[Police Brutality\Alec Karakatsanis]
Karakatsanis: “Politicians respond to the fallout by pledging more recruitment and training of ‘good cops,’ better ‘community policing’ practices, and rewritten ‘use of force’ policies. These pledges are then followed by increases in police budgets.”
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Lawyer Alec Karakatsanis says main problems with abusive policing has little to do with a “few bad apples.”
Civil rights lawyer and former public defender Alec Karakatsanis has penned an op-ed in Slate, decrying the view that problems with police brutality boil down to a few “bad apples” amongst a sea of “good cops.”
In “What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Good Cop’?” he explores the real problem: an ever-growing police bureaucracy built on “surveillance, brutality, profit, and family separation.”
“I have seen virtually the same cycle in every major city: police militarization, surveillance, incarceration, and unconstitutional abuses leading to a particularly high profile crime by police caught on video,” Karakatsanis writes. “Politicians respond to the fallout by pledging more recruitment and training of ‘good cops,’ better ‘community policing’ practices, and rewritten ‘use of force’ policies. These pledges are then followed by increases in police budgets after the unrest subsides. The police bureaucracy keeps expanding, and police keep killing Black people.”
Karakatsanis is the founder of Civil Rights Corps, an organization designed to advocate for racial justice and bring systemic civil rights cases on behalf of impoverished people. He was named the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice and was awarded the Stephen B. Bright Award for contributions to indigent defense in the South by Gideon’s Promise. The author of Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (The New Press), he lives in Washington, DC. In recent months, Karakatsanis has been speaking out and working towards quick action to prevent the uncontrolled spread of coronavirus in the nation’s jails and prisons.
