Crisis and Redemption: The History of American Police Reform since World War II

Disruption: The Great Challenge to Urban Police during the 1950s and 1960s

American law enforcement experienced its most significant twentieth-century crisis of legitimacy during the 1950s and 1960s. In the hundred years leading up to that period, many of the core features of American policing had proven remarkably durable. Since their inception in the mid-nineteenth century, urban police forces had served two primary functions. First, many urban police acted as electioneering agents for their local political machine, regulating the vote and extorting and funneling graft from the so-called underworld to their machine sponsors. To reinforce this relationship between the machine and the police, cities drew police district lines to match machine ward lines, and they assigned most officers to walking beats in the districts. ⁶

Second, police regulated behavior to comport to their own sense of racial, sexual, ethnic, and class order. Because police were organized by districts and because cities were spatially segregated, police forces primarily regulated social hierarchies through their regulation of space. ⁷ In marginalized neighborhoods—and predominantly black neighborhoods, in particular—residents experienced a discriminatory mix of underpolicing and overpolicing. But the highly localized nature of policing ensured that city residents were often unaware of what day-to-day policing looked like outside their own district.

To encourage police to carry out their two main functions, city leaders denied rank-and-file officers any voice in political debate and granted the officers nearly infinite discretion on the beat. Patrol officers had access to broad status-based laws like “common vagrancy” that allowed them to arrest urban residents for simply growing a beard or strolling with someone of another race. The police subjected great swaths of the urban citizenry—including political radicals, sexual minorities, people of color, bohemians, and the poor—to hundreds of thousands of status-based arrests each year. ⁸

During the 1950s and 1960s, three political movements coalesced to challenge this century-old policing system. ⁹ First, business-driven, progrowth coalitions began overthrowing the traditional graft-fed machines. Motivated by the prospect of new federal redevelopment grants, these downtown-led coalitions starved the old machines by exposing the police’s corrupt electioneering role and instituting professionalization reforms that centralized police authority out of the districts (and the coterminous machine wards) and into the hall of justice. Second, and of equal importance, a tidal wave of rights campaigns—organized by groups of blacks, Latinos, political radicals, civil libertarians, union members, sexual minorities, artists, and bohemians—encountered, brought attention to, and challenged abusive order-maintenance law enforcement. ¹⁰ Third, white liberals—especially a new generation of white-collar cosmopolitan liberals moving into redeveloping cities—began endorsing the progrowth coalitions’ demands for police professionalization and the civil rights and liberties protesters’ critiques of order-maintenance policing. ¹¹

Collectively, these campaigns over the police forced cities to reconsider the organization of the state and the definition of citizenship. Liberal policy makers steered those discussions toward issues of individual police discretion. On these terms, liberals helped wipe out the old networks of graft linking police departments to City Hall, and they spearheaded a “procedural revolution” that promised to bind police officers in rules. At the same time, liberals articulated a new understanding of citizenship that tolerated expanded cultural, sexual, and racial pluralism in politics, and saw a reduction in harmful crimes (that is, crimes that brought physical or material harm upon others) as the common principle uniting the pluralist citizenry. ¹²

Liberals spoke of harm in colorblind terms, but policy makers applied the principle to blacks and whites in very different ways. In cities, cosmopolitan liberals characterized white bohemians, white artists, and white gays and lesbians as harmless, and the liberals grew increasingly critical of the morals policing against these groups. At the same time, white officials identified black culture as pathologically violent, and they resisted applying the harm principle to the day-to-day policing of black life. As a result, liberals in many cities did attempt to create a more beneficent police regime by instituting police–community relations units and demanding departments hire more police of color, but they stopped short of seriously addressing police power over black communities. Indeed, the liberal program decriminalizing whiteness and criminalizing blackness accelerated through the 1960s as white politicians drew connections among disruptive civil rights demonstrations; black urban uprisings; and a sustained, rapid rise in rates of criminal violence. ¹³

Redemption: Building the Carceral State during the 1970s and 1980s

The disruption of American policing during the 1950s and 1960s set the terms for the development of the carceral state during the 1970s and 1980s. Already by the late 1960s, lawmakers and judges at the city, state, and federal levels were reauthorizing policing around the principles of professionalization and the racialized harm principle. For instance, the Supreme Court’s 1968 Terry v. Ohio decision expanded police discretion over black people by authorizing stop-and-frisk law enforcement, and the High Court’s 1972 Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville ruling then curbed police discretion over white people by voiding the common vagrancy statutes officers deployed against all races. ¹⁴ During the same period, local city officials introduced paramilitary units and then deployed them with fanfare against protests the officials characterized as violent. City leaders insisted that these paramilitary groups proved that the state was capable of deploying force in concordance with the harm principle and police professionalization. Out of the media spotlight, however, the paramilitary units spent the long gaps between demonstrations subjecting black and Latino communities to heavy doses of day-to-day surveillance and repression. ¹⁵

By the 1970s, broad coalitions were coming together to expand these types of police authority. A steep, continuous, and visible rise in serious criminal violence that had begun in the 1960s and then continued through the 1970s pushed issues of security to the fore of urban political debates. The relative inability of American voters (compared with citizens, for instance, in Western Europe) to affect social policies concerning security, meanwhile, encouraged voters and policy makers to steer those discussions in punitive directions. At the same time, police researchers began insisting that the only police policy that might reduce violent crime was a program of mass arrest that moved “at-risk” populations off of the streets and into prison. ¹⁶

Under these conditions, law-and-order Republicans, New Deal Democrats, white neighborhood localists, middle-class blacks, and working-class whites all began advocating for more police. ¹⁷ At the same time, rank-and-file police officers emerged as an assertive voice in their own right. The old graft system had helped keep police pliant, but now that policy makers had eliminated the lines of corruption binding police to sponsors in City Hall, police were free to politic for themselves. These various propolice constituencies faced a weakened police reform coalition. Police began tolerating cultural and sexual pluralism in spaces occupied by middle-class whites—middle-class gay and lesbian bars, for instance, experienced a marked downturn in police harassment—and the number of organized groups committed to police reform diminished. ¹⁸

Lawmakers responded to the increasingly punitive politics by reauthorizing the police’s old, racial order-maintenance functions. On one hand, they replaced the vague status-based common vagrancy code with a host of vague conduct-based codes (for example, “disorderly conduct” and “lingering”), and they carved out drug-law exceptions to the new procedural rules. ¹⁹ To give this law enforcement a patina of professionalism, police departments created new undercover and tactical units run out of the hall of justice. ²⁰ Urban policy makers also began integrating police into other service-providing institutions (for example, schools) so that the officers could help those agencies sort the “harmful” from the “harmless.” ²¹

The new policing system that emerged in the 1970s thus redeemed the old order-maintenance function of police, but it did so on far more costly terms. Prior to the 1970s, cities had relied upon interchangeable, politically voiceless police officers to use their broad discretion to march into spaces with marginalized citizens and maintain order. In other words, the old system was cheap and straightforward. The new professionalized, unionized, and harm-oriented policing, by contrast, required cities to create specialized units, increase police salaries and protections, and integrate officers into other arms of the government. The post-1960s law enforcement regime increased the number of constituencies angling for police funding.

The post-1970 order-maintenance system thus required an intense capitalization of urban police. Already during the 1960s, big-city governments had begun growing police budgets to fund local police experimentation, and through the 1970s, big-city governments continued to carry the lion’s share of their police budgets. During these years, the federal government grew increasingly interested in influencing police policy with its own spending, but most federal funds went to suburban and rural police departments. Under the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, federal grants played a relatively minor role in big-city police budgets. For instance, in 1970, the federal government’s direct grant of $1 million to New York City represented two-tenths of a single percent of the total New York $477 million police budget (which did not include police pensions). The $35,000 the federal government granted the Detroit Police Department for its notoriously violent plainclothes tactical squad—STRESS—represented an even smaller fraction of Detroit’s police spending. ²²

But if federal money did not change the policy directions of big-city police departments, it was deeply consequential in encouraging other big-city government agencies to interlace police officers into their functions. President Jimmy Carter’s administration encouraged that integration by equating “crime policy” with “urban policy.” Under Carter, the department of Housing and Urban Development mandated that its grant recipients build law enforcement initiatives into their programs. By the end of the 1970s, the rationales, institutions, and relationships were in place for police to take a vanguard role in mass imprisonment. ²³

Policing in the Carceral Era: The 1980s to the Present

America’s urban police underwent a final twentieth-century round of disruption and redemption during the 1980s. At the outset of this decade, the federal government slashed aid to cities, and the municipal governments that had been supporting police budgets responded with across-the-board cuts to services. In 1980, Philadelphia’s Democratic mayor eliminated 738 police positions as part of a reduction in city staff of 1219 workers. In 1984, Portland, Oregon, cut 60 police officers from its force. Other cities avoided laying off officers but reduced police personnel through hiring freezes. The police department in Houston, Texas, for instance, made no new hires between 1986 and 1989 and did not build back 1986 levels of staffing until 1992. In the face of austerity, police departments scrambled for new authorizations. ²⁴

During the 1980s, politically ambitious police officers used both the war on drugs and the movement for community policing to reestablish police as first-line defenders of the citizenry and democracy itself. Police once again drew together a broad reform coalition advocating for more police. On one hand, police appropriated the anxieties of residents of color who recognized that outdoor drug dealing in their neighborhoods was a source of increased robberies and gang violence. ²⁵ At the same time, white middle-class cosmopolitan liberals had long prized face-to-face partnerships with the police as the key to a socially liberating and physically safe city, and savvy police leaders now reached out to this liberal constituency with the promise of cooperative community policing. Finally, police renewed their support among downtown business elites. In light of the federal government’s austerity measures, business elites insisted that the financial and service sectors were now responsible for urban economic growth, and these advocates of neoliberalism turned to police to help prepare “transitional” neighborhoods for private investment. ²⁶

The broad coalition advocating an increase in police officers spurred the federal recapitalization of urban police departments. Making good on the precedents it had set during the 1970s, the federal government during the 1980s extended military equipment, federal facilities, and manpower to police forces. The federal government also opened new lucrative revenue streams. During the 1980s, it brokered “equitable sharing” arrangements that granted local police forces assets seized during drug-law arrests. The 1994 Crime Bill responded to local demands for more police by allocating $10 billion for police hires. After 2001, the federal government buttressed urban police forces further by enlisting local police as enforcers of federal immigration law. ²⁷

Once again, American law enforcement had the authorization for an order-maintenance policing that existed outside the public eye. Under the veils of professionalism, the harm principle, and community partnership, police served as agents for mass incarceration and regulators of increasingly prison-like, low-income neighborhoods. ²⁸ It is this policing system that BLM now exposes and challenges.

New Directions in the History of Police and Cities

As much as the recent explosion in police history scholarship has taught us, critical questions remain. Historians are still trying to identify the various constituencies that helped authorize and determine police powers and roles. In particular, historians are still trying to untangle the relative influence public officials—at the local, state, and federal levels—have enjoyed in shaping police power. Similarly, scholars are still gauging the ability of federal grant writers, liberal police chiefs, and black mayors to affect the power and functions of the police. Historians do not yet fully understand how police have managed the public’s and state’s knowledge about the citizenry and day-to-day police work. Researchers are also still working to explain how police officers themselves not only enforced social hierarchies and practices but also helped determine them. Finally, much work needs to be done to determine whether and how police histories in smaller cities, such as Ferguson, Missouri, relate to the histories of policing in the major metropolises. The essays in this collection engage with these key historical problems.

Eric Schneider’s “Dirty Work: Police and Community Relations and the Limits of Liberalism in Postwar Philadelphia” examines both the breadth and fragility of the great challenge to police legitimacy during the 1950s and 1960s. In Philadelphia, Schneider shows, multiple constituencies came together to reorganize the state and institute civilian oversight over the city’s police. Civilian review exposed the police’s “dirty work”—the department’s violent, order-maintenance policing of black citizens. This exposure forced the police reform coalition to confront the city’s definition of citizenship, and the coalition splintered over this question. White liberals continued to associate black people with violent criminality, and police exploited white fears over rising urban violence to re-legitimize the department’s pattern of violence against black citizens.

Anna Lvovsky’s “Cruising in Plain View: Clandestine Surveillance and the Unique Insights of Anti-Homosexual Policing” flips the traditional 1960s narrative in which modern, enlightened judges worked to rein in ignorant, outmoded law enforcement. Midcentury vice squads, Lvovsky shows, developed a sociological understanding of gay male culture that recognized the growing surreptitiousness of gay sexual encounters. Police responded to these new gay male practices with increasingly sophisticated public bathroom surveillance. But to secure approval for that new law enforcement, police hid from judges their sociological picture of gay culture. Magistrates therefore authorized bathroom surveillance on the old assumption that gay men were bent on exposing themselves to the public. By managing the flow of social knowledge within the state, police officers reauthorized their order-maintenance function over gay men, and by extension expanded their surveillance powers over all male citizens who used public bathrooms.

Stuart Schrader’s “More Than Cosmetic Changes: The Challenges of Experiments with Police Demilitarization in the 1960s and 1970s” examines the attempts of liberal police to relegitimize rank-and-file police discretion after the challenges of the Sixties. Schrader shows that in small cities like Menlo Park, California federal aid and federally funded information networks encouraged police experimentation. Menlo Park’s police chief, Victor Cizanckas, positioned himself in opposition to “police militarization” and instead promised to remake police officers into comprehensive service providers. Cizanckas ultimately offered a more comprehensive vision of police reform than the case-by-case approach taken by Philadelphia’s civilian review board, but he too refused to conceive of citizenship in a way that detached violent criminality from black culture. As a result, Cizanckas’s antimilitarization reforms expanded, legitimized, and obscured the police’s order-maintenance powers over black residents.

In “Liberal Law-and-Order: The Politics of Police Reform in Los Angeles,” Max Felker-Kantor charts how Tom Bradley, Los Angeles’s first black mayor, responded to the rising crime rates and civil rights campaigns of the 1960s with a “liberal law-and-order” politics. Bradley ran for mayor on the promise that he would reduce criminal and police violence. Once Bradley won office, black activists called on the city government to curb police repression with community oversight. But Bradley subscribed to a racialized harm principle that associated working-class black culture with criminal violence. So Bradley, like Cizanckas, eschewed civilian oversight and instead attempted to improve police–community relations by transforming militarized police into beneficent socializers. Unlike Cizanckas, Bradley faced a powerful police union, and as he pursued his reform agenda, police negotiated a massive capitalization of the police force. By the 1980s, Bradley’s liberal law-and-order agenda had created a police department capable of subjecting black Angelenos to mass surveillance and arrest.

In “‘The public does not believe the police can police themselves’: The Mayoral Administration of Harold Washington and the Problem of Police Impunity,” Toussaint Losier shows how the half-measured police reforms of the 1970s stymied the efforts of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, to secure police accountability during the 1980s. White Democrats in 1970s Chicago created the Office of Professional Standards (OPS), a police oversight group that served at the behest of the police chief. Under this arrangement, the OPS helped create a self-reinforcing cycle: OPS hid patterns of police abuse against black Chicagoans, which then dampened public interest in issues of police accountability, and thereby enabled OPS to hide new rounds of police abuse. Washington won the mayor’s seat in the early 1980s on the promise of civilian oversight over the police, but he could not break through the OPS’s obfuscation and organize a broad police accountability coalition. Indeed, with OPS providing cover, police introduced a torture program as part of their traditional order-maintenance function.

In “They Don’t Care if We Die: The Violence of Urban Policing in Puerto Rico,” Marisol LeBrón shows how police leaders and law-and-order politicians in both the United States and its territories used violence to redeem the police’s racialized, spatial order-maintenance function in the age of austerity. During the 1990s, city governments faced crises of declining federal funding support and climbing rates of homicide. Urban officials had long responded to high rates of violence by advocating the removal of young black men via arrest and imprisonment, and now at the end of the twentieth century, law-and-order officials took that eliminatory logic to its extreme. Policy makers promised to reduce the threat of violence for law-abiding citizens by encouraging homicides among black drug dealers. By the early twenty-first century, this “Let them kill each other” policy could be found in cities from Chicago to Rio de Janeiro. ²⁹ So while officials during the 1960s had introduced the harm principle on the promise that it would reduce criminal violence, officials by the 1990s were using it to promote premature death in racially segregated neighborhoods.

In “The Making of the Orderly City: New York since the 1980s,” Themis Chronopoulos draws attention to the decade-long lag between the formulation of the “broken windows” order-maintenance strategy and its eventual implementation in New York City. During the early 1980s, broken windows theorists repackaged the racialized harm principle for the age of austerity. They argued that “disorderly” behaviors created fear in depressed neighborhoods and that this fear then crippled a neighborhood’s internal defenses against violent crime. Chronopoulos argues, however, that four preconditions—revolving around crime rates and the resources and capacity of the state—were necessary to implement the broken windows program. So, while the broken windows concept was born out of the economic and social crises of the 1980s, its implementation required the economic and social conditions of the 1990s. As in earlier rounds of reform, the broken windows program obfuscated its own street-level practices. Officials promised that the strategy would reduce fear for the citizenry, but day-to-day broken windows law enforcement explicitly aimed to spread fear among low-income residents.

The essays in this collection illustrate that from the immediate post–World War II period to the early twenty-first century, America’s urban police pursued a racial, space-based, order-maintenance function. The story behind that continuity, however, has been anything but steady and inexorable. Urban police since the mid-twentieth century have faced significant, repeated challenges to their legitimacy, and cities have had to reauthorize police power in the face of new citizenship models, new social practices, and new understandings of democratic governance. A better understanding of this history of police crisis and redemption, BLM activists now remind us, is critical as twenty-first century cities once again attempt to navigate a national challenge to police legitimacy.