disruption to produce transformational change.” – Robert Vargas