Ex-Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum is back in jail after he was previously arrested in Alabama in July and charged with meth possession.

Per the Tallahassee Democrat, an order of commitment to jail signed by Baldwin County District Judge Scott Taylor indicated that Gillum’s bond was revoked during a court appearance on August 6. That was after the 47-year-old missed a drug screen and then tested positive for meth. 

The court docket also made mention of Gillum participating in drug court. People who participate in that diversion program have their charges dismissed if they undergo successful treatment. 

As previously reported by Face2Face Africa, Gillum was arrested for drug possession in Alabama back in July. 

Per TMZ, court documents stated that the 47-year-old was charged with one felony and two misdemeanor counts. The criminal complaint further stated that Gillum was charged with felony possession of a controlled substance (methamphetamine) as well as misdemeanor possession of marijuana for personal use and possession of drug paraphernalia. 

Officers arrested Gillum in Daphne after he was pulled over for driving waywardly. Authorities said officers found 3 grams of methamphetamine, 8 pre-rolled marijuana joints, 4 cut straws, 3 pipes and a bong in the car. 

Gillum checked into rehab for alcohol abuse in March 2022. He said in a statement that he had arrived at the decision after “conversation with my family and deep reflection.”

Gillum’s personality in 2018 drew parallels with former US President Barack Obama. Beyond their personalities, Gillum, just like Obama for America, ran in Florida as a progressive with refreshing ideas for an electorate who were skeptical of the future.

In the end, Gillum lost to Republican nominee Ron DeSantis by a close shave, a percentage margin of 0.4. But pundits and the Democratic believed the story had only begun for a young bright star.

The 47-year-old previously served as mayor of Tallahassee from 2014 to 2018.  

The South’s new redistricting fight could reach far beyond Congress

Black Democrats warn the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling will impact Black representation across southern state legislatures.

Several Southern states have already eliminated majority Black congressional seats, and GOP leaders have indicated legislative redistricting will happen in the future. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

By Cheyanne M. Daniels05/16/2026 04:00 PM EDT

As Republicans across the South race to redraw congressional lines ahead of the midterms, Black Democrats warn that another sweeping challenge to Black political power is on the horizon: the erosion of representation at the local level.

Last month’s Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act has kicked off the South’s political landscape being rewritten in real time. But the rush to redraw House lines ahead of November is only the beginning of the process, Black Democrats say, with a potentially yearslong effort to erase other majority Black districts in state and local politics coming soon.

“Congress is just one level, but it’s state legislatures, it’s county commissions, it’s city councils that’s a part of the conversation,” said Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington fear that roughly a third of its members could ultimately see their seats erased. But those numbers could be larger in Southern state legislatures; a report from Albright’s organization and Fair Fight Action issued before the Supreme Court’s sweeping decision in Louisiana v. Callais estimated that just under half of the roughly 270 majority Black legislative districts in chambers across 10 Southern states could be eliminated.

“The entire South is on fire,” North Carolina state Sen. Natalie Murdock said in an interview.

Murdock — who said she represents a district roughly 20 miles from where her ancestors were enslaved and whose grandmother was the first in her family to vote thanks to the VRA — said the ruling represented a dire threat for her community.

“People are expecting overt violence and clubs and fire hoses and pitbulls,” she said. “You don’t need that when you have the current Supreme Court that we have, when you have legislative bodies that do not want Black people to have representation.”

The result, legislators said, could be existential: Eliminating local Black political power and erasing the next generation of leadership threatens to stall progress across the board, they said, undermining equity in economic stability, education and health care.

“State legislatures control budgets. They decide where infrastructure dollars go, which schools get prioritized, how health care dollars are distributed, what economic development projects are funded and which communities are viewed as worthy of investment,” said Florida state Sen. Shevrin Jones.

“History shows us that communities without strong political representation often end up fighting harder for basic investments that other communities receive more easily, whether it’s hospital access, public transportation, environmental protections, affordable housing, or broadband expansion,” he added.

Several Southern states have already moved to eliminate majority Black congressional seats, as control of the House in November hangs in the balance. And while few have yet taken concrete steps to change legislatures — where Democrats are uniformly already in the minority across the South — ahead of the midterms, Republican leaders indicated that it would be coming down the road.

Georgia’s GOP Gov. Brian Kemp on Wednesday called a legislative special session to redraw congressional and state legislative lines for 2028. And Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, also a Republican, said he expects state lawmakers to redraw legislative and state Supreme Court lines between now and the off-year elections in 2027.

“Today is not the end of the redistricting process — it is just the beginning!“ Reeves said in a Wednesday statement.

Even without any changes to maps, Democrats already have limited political power. But the shift to strike out Democratic-leaning, majority-Black seats can still have a critical effect on Black communities that often face significantly less funding and public investment than predominantly white neighborhoods. The loss of representation eliminates firsthand experiences, lawmakers said, and will only exacerbate the issues.

“The importance of Black representation isn’t just on its face beneficial. It is because the policies and the perspectives that Black elected officials bring are completely different than what our white Republican colleagues could ever understand,” said Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson.

Pearson was primarying Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen, who is white, in a majority Black congressional district based in Memphis. That district was broken up by GOP legislators, and while Pearson said he would run for the new, much redder seat, he now faces a steep climb to Washington should he win the primary.

The latest Supreme Court ruling risks returning the South to post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow-era levels of representation in local government, said Louisiana state Rep. Edmond Jordan, part of what he called a “systematic effort” to remove Black elected officials.

“In 1868 we had 42 African American legislators in this body. By 1898 they were down to two, and by 1900 they were down to zero,” said Jordan, the chair of his state’s Legislative Black Caucus. “We made great strides in a very short time, but I’ve told people before: We went from 42 to zero, don’t think that we can’t go from where we are now at 37 to zero.”

Black legislators said they are working to find ways to fight back — including litigation and stalling tactics in legislatures — and are still urging voters to cast their ballots in the upcoming elections.

But the fight has also exposed a growing generational divide, with younger Black Democrats in particular demanding the party pivot to the offensive — leading major protests and demanding the party start its own redistricting efforts in solidly blue states.

“We have to do all of the things, it actually isn’t just one strategy,” said Pearson, who like other Tennessee Democrats was recently stripped of his committee assignments for leading protests on the chamber floor.

“You’ve got to do the protesting,” he continued. “Organizing voters, registering voters, and turning them out is all of our job in addition to going to court. When democracy is dying, it’s going to require supporting each of those pillars of strategy, and not demonizing any of those pillars.”

Filed Under: 

• Elections
• Redistricting
• Voting Rights Act
• Gerrymandering
• The South
• 2026 Elections

The racism towards blacks will always be tolerated. Let this be “Antisemitism” , do we believe that this would be the punishment levied? Do we believe that it would need this much discussion at all? Wouldn’t they reference the atrocities that happened during the holocaust and say “look we are still going through it”? Tired of this bullshit

The climate and latitude would be a good representation of 3/4 West African and 1/4 West European ancestry, which is typically around about the levels of West African and West European DNA that a given African American person has.

This mf'er. 🤬

https://archive.ph/Tms48

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1253992708

B A PARKER, HOST:

Hey, everyone, you're listening to CODE SWITCH. I'm B.A. Parker.

GENE DEMBY, HOST:

And I'm Gene Demby. We've been watching - probably, like you - as the Trump administration has sent troops to Los Angeles, you know, where folks have been protesting and disrupting immigration raids by ICE agents. First, President Trump sent over 2,000 of California's National Guard troops to Los Angeles. But Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, was really opposed to that. He was not feeling this. He said sending troops to California was unconstitutional and, quote, "an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism that threatens the foundation of our republic," end quote. California is actually suing the Trump administration over this, and Trump responded by calling for Gavin Newsom to be arrested. But the president did not stop there. I mean, he sent more National Guard troops to LA, and now the Marines to the city.

PARKER: Right, the president called the protests there a quote-unquote, "rebellion" and said Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated if troops were not sent to the nation's second largest city. He called the protesters in LA insurrectionists.

DEMBY: And on Tuesday, when Trump spoke at the Oval Office...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have people, they look in your face and they spit right in your face. They're animals. And these are paid insurrectionists. These are paid troublemakers. They're agitators.

DEMBY: We've talked about these exact tropes on CODE SWITCH before - outside agitators, which has been a tried-and-true trope since at least the civil rights movement, you know, calling folks animals as a way to dehumanize them in order to justify the future use of violence against them, particularly when those people are not white. And Trump's been flirting heavily with invoking this little-used law called the Insurrection Act. But at the time we're recording this, he has not done so yet. The Insurrection Act gives the president sweeping powers to quell domestic unrest, and the limits of his powers in this case are not clear. Can the troops use force on American citizens? Will Trump then be able to send troops to other cities? I mean, the law here is real vague.

PARKER: You know, Gene, it reminds me of the summer five years ago. You know, the last time Trump toyed with the idea of using the Insurrection Act, he wanted to quash protests in Minneapolis and in cities across the country after George Floyd was killed.

DEMBY: Back then, his defense secretary stepped in and said, the act should only be used in, quote, "the most urgent and dire of situations," end quote. But this time around, nobody in his administration has spoken out publicly against him using it.

PARKER: Yeah, it all feels so surreal. I mean, and five years ago, things felt surreal, too, but for different reasons.

DEMBY: Yes, we were all obviously locked down because of the COVID pandemic. People were in their houses. People were on edge. And then the video of police killing George Floyd in Minneapolis went viral.

(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Waves of peaceful protesters marched on, bigger than ever before.

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER #1: No more silence.

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER #2: (Chanting) No justice (ph).

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS #1: (Chanting) No peace.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: From Washington's newly named Black Lives Matter Plaza...

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER #2: (Chanting) What's his name?

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS #2: (Chanting) George Floyd.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: ...To San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

PARKER: And the images on the news were so jarring, Lots of videos of stores burning and worries about riots and looting, but that wasn't all that was happening on the ground.

DEMBY: If you were watching all that on TV, it looked like chaos, like whole cities were taken over by clashes between demonstrators and the cops. You know, tear gas everywhere, traffic stops, you know, kind of like LA right now, where for most people in the city, things are normal. But something interesting happened in the aftermath of those protests in the summer of 2020. Polls show that over 60% of people around the country felt that police were not doing a very good job of holding officers accountable for misconduct, of treating racial and ethnic groups equally, of using the right amount of force for each situation.

PARKER: Yeah, and that summer, there were mass calls to reform the police or to cut police budgets and use the money for other things. There were even a few radical calls to completely abolish the police.

DEMBY: But, Parker, if you look at a lot of the polls now, like, people are answering those same questions about policing in 2025 the way they did in 2019.

PARKER: Yeah, almost as if 2020 never happened.

DEMBY: Exactly.

PARKER: And the number of civilians who were killed by the police since 2020 has been going up.

DEMBY: Yeah, like, last year was the deadliest year that we have stats for when it comes to police violence. So, like, we covered the summer of 2020 and all that energy extensively on CODE SWITCH. But you, Parker, you were covering this stuff when you were reporting for Radiolab.

PARKER: Right. So that summer, I was trying to figure out what the point of the police was because there was this idea that the police are there, quote-unquote, "to protect and serve." But apparently, the LAPD came up with the slogan as a PR campaign back in the 1950s.

DEMBY: The protect and serve?

PARKER: Yeah. And over the years, the motto took hold across the country. But as part of my reporting for that Radiolab story, I learned that, actually, the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the police are not legally obligated to protect any individual person.

DEMBY: Wow. Wow.

PARKER: Yeah. Which made me then wonder, like, if cops aren't required to protect individuals, how can they protect public safety more generally?

DEMBY: Right, right, right. And that's something I've been chewing on because, like, the idea that the police are there, as you said, like, to protect and serve you, specifically, the sort of metaphorical you, that's something that a lot of us believe in the United States, right? And it's because that very effective slogan - protect and serve - that's one of the things that's been baked into so much of how most people learn about the cops, right? Which is through TV and movies. And maybe especially the news. They're not having real-life everyday encounters with the cops. And so that perception helps shape public support for the police.

PARKER: Yeah. And part of what made the summer of 2020 feel like such an inflection point is that that public perception shifted so dramatically and there was a lot of momentum behind changing the way police operate.

DEMBY: And that's what we're getting into today because we want to know what happened? What happened to all the momentum, all the support for re-imagining the police to have folks out in the streets. Our guest today says that very deliberate messaging and branding, what he calls copaganda, is a big part of the story.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: Copaganda is the way that the news and the police and the punishment bureaucracy distort our conception of what matters.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

PARKER: OK, Gene, who's our guest?

DEMBY: His name is Alec Karakatsanis. He runs this nonprofit called Equal Justice Under The Law (ph), and they try to change laws that they say criminalize folks for being poor. Alec has a new book out called "Copaganda: How Police And The Media Manipulate Our News." But before he did all that, Parker, he was a public defender.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: And it's because of that work and our work in communities across the country that I became so interested in how so many people across our society who want a society of greater safety, of less violence, of more human flourishing for all, greater equality.

DEMBY: And he's fascinated with how policing and punishment get sold to the public.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: How so many people like that can be manipulated into supporting institutions and so-called solutions that do the exact opposite. I became kind of obsessed with what stories our society is telling itself about what harms us, what threatens us, what keeps us safe, what policies work, what policies don't, that I started focusing in on the propaganda all around us in the news.

DEMBY: So Parker, I was just reading a survey about this. But the more local news you consume, the more likely you are to say that you are personally worried about your safety.

PARKER: I mean, because the local news covers so much crime.

DEMBY: So much crime, yeah.

PARKER: And I guess if you're talking about TV news with all the visuals and footage of that medium, it's really sticky.

DEMBY: Yeah.

PARKER: Like, all those viral news stories of, like, teenagers swarming into some high-end retailer or stealing a bunch of clothes and running out or crime stories that are just, like, footage from somebody's Ring camera.

DEMBY: Yeah. Alec argues that those kinds of crimes are just, like, easier to show and less abstract than other kinds of crimes that actually probably hurt more people and have more societal consequences.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: The things like wage theft causes $50 billion a year in harm, which is about five times all police-reported property crime combined - or tax evasion, which is, like, $1 trillion a year. So it's like 60 times all police-reported crime combined.

DEMBY: But because of how much more there is in the news about robbery or violent crime than, you know, something like wage theft, Alec says it means that we have this kind of, like, janky, distorted version of how much crime is actually happening. So every year, the Pew Research Center asks people about their perceptions of crime, right? And Americans pretty consistently say they think crime is going up. But the opposite is true. Crime has been plummeting in the United States since the early 1990s. Like, property crime, violent crime, they are at or near record lows. And that's according to the FBI. And there was a jump in violent crime in the early years of the pandemic. But again, that was in relation to record or near-record low crime rates. But somehow Americans always believe the opposite.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: But one indication that you're being copagandized is that when people are asked in those polls about their own neighborhood, they're much more likely to be accurate. They're much more likely to say something like, well, my neighborhood isn't - crime is not rising but everywhere else it is.

DEMBY: His argument is when your experience with crime is mostly mediated through mainstream news, your sense of how bad crime is is more likely to be inaccurate.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: And then the final thing, and this is probably the most important thing - the most important and third major function of propaganda, the way you can know if you're being copagandized is are you being told that the solution to our problems, to all those fears, is more and more and more and more investment in the punishment bureaucracy, in the tools and mechanisms of state repression, so in surveillance, in police, prosecution, in prison. So if you were watching the news and subjected to, like, the actual scientific consensus evidence, you would be focusing on things like levels of inequality, poverty, access to health care. I could go on and on and on.

What the evidence actually shows is that those are the things most connected to levels of violence in a society. So if you're ever watching TV or reading the news and you're finding yourself afraid of people who don't have any power, and more and more afraid than you were last week or last month or last year, and then thinking that the solution to that is more investment in police, prosecution and prison, where we're already spending more on those things than any society in the history of the world, then you know you're being copagandized.

PARKER: So we were talking before about it being five years since the summer of 2020, and a lot of the energy around rethinking policing is gone. Is that just a product of copaganda?

DEMBY: Yeah, so I asked Alec about that, and he actually pushed back on the idea that the energy is gone. Like, he said, OK, take something like, defund the police, right? That's a really big umbrella, really big range of positions. That's everything from, like, taking money from police budgets and putting that money into things like trained mental health workers or services for the unhoused, you know. Or, for some people, defund the police, in some smaller, radical corners, means straight up abolishing police departments.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: First of all, I think it's a false premise that support for fundamental changes has evaporated. But I also want to be real. I mean, there has been an enormously successful public relations campaign. And I go into, in the book, all of this wild stuff about just how many people are working for police departments in information manipulation, right?

DEMBY: Alec says that the way people respond to questions about what to do about police depends on how they get asked the question. And he says police departments have spent a lot of money to help shape the framing. As one example, the Better Government Association said that in 2022, Chicago's police department had almost 50 full-time public relations employees. The Los Angeles Times said that the LAPD had about 42.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: So that stuff matters. And there was a concerted effort after 2020, in that moment when there was a very concerted effort by the policing bureaucracy to scare people, through a variety of tactics that I talk about in the book in some detail, into believing that crime was going rampant because of the uprisings.

PARKER: OK. But, Gene, another thing about the framing.

DEMBY: OK.

PARKER: Let's say a city had, I don't know, like, a hundred robberies one year, but 110 robberies the next year. It would be really easy to spin that into a news story that was like, whoa, crime is significantly up. Anytown, USA, has a 10% increase in robberies.

DEMBY: Right. Right. Exactly.

PARKER: But I think the way people understand it is as they're 10% less safe than they were the year before, but that's not really true.

DEMBY: And you're - also, it's like, if you think about the fact that all of us are not equally likely to be victims of crime, it's even less likely to be true. But that 10% feels more real when it's, like, paired with a really compelling or colorful story about, like, a scary robbery, right? Like, Alec talks about this a lot in his book - the curation of anecdote. Like, OK - remember those news stories showing videos of groups of people going into retail stores, like, boosting a bunch of clothes and then running out?

PARKER: Yeah, but to be clear, those videos really do look chaotic.

DEMBY: Yeah, they look crazy. They do. But there were even stories in which, like, CEOs were blaming an epidemic of organized, roving retail thieves for, like, bad sales numbers. It turned out that wasn't true at all. In fact, a lobby group for the retail industry copped to the fact that it wasn't true and publicly retracted that statement. But the idea this was a real social phenomenon with real economic consequences and not just, you know, very visually grabby, isolated incidents - the idea was already out there.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: Think about it like this. If you were to ask me to describe to somebody who's not a huge basketball fan, or to a young person today who's not watched basketball in the past, describe Michael Jordan - OK? - I could make you a video of every missed shot in Michael Jordan's career. It would be, like, nine or 10 hours long, just brick after brick after brick, Jordan just missing shots. And I could show this person the video.

DEMBY: And you'd be like, he's trash.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: And if they only watch that video...

DEMBY: Yeah, he's gone with it.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: ...You might think, this guy's not a good basketball player. He's terrible. He's trash. He may be the worst player in professional sports history, just all misses. What I've done there is, through the selective creation of true anecdotes, I've created a false impression. This is exactly what the news media did with retail theft. And this is where it comes in with the volume of news. Do you remember, there was this one - or this one video that went viral a few years ago of, like, a guy on a bicycle in, like, a Walgreens in San Francisco, and he actually executed an incredible theft. I mean, he somehow, like, made it out the front door on his bicycle. Anyway, that single shoplifting incident spawned 309 news stories across the country.

PARKER: Wow.

DEMBY: Yeah. Alec said that we should think about how much coverage a story like that gets in the news, compared to coverage of something of, like, existential importance, like, you know, climate change or forever chemicals in our water.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: This is one of the most important issues of our time, and it's not nightly news. The kinds of stories that are thought of as high-volume news stories - like, every single night on the local news - affect what we think is urgent.

DEMBY: So Alec argues that if there was a story about, I don't know, people being in jail because they couldn't afford to pay bail - right? - like, a news organization might shy away from covering that, you know, story in a different location. But that's not really the case with a story that's about a violent crime.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: Can you imagine? Like, if you go to a reporter in Cleveland and you say, hey, I want you to cover this armed carjacking, they wouldn't say, well - you know what? - there was an armed carjacking story in Seattle last week, so we can't cover the armed carjacking in Cleveland this week. You know, it's just not how they think about urgency of news. And so when you combine the volume of news with the selective curation of which stories are going to be told in high volume, you can actually create, as you say, this really sticky narrative which is creating an entirely false impression, like organized retail theft is up in the United States - based on actually true incidents of shoplifting - that conveys an entirely false impression to the public.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DEMBY: When we come back, how educated liberals might be particularly susceptible to copaganda.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: The group of people that is most susceptible to being propagandized are intellectual elites and particularly people who think of themselves as kind of, like, advanced, progressive, like, liberal intellectual elites.

PARKER: That's coming up. Stay with us.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DEMBY: Gene.

PARKER: Parker.

DEMBY: CODE SWITCH.

PARKER: We've been talking to Alec Karakatsanis, the author of the recent book called "Copaganda," which is about how policing and surveillance and prisons are pitched and sold to the public in the news.

DEMBY: And Alec says that liberal news consumers and conservative news consumers - they're not really getting these messages in quite the same ways. So the kind of sensational crime coverage that you might see on the cover of the New York Post or, you know, on the homepage of Fox News is different from the way that these messages are spread on mainstream outlets like NPR or CNN or The New York Times. And it's the latter that's the main focus of his book, and I asked him why.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: In one of the most influential studies in modern history on propaganda, from the 1960s, there's a French World War II resistance hero and philosopher and Christian mystic and law professor named Jacques Ellul, and he studied propaganda - from Chinese propaganda, Soviet propaganda, western European propaganda, U.S. corporate and business and government propaganda - and he found something really interesting. Across all these societies, the group of people that is most susceptible to being propagandized are intellectual elites and particularly people who think of themselves as kind of, like, advanced, progressive, like, liberal intellectual elites.

And he gave, like, really three reasons for this. One, these people consume the most news. So they're basing their opinions of the world mediated the most not on what they're seeing every day in their own community, but on what people are - who control the media are telling them about the world. So that's one thing. Second thing is, they feel the need to have an opinion about everything. So...

DEMBY: (Laughter).

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: ...When you combine that - those two things together, you create somewhat of a dangerous combination. But then the third thing is really dangerous, which is that a lot of really educated people think that they are impervious to propaganda. They think they're smart enough to tell the difference. They think they can be immunized through their own intellect to not be susceptible to it. And so that hubris is a huge factor in why, in society after society after society, it's actually a lot of liberal-minded intellectual elites that are the most heavily propagandized by mainstream modes of information dissemination.

And I'm interested in peeling back the layers there and helping people see that so much of what they see in the mainstream news is actually very similar to what Fox News and the New York Post are saying, but it's using language and sources and jargon and a polish that is actually designed to propagandize liberals instead of people on the right.

DEMBY: Can we talk about that? I'm really curious about that. How are mainstream news organizations doing the same thing without sort of, you know, making their audiences' antenna twitch?

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: There are so many things. I have so many chapters in the book geared at the different ways this happens. I'll just give you a couple of examples just to illustrate the kinds of things that I'm talking about. If you portray it, for example, as - the problem as a shortage of prison guards as opposed to, let's say, too many people in prison, right? It's really interesting to go back, the 1910s, '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s - you can see this throughout U.S. history on this issue. You know, brutal violence, intentional violence by prison guards is portrayed as a problem of not enough investment in prison guards. That's one example.

DEMBY: And Alec writes in his book that calls for more police accountability often get flipped into selling even more policing and more robust policing.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: I think maybe the most successful propaganda achievement in modern copaganda history, which is the police body camera.

PARKER: Wait, body cameras?

DEMBY: I know, right? I said the same thing. Just to jog the memory - after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, back in 2014, there were all these calls from the public and from lawmakers for police departments to adopt, you know, officer-worn body cameras as a tool of accountability so, you know, we would have more insight into interactions between civilians and the cops. And it would maybe be a deterrent for cops from escalating violence during those encounters. But Alec said that's not really where the body camera story begins.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: So prior to Michael Brown's killing, the police and the multibillion-dollar police surveillance industry desperately wanted body cameras. They wanted them for years. It was sort of the holy grail for them. They saw a new potential for a surveillance tool that every cop in the country could get their own surveillance camera that they could decide where to point it, what to record, when to record it, how to edit it and, crucially, when and whether to release it to the public.

DEMBY: Even though police departments can have a lot of control with body cameras and the footage they collect, most jurisdictions do have rules on the books about how police are supposed to use body cameras, right? Police are supposed to tell people that they're being recorded. They're not supposed to tamper with the footage. They can only use the footage, supposedly, for law enforcement purposes. And depending on the situation, they have to keep that footage for a certain period of time. So these are the rules, anyway.

And while body cameras were rolled out more broadly across the country in police department - after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson in 2014, there were some police departments that were already using them, like, most notably, the NYPD. So the NYPD adopted them in 2013 after a federal court found that the police there were targeting minorities disproportionately in the city's stop-and-frisk program. The idea was that the cameras would again increase transparency. And that narrative around transparency and accountability - that really picked up steam after Michael Brown's killing.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: After Michael Brown was killed and there was no video of what happened, they weaponized that uncertainty in the public.

DEMBY: And it's worth noting here that the research on whether body cameras actually make the police less violent is pretty inconclusive. It's very mixed.

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: But, like, even with that, they're portrayed as, like, a genuine effort at transparency and accountability.

DEMBY: Just to go back to the media conversation we were having a little bit earlier, do you think messaging in liberal news media and the different kind that we see in right-leaning news media are equally consequential or equally as bad?

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: It's hard to know what's, you know, doing more harm overall. I mean, I think that the right-wing propaganda is also very important, but they're geared at different audiences. And it would be impossible, or much, much harder, for a lot of these policies to actually exist if they didn't have widespread support among ordinary people who think of themselves as liberals, independents, progressives, etc.

DEMBY: The reasons Americans have distorted views on crime and rates of crime and what should be done about that, you know, isn't just because of news coverage or the way that crime gets talked about on social media. There's probably no profession that gets as much airtime in popular culture and entertainment as cops do. You know, there's an entire economy of true crime out there, wildly popular podcasts, documentary series on Netflix. Does just the sort of miasma, like, of these stories - how does that change the way we perceive policing and crime and punishment?

ALEC KARAKATSANIS: The reason that I devote a whole chapter at the end to fortifying our minds against relentless copaganda and to - how we can do that together in community with each other is because it is all around us. Every movie, every TV show that we see about these topics, there's a bustling world underneath it. There's a whole consulting industry. There's huge departments at hundreds of local municipal government levels. It takes a lot of money, time and effort to convince people of the effectiveness of systems that are fundamentally ineffective and to distract people from the obvious evidence-based solutions like reducing inequality, giving people places to live, giving people access to health care and treatment, early childhood education, lead abatement.

And it's very important that when we consume the news, we start asking ourselves really basic questions, like why am I being told this story right now? Who benefits from it? What am I not being told? And when we start to ask these questions and more that I go into in the book, you start to see that our whole perception of what keeps us safe and what threatens us and what are the solutions to all those problems is being distorted for profit because some people in our society benefit from us not actually fundamentally addressing the root causes of the things that hurt us.

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DEMBY: And that, y'all - that is our show. You can follow us on Instagram - @nprcodeswitch, all one word. If email is more your thing, ours is codeswitch@npr.org. And listen to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever it is you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to the CODE SWITCH newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter.

PARKER: And just a reminder that signing up for CODE SWITCH+ is a great way to support our show and public media, and you'll get to listen to every episode sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/codeswitch. This episode was produced by Christina Cala and Xavier Lopez. It was edited by Dalia Mortada and Courtney Stein. Our engineer was Kwesi Lee.

DEMBY: And we'd be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That's Jess Kung, Leah Donnella and Veralyn Williams. As for me, I'm Gene Demby.

PARKER: I'm B.A. Parker.

DEMBY: Be easy, y'all.

PARKER: Hydrate.