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From moderating a niche meme account on Facebook to making videos for almost 900,000 followers on TikTok, Alex Peter, a.k.a. Lolo (short for, Loloverruled), has come a long way. His day job, off from TikTok, is public defender, but he’s long pursued avenues to make a difference. As an undergrad, Peter interned in Congress and the White House, then spent a year in Malaysia on a Fulbright before heading to law school. When he wasn’t moderating a law school meme group, Peter used his free time to help organize the NYC March for Our Lives. Since passing the bar and becoming a public defender, Peter, 32, has already accomplished so much — but his current claim to fame is his TikTok account.
Over the years, Peter has used the account to share some of the many injustices he’s witnessed in the American judicial system and explaining how they disproportionately affect marginalized communities, calling for bail reform, prison abolition, and drug decriminalization. While a few of Peter's first videos have been deleted or made private, you can scroll back through his posts to 2020 to see content ranging from educating the masses about MK Ultra and urging his followers not to steal ducks from public parks to sharing updates on the current events in Palestine and reflecting on his job as a public defender. Whether it’s the conditions at Rikers Island or the general difficulties people face upon reentry after incarceration, one thing has always stayed the same: Using his platform to keep his followers informed about the American judicial system remains of utmost importance to him.
Peter talks to Teen Vogue over email about using his platform as a means to educate the masses.
Teen Vogue: How has your view of the justice system changed since you got your first client in November 2020?
Alex Peter: Phew. I don’t know how dark you want me to get. It’s difficult for me to answer. Obviously, my perspective has changed drastically, but I think even before I started full-time practice [as a public defender], I had a generalized, somewhat abstract understanding of how evil the criminal punishment system is.
Actually, that’s not true. I’ve pretty much thought the criminal system was pure evil from the time I was working in law school with the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem. The first time I saw a young client in leg and handcuffs holding a copy of Harry Potter walking into a plea bargain session, I realized immediately this system was irredeemably evil. But ignoring that, I think I was still a little more hopeful about fixing the system when I started practice back in 2020.
This isn’t to say I don’t still support efforts to mitigate harm and decarcerate things like bail reform, improving diversion programming, access to drug treatment, et cetera. But the general idea I feel now, more than I felt back then, is that the system serves a singular purpose and that purpose has nothing to do with rehabilitation or community safety. The purpose is to criminalize poor people and people from marginalized communities and to maintain a backstop system that reminds [most] everyone that if they stop moving for a second or make one bad step, they are in peril of being thrown in a cage.
I think it’s about control more than anything. There’s money, of course: Policing is a $100 billion-a-year-plus enterprise in the United States. And that doesn’t include the value in incarceration, which is a legalized system of slave labor. But still, it’s beyond the money. People sometimes like to talk about private prisons, but the reality is they make up a small slice, less than 10% I believe, of the entire pie. Ultimately, the prison industrial complex allows the state to have complete control over poor people and their lives and it also threatens those of us nearing poverty, which unfortunately is becoming a larger and larger portion of the population.
We see it more and more with the criminalization of homelessness, the perpetual increase in funding of police spending (despite dishonesty about this simple fact), and politicians constantly using fearmongering to talk about [some of] the [statistically] safest cities in America. There’s no doubt that things have become more tenuous and there’s an atmosphere you can absolutely sense in many cities. But this has little to do with policing tactics. Costs have gone up, wages remain stagnant as they have for decades, and there are fewer and fewer avenues to stability.
I suppose my position has simply solidified in terms of thinking, Wow, we are so far beyond saving this, changing it. It needs to be totally razed and made into something else. We need a drug treatment system that isn’t gamified to incarcerate, we need stable housing for people that is accessible, and we need to decriminalize drugs completely. We need to take away funding from police, who quite clearly do not make us safer, and instead direct it into things that do: community centers, health care, affordable housing, and education.
TV: Do you think TikTok is a net negative or net positive, weighing its potential to educate people on current events versus its tendency to spread rampant misinformation?
AP: It may surprise people to learn that I actually have very mixed feelings about TikTok and social media news generally. I do genuinely worry about what seems to be a general decline in everyone’s ability to suss out fact from fiction, or at least hyperbole from reality. I know we like to joke about Boomers and their sometimes comically bad media literacy, but it isn’t just them. I have around 900,000 followers on TikTok and sometimes I will read comments of people arguing in my own comment sections. Multiple times, I’ve seen one person make a claim, quite confidently, and then immediately walk it back when pushed. Now imagine that same person making a video that is shared 20,000 times. Oftentimes, the bad information is spread more than a retraction, and so especially as a content creator with [a sizeable] audience, you really do need to be careful and thoughtful about what you say and share.
It worries me that we have lost any kind of institutional standard bearers and I believe this is in part because our representatives and government have repeatedly failed us and people have lost trust in them. At this point, people are more willing to believe strangers online than officials or people in the media who were much more respected 20 years ago.
I do believe [TikTok is] still a good place to learn news and new information quickly, but you need to have a critical eye and ear for what you’re seeing and hearing. Clearly, TikTok was important in learning more about what was happening on the ground in Gaza, and figures like Bisan [Owda] and Motaz [Azaiza] became incredibly important voices, sharing information about what people were experiencing there firsthand. I think ultimately I’d rather us have it than not. It’s been an incredible resource, both as a tool to learn information and to get important news out into the world quickly.
TV: Through your platform, you’ve been able to raise money for mutual aid funds, Release Aging People in Prison, Eileen’s Free Bodega, and other nonprofit organizations. What’s one of your proudest accomplishments?
AP: I was really honored to receive a community service award from Eileen’s Free Bodega, just because they are a mutual aid org in my home community in Brentwood, Long Island, and I’ve developed such a great relationship with them. They have a community fridge where people can go get free groceries. It’s a great example of mutual aid, and to introduce people to the concept in a concrete way.
What I’m most proud of is the group of people who have followed me around the internet. They are so kind to me and often very positive. I get messages from people saying how they started volunteering or working on mutual aid projects and it makes me so happy to hear that. It’s a cool group of strangers who are trying to build community both online and in the places where they live. Even when I feel down, it’s a positive feedback loop of solidarity. It’s really needed.
TV: You’ve appeared on political commentator Hasan Piker’s Twitch broadcast and you’ve recently started a podcast with fellow attorney (and Teen Vogue contributor) Olayemi Olurin. What else are you working on now?
AP: Shoutout to Olay, the mayor of NYC. We’ve been friends for several years now and finally succumbed to everyone telling us to make a podcast. But beyond that, I am writing a lot and have been for the last two years. The true diehard ride-or-dies know this, and I think at this point they are frustrated that I haven’t published yet. But yes, I have two major writing projects: One, a completed manuscript that is not yet finished with editing, and the other, a screenplay about some insane sh*t the CIA did in the 1960s. I think that’s vague enough because everything they did in the '60s was insane. Speaking of Hasan, I already tricked him into agreeing to produce it. So hopefully you will see that within the next few years.
TV: You regularly remind your followers not to talk to the police. What other general advice would you give to younger audiences interacting with those who work in the judicial system?
AP: Listen to your lawyer.
TV: Do you have any advice for those who want to pursue public interest work?
We need good lawyers. But please, don’t become a lawyer. But we need good lawyers. If you’re really thinking about it, consult Dean Spade’s piece, “For Those Considering Law School.”
It’s also always been my opinion that you can’t tell a future lawyer anything anyway.
TV: Finally, what gives you hope?
AP: I have endless hope for a better future. It may be in some small part because things are so particularly bad at this moment. But even still, I don’t think you can do any kind of public interest lawyering or community-type work without a sense of hope and optimism. There are so many people still fighting for harm mitigation in the form of concrete public policies that decarcerate, like decriminalizing drug possession, limiting bailable offenses, and getting cops out of schools to prevent the school-to-prison pipeline. [These are] the kind of policies that can work towards healing a community instead of displacing and destroying it — and those are just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of a better future.
There are so many things that give me hope: The people who write to me about how they were inspired to start their own reading group, or send books to incarcerated people, or volunteer with a local community organization doing mutual aid. The real, genuine responses to stories of people’s suffering inside the system, the collective outrage, the desire of so many people to get more involved in fighting back, and more importantly, them actually getting out and doing it. The growing recognition by people from all walks of life that we are in this mess together and that together is the only way through. All of this gives me hope. I am nothing but full of hope.
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