Beware Pro-Police Propaganda from the Left
The idea that policing reduces "crime" is a classic trope of "copaganda." It even appears in left-wing publications. But the political Left should not be promoting this dangerous falsehood.
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Everybody needs to know about “copaganda.” As explained by civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis in his recent book (which I highly recommend), copaganda is pro-police propaganda. It can be employed by news media, academics, and even in fiction and film/TV. There are three main functions of copaganda:
It narrows our understanding of threats to our safety and well-being by focusing mostly on “crime” committed by poor people. What’s often ignored is large-scale wrongdoing that impacts most of us on a daily basis such as wage theft or fossil fuel companies continuing to burn fossil fuels and worsen climate change, among others.
It manufactures fears, crises, and panics about these threats. Often, marginalized people, such as racial minorities, immigrants, and poor people, are said to be the villains causing crime.
It promotes punishment for “crime” and promotes the idea that the criminal punishment system (including police) produces safety.
Note: I put “crime” in quotations because it is a political concept. What the authorities choose to deem a crime depends on who is in power and what conduct they consider to be acceptable or unacceptable. When I use the word “crime,” I’m referring to the narrow way it’s used by those engaged in copaganda. “Crime,” for instance, often means certain crimes defined by the FBI such as “violent” acts including “murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.” While these are definitely a problem in our society, they’re not the only ways in which people can harm each other. That’s why abolitionists—who argue for the eventual end of policing as we know it—tend to use the word harm, as it more fully encapsulates the threats to our safety and well-being than “crime.”
Now, in his book, Karakatsanis gives numerous examples of copaganda. Many of the examples come from the mainstream media. But copaganda can even come from left-wing publications. Case in point: a June 13 article in Jacobin entitled “Zohran Mamdani is right on public safety” by Nick French. This article employs copaganda #3: it links policing to safety in a way that relies on false assumptions.
Jacobin published another article with similar wording on June 25 in which Liza Featherstone remarked on Mamdani’s plan to allow “police to focus on preventing and solving serious crimes.” I’m going to focus in this piece on French’s article, but the same analysis applies to what Featherstone wrote.
(Note, 7/6/25: For context, Mamdani had tweeted support for “defund the police” in 2020, a fact that Andrew Cuomo tried to use against him during the recent Democratic mayoral primary. But it didn’t seem to stick. As Briahna Joy Gray pointed out on her podcast, Mamdani basically got away with it because the race ended up being focused so much on Israel/Palestine.)
I’m familiar with NYC mayoral candidate Mamdani’s platform on public safety, so French’s article caught my attention. As I’ve written recently, Mamdani wants to create a department of community safety to address the root causes of crime and to better respond to mental health crises and implement violence interrupters. This sounds good. But Mamdani has also said that the “police have a critical role to play” in public safety, which runs counter to empirical evidence, which shows that police do not reduce crime. (This is one reason that abolitionists support defunding the police. Abolitionists also see policing as inherently violent and as unable to substantively respond to or prevent harm, provide justice, or to keep people safe. For an explainer on abolition, see my recent piece.)
French summarized Mamdani’s platform as such:
Mamdani put in a solid performance at the June 4 debate, projecting confidence in the face of opponents’ accusations that he is running on defunding the police. […] Rejecting the more radical sloganeering on public safety, as he has throughout his campaign, Mamdani argued for the creation of a “Department of Community Safety” to help prevent crime through social service provision and mental health services, on the grounds that it would reduce overwork and overburdening of police with work better suited for social workers and mental health counselors, so those police could more effectively prevent and prosecute violent crime. (emphasis mine)
This paragraph is fine until we get to the point about helping the police “more effectively prevent and prosecute violent crime.” We need to break this down.
First, the idea of crime “prevention.” This is a major tenet of copaganda—the assumption that policing prevents or reduces crime. (#3 on the above list.) This is simply not true. As Karakatsanis explains in his book, research shows that policing does not affect crime levels. So, adding more cops does not lead to less crime. Conversely, decreasing the number of cops does not lead to more crime. Key point: Policing doesn’t reduce crime! Remember, cops show up mostly after a crime has been committed. (Also see this piece by Karakatsanis in Current Affairs from 2020 in which he explains why “police reduce crime” is a very misleading framing.)
Next, the idea of police “solving crime.” The police are not very good at solving violent crime. We also know that cops only spend a tiny fraction (4 percent, according to one study) of their time responding to violent crime. Now, the assumption Mamdani makes (and that French agrees with) is that freeing up cops’ time will lead to more crime-solving. So, the idea is that if police aren’t responding to mental health distress calls, presumably they’ll have time to work on solving crime and will thus be more effective at it. But where’s the evidence for this? None is presented!1 Given how police spending has ballooned over the years, it begs the question: why haven’t the police dedicated more time to solving violent crime? Could it be because their priority is not “public safety” but rather to carry out class warfare and suppress political dissent? As abolitionist Mariame Kaba has pointed out, “We can’t simply change [the police’s] job descriptions to focus on the worst of the worst criminals. That’s not what they are set up to do.”
Assuming policing continues as is, it’s not clear at all that giving police more time to theoretically respond to violent crime will actually make police better at it (or ensure that they simply do more of it). Who’s to say that cops won’t just spend more time over-policing poor communities of color or migrant communities (because that’s where the “criminals” are!) or enforcing other low-level criminal violations? (Note: 7/7/25: As Karakatsanis pointed out about a recent NYT article, cops’ failure to solve crime is being presented as a reason to give them MORE technology and personnel. Somehow the cops’ failure to do something well justifies giving them MORE instead of “defunding” them!)
If you wish for more “violent crime” to be solved, you should present a better idea for what this “solving” looks like (is it just to arrest someone and convict them and put them in a cage?) and who should do it. At minimum, you should present an affirmative case for why it should be armed, highly militarized, violent agents of the state who solve crime by rounding people up into the punishment bureaucracy. You should make the case that we should continue to fund these agents to do this work because there are no other possible alternatives. But surely there cannot exist a leftist case in defense of the punishment bureaucracy. The only reasoning here, then, seems to be the false idea that policing leads to reduced crime.
This assumption is also seen in the paragraph below:
This approach, which emphasizes social services not as a replacement for but a complement to traditional policing, is a departure from the calls to defund or even abolish the police that became prominent on the Left starting in 2020. […] Mamdani’s position is both politically savvy and substantively sensible. Proposals to defund or abolish the police are very unpopular, and understandably so — people reasonably worry that a reduction in police will leave them more vulnerable to violent crimes like theft or assault. (my emphasis)
Now, let’s assume that the people in the linked survey (the full text of which is behind paywall) did endorse the idea that reducing police will leave them more vulnerable to violent crime. Fine. But the author has a responsibility here to point out to readers that these respondents’ assumptions run counter to the evidence, which shows that policing does not reduce crime. (And as I mentioned in my abolition piece, “defund” has polled well in other surveys. So, one bad survey does not mean that “defund” is doomed.)
Now, some may bristle at what I’ve just written. Some may see it as a suggestion that poor or working-class communities of color who are concerned about crime are wrong. I’m not saying they are wrong. What I’m saying is incorrect is the assumption that the police have anything to do with protecting them. As Karakatsanis puts it: “you have to understand that preventing violence has nothing to do with the primary functions of police: social control.”
This issue has also been tackled elsewhere, such as in abolitionist Derecka Purnell’s piece on abolition, in which she explains how she came from a community that called the police for anything and everything. She clearly explains how she came to realize that the police were not going to save her or her community and that there had to be a better way to create safety for communities like hers. I’d encourage everyone to read that.
As abolitionist Angela Y. Davis has pointed out, taking the concerns about crime of poor communities of color seriously is important. It’s also an opportunity to promote a different vision of “safety and security”—in other words, a vision that does not promote policing and imprisonment as the solutions. Writing about the response to “defund” in 2020, she notes that the idea
had a jarring effect [for some people], conjuring up images of chaotic, crime-ridden (Black and Brown) communities, with no force in place to guarantee order. Some people, who live in so-called high crime neighborhoods, where they are preyed upon not only by the police but also by armed individuals and groups from their own communities and for whom the demand to defund the police was their first introduction to abolitionist ideas, were understandably bewildered. How would they survive at the mercy of malevolent groups who hardly care about the trajectory of stray bullets that have taken the lives of children and other bystanders? Their fears are real and not to be dismissed. But this is absolutely the moment to engage in the kind of educational activism that might help to encourage all of us, especially those of us who live in the most vulnerable neighborhoods, to purposefully rethink the meaning of safety and security.
As for “safety and security,” abolitionists Andrea J. Ritchie and Mariame Kaba explain further: Safety, they write, is “a set of resources, relationships, skills, and tools that can be developed, disseminated, and deployed to prevent, interrupt, and heal from harm.” Put another way, safety can be thought of as the things we need to thrive (housing, healthcare, social relationships, meaningful work, a clean environment, etc.). It’s also a set of alternative responses to harm/violence that do not involve punishment/policing.
Now back to the Jacobin article. Consider the paragraph below:
Mamdani’s public safety platform isn’t just a concession to what’s popular, however. Substantially addressing the root causes of violent crime in poverty would require massive wealth redistribution. When violence in the United States began to rise sharply in the 1960s, the inability of left forces to enact a robust redistributive agenda led US political leaders to construct a monstrous carceral state in response to public demands for a response to rising crime. (emphasis mine)
I suspect this might not be intentional on the part of the author, but the problem with the bolded part is that it subtly risks linking “rising crime” to mass incarceration. While I don’t dispute the facts of rising crime in the 1960s—or the rise of mass incarceration starting in the early 1970s—what I do dispute is the possible implication that mass incarceration has continued to result from a legitimate concern for—or a true occurrence of—“rising crime.” As Marc Mauer has detailed in Race to Incarcerate and as I summed up in another piece, “Levels of what we call ‘crime’ have gone up and down over the years even as imprisonment levels reached a peak in 2009.” Again, the problem here is the subtle unchallenged assumption that more crime should (or has) logically lead to more police or prisons. This follows easily when your underlying assumption is that adding more cops leads to a reduction in crime. (Remember, it doesn’t.)2
Now let’s get to the conclusion of the piece:
When it comes to reducing crime, the Left’s North Star must be attacking its roots by “winning redistribution from ruling elites,” as Adaner Usmani and John Clegg put it. And reforms to our often grievously unjust criminal justice system are both popular and necessary. Yet before we achieve the sort of ambitious redistribution that meaningfully reduces crime, an approach to the issue that focuses simply on reducing police budgets does not take seriously the real costs that crime imposes on people, costs that fall disproportionately on the poor, and which help explain popular opposition to defunding the police.
As an abolitionist, I have no problem with the idea that redistribution is important to attacking the root causes of crime. If investments in healthcare, jobs, housing, and more are needed to address crime and promote safety and well-being—which research shows that they are—then, yes, some of those efforts require wealth redistribution, and I support that. The problem comes in the latter part of the paragraph, where the author implies that redistribution is essentially a classist effort because it will happen too late to help the poor, who disproportionately experience crime now. Here, copaganda strikes again: the idea is that reducing police budgets/reducing police will lead to more crime. Again, this is false. And the mistaken idea that abolitionists do not care about victims of crime is addressed in this piece by Derecka Purnell. In fact, abolitionists care about all of the harms experienced by poor people, including the harms inflicted upon them every day by the police themselves such as violent encampment “sweeps,” sexual assault of women, abuse of minors, and so on. Abolitionists, in advocating for reducing police budgets in order to reduce contact between police and members of the public, are advocating for reducing police-inflicted harms now. This, to my mind, is what makes the abolitionist position superior to the purely redistributionist, pro-traditional policing one described by Mamdani and endorsed by French.
Now to the “before we achieve ambitious redistribution” sentiment. This implies that we have to abandon the (implied) classist project of abolition/defund because it will harm people in the here and now (false) and that reforms are the best we can do. Now, making reforms, assuming they actually work, need not actually be mutually exclusive with cutting police budgets (I’m not saying abolitionists across the board support “reformist” reforms, I’m just saying for the sake of what’s possible). But what “reforms” is the author talking about, anyway? As far as I can tell, the only “reform” mentioned would be to free up cops’ time so that they could get better at solving violent crime. Again, it’s hard to see how that would work. Simply giving police more free time does not mean they will spend it the way we want them to. And as Kaba has written, “efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms [...] have failed for nearly a century. Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.”
And in terms of “solving” crime, assuming the police manage to get better at it, this simply means that more people will be introduced into the punishment/imprisonment system, which does not deliver justice so much as inflict “incapacitation,” violence, and even torture on people and harms their families. Advocating for more people to come into contact with the criminal punishment system as it exists now (or even with some tweaks/reforms) is not really something that I think leftists should be advocating for. Putting into place some mental health response teams or housing efforts will not, by itself, alter the nature of existing policing that is left intact. Given how harmful the punishment system is, I think the better leftist position here, short of abolition, might be to simply not advocate for the part of Mamdani’s platform3 that calls for helping the police continue utilizing traditional policing to get better at solving crime. It’s one thing for a mayoral candidate in a city with a history of highly aggressive “broken windows” and stop-and-frisk policing to try not to alienate the police or their supporters during an election campaign; it’s quite another for leftists to agree with this stance, which is based on harmful and false pro-police propaganda.
Overall, the idea that the left should see community safety efforts (such as housing, mental health response teams, and so forth) as a “complement to traditional policing” (author emphasis) is, I think, dangerous and misleading. It’s trying to have it both ways: it implies acceptance of a part of abolitionist thinking (the idea that addressing root causes of harm is important) while rejecting another key part from which the former idea follows (the idea that policing is inherently violent and has shown itself incapable of reducing/preventing crime, delivering justice, or promoting safety and well-being).
We might even go a step further, though, and think a little bit more about whether Mamdani’s stance on police is good enough. In Dissent, J.W. Mason, who canvassed for Mamdani, wrote about how this is a delicate issue:
You can avoid saying the words “defund the police” on the campaign trail, as Mamdani did, but that doesn’t answer the question of how much funding to dedicate to policing. There will, inevitably, be high-profile cases of police violence that will provoke protests; the mayor will have to take a position. If there are renewed protests over Gaza on New York campuses, will he try to limit police involvement? (And will the police listen if he does?) Mamdani has promised to eliminate the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, which is notorious for its heavy-handed response to protests and is responsible for a disproportionate share of brutality complaints, lawsuits, and overtime. Whether he can deliver on this will be an important test of his relationship with the department.
That said, the proposal to create a new Office of Community Safety is promising, and it is an example of the kind of bureaucratic reorganization that mayors are generally able to carry out without too much difficulty. […] In the best-case scenario, this offers a route to reduce the role of the police without a public confrontation.
We might ask: is it really possible or desirable for a leftist candidate to avoid a “public confrontation” with an institution that serves an important role in upholding class relations in this country? I certainly suspect that Mayor Eric Adams and former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who are running in the general election, are going to go hard on the issue of crime in the upcoming election. Adams is a former cop—how could he not? This is where I think the “fighting strategy” of socialist Kshama Sawant is relevant. As she tells it, as a socialist candidate for office, you have to accept an adversarial battle on your hands. Just as you have to directly confront the billionaire class about taxation, so you must confront the police. If there’s someone who’s skilled enough to do it, surely it’s Mamdani?
[Update 8/19/25] “Copaganda” expert Alec Karakatsanis said recently on Bad Faith podcast on the subject of Mamdani and the police:
You have to tell the truth at the end of the day. The bar for lying to yourself and to the public is very, very, very high. Maybe there's some instances where you don't tell the full truth and you hide some of your real beliefs, but on really important matters of public debate and public policy, [you need to be] authentic and genuine and relentlessly telling the truth and explaining why you believe that and what evidence supports it and what you've done in your life and how your life lives up to your own values. [That’s the] best strategy at all times for all people at all levels of office. […] Never, ever apologize for your past positions [on “defund”]. Never walk back your legitimately held, evidence-based positions [on addressing the root causes of crime], and be unapologetic about who you are. […] There are enormous consequences to being the first person that does it.
Karakatsanis explained that any public official that challenges the police can expect to face threats, so they need a constituency to back them. Furthermore, there need to be more and more public officials taking these stances so that they become less dangerous to any particular individual.
As one commentator on twitter astutely put it:
i say this with an earnest desire for [Mamdani] to win based on correct and just stances. [..] the nypd do not play a role in safety. […] there is no reason to indulge falsehoods like this when his critics will lambast him regardless of the position he takes and doing so only gives legitimacy to the premise of those who want him to lose. […] if his dept of community safety gets off the ground independent of the nypd, that'll be a reassuring sign, but we need this validation of a poisonous institution to end.
I couldn’t agree more here. Mamdani needs to be honest, and his constituency needs to back him and embolden other public officials who are politically aligned with him to take similarly honest stances to declare that there is in fact no link between policing and public safety. Cops don’t make us safe!
As Purnell wrote in the Atlantic, not everyone is going to be convinced to become a prison and police abolitionist, but that need not stop our efforts. Comparing prison abolition to slavery abolition, she writes, “[I]f abolitionists waited to convince every single person that liberation was worth the pursuit, Black people might still be on plantations.” While there are some people we might not be able to win over to the abolitionist cause, we can and ought to point out bad arguments that are used to justify policing. And at minimum, leftists should not try to build a case for public safety improvement using pro-police propaganda. Instead of propping up the police, let’s work together to fight against all forces of class oppression—billionaires and police just the same.
Update: 7/24/25. As policing expert Alex Vitale has explained, “[T]here is little evidence that clearance rates [solving crime] can be significantly improved by policy interventions or that such improvements translate into safer streets.”
Another interesting point is that violent crime is at a 50-year low, yet this doesn’t seem to be causing leaders to call for fewer police or prisons. Probably because the mainstream position tends to advocate for more police and more prisons regardless of crime levels.
Update: 7/24/25. French’s article notes that Mamdani has expressed a desire to cut “the New York Police Department’s $80 million communications budget.” This would be welcome. And as Vitale points out in the same article I referenced in footnote 1,
One concrete step Mamdani could take to reduce police influence is to order his Police Commissioner to dramatically scale back the Department’s in-house press operation. The NYPD currently has 86 officers assigned to its 24-hour press unit, allowing it to control the news cycle on public safety issues, including the extensive use of “unnamed police sources.” Reducing that office and transferring some of its responsibilities to the Mayor’s office would give Mamdani more control over a public safety narrative that he wants to frame as much broader than the use of police and reduce the NYPD’s ability to exert pressure on local media to frame stories from a police perspective.