Special Report: Jon Ben-Menachem on Copaganda and "Police Pullback" & "Ferguson Effect" Mythology

For this special report we talk to Jon Ben-Menachem. Jon is a researcher and journalist, currently working on his PhD in Sociology at Columbia University, where he researches political economy and punishment. As a journalist he’s published on policing, incarceration and austerity for The Appeal, Slate, Shadowproof, Current Affairs, Truthout and New York Daily News.

Today we invite Jon on to discuss his latest piece “What Media Gets Wrong About Last Year’s Uptick In Murders” which was published at Slate. There’s been a deluge of local and national media copaganda pushing for more cops and increased police budgets since the George Floyd protests and calls to defund police and abolish police that came along with them. It’s important to disrupt these copaganda narratives, and we thought Jon’s piece is helpful in that effort.

The "Special Report" is a new segment where we interview journalists, activists, academics and organizers on shorter pieces. These might be essays, articles, field reports direct from organizers and/or incarcerated people, short stories or even poems.  These interviews will be typically shorter than our full episodes, ranging somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour and will have a limited focus. Our goal with these is to talk about current events and ways that people are analyzing and seeking to intervene in them. Sometimes - as with this episode - there will be contradictions raised that we aren’t able to resolve neatly, but need to be grappled with. 

This is part of our effort to bring you all more content. We are both doing this full-time now and we hope to continue to bring you all about 4 of our full episodes monthly, but also sprinkle in about 2 of these special reports or smaller discussions each month as well. To support this work we are on a current pledge drive to hit 1,000 patrons and we’re only 20 patrons away from that big goal as we publish this. So if you haven’t become a patron yet, now is a great time to do so. And thank you to all of the people who have been supporting us along the way.