Alec Karakatsanis Speaks!

Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

Will Miller Social Justice Lecture Series

Thursday, October 29, 2026, 7:00 PM

Frank Livak Ballroom, Davis Center

University of Vermont

Turn on the local news any night this week and you’ll see the pattern Alec Karakatsanis has spent his career exposing: an urgent story about a shoplifting ring, a call for more police, a warning to stay afraid.  What you won’t see on the news is a serious look at wage theft, which costs workers far more than shoplifting ever will, or an honest account of why more policing hasn’t made Burlington safer. 

Karakatsanis is a civil rights attorney and founder of Civil Rights Corps.  His litigation has helped free hundreds of thousands of people from jail, returned tens of millions of dollars to families who were wrongly charged, and stopped hundreds of thousands of unlawful convictions. He is the author of Usual Cruelty and, most recently, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News—a book that finally names a pattern many of us sense but rarely have the language for: how news coverage manufactures fear to justify police budgets instead of the housing, healthcare, and support that actually make communities safer.

As Burlington debates how to respond to rising homelessness and addiction, the loudest answer is almost always the same one: more police, more power, more discretion.  Karakatsanis will help us understand how that answer gets manufactured—and what a different one could look like.