The Origins of Police Power

The Origins of Police Power The Origins of Police Power An interview with Stuart Schrader, author of Blue Power, about how U.S. police unions built themselves into a formidable political force, and whether the movement is more fragile than it appears. In Blue Power, Stuart Schrader tells the story of how U.S. police unions built themselves into a formidable political force, securing material gains for cops while shielding them from oversight. In addition to formal bargaining, these police unions have often sought to mobilize public opinion against those seen as a threat to their autonomy, incubating a right-wing politics that has found its full expression in President Donald Trump. Even with evidence that the 2020 George Floyd protests boosted Democratic vote totals, critics of policing have come under fire recently as a potential electoral liability. I spoke with Schrader about how the police managed to secure such a powerful hold on American politics, and why Blue Power may be more fragile than it appears. Nick Serpe: I wanted to start by asking you about how you ended up writing this book. It’s not your first book about police. In Badges Without Borders (2019), you looked at the relationship between U.S. empire and policing. In Blue Power, you’re examining police unions and professional organizations, a topic that brings together labor history and political history. Why did you decide this was an important subject to study? Stuart Schrader: In the beginning of Badges Without Borders, I write that U.S. empire is typically in the background of the study of the carceral state, prisons, and policing, largely unmentioned. I wanted empire and its effects on the development of the carceral state to be at the center of the analysis. Similarly in this book, I realized that in a lot of the scholarship and popular understanding, the political agendas of police are in the background. Everybody knows they’re there, but nobody is too focused on them. Sometimes they play some role in the story, but they’re not understood as a central topic. I was also frustrated that there was not already a book-length history of the police union movement. Where did it originate? How did it develop? What are its key characteristics? I started thinking about this topic around the original Black Lives Matter upsurge in 2014–15. I was living in New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio was receiving a huge amount of pushback from the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (now the Police Benevolent Association) after a couple of cops were killed in Brooklyn in December 2014. This was when I was researching Badges Without Borders, and I had also noticed that police were becoming more politically aware, more cohesive as a national unit decades ago. I wrote in that book about the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), which is a trade association that has existed since the nineteenth century. It gained a great deal of attention in Washington, both from the White House and some allies in Congress, toward the end of the 1960s. The leader of that organization, Quinn Tamm, was trying to convince police chiefs around the country that they should become more politically active, that they should marshal a coherent and unified political voice to gain favor in in the halls of Congress. He was fairly successful—although he faced a lot of intransigence because many police chiefs found the notion of any sort of influence from Washington to be very worrisome. This was the civil rights era. Many chiefs thought that, as soon as Washington got involved, that meant oversight regarding racial discrimination, brutality, abuse, and so on. Tamm and the IACP had to navigate a challenging political question, which was really a political organizing question: How do you get a bunch of skeptical, individualistic police chiefs who are very powerful in their local jurisdictions to care about what happens beyond those boundaries, to think at the state level or the federal level? The IACP and Tamm were successful in the 1960s, but this was also the moment when the police union movement exploded, and the unions ultimately surpassed the organized power of the police chiefs in many ways. It’s an open question whether chiefs retain the kind of power and influence that they had even as recently as the Obama administration. Police chiefs generally tend to find favor among Democratic administrations in Washington, and the rank and file find favor with Republicans. Sometimes they bridge that divide and come together. But during both Trump administrations and the Biden presidency, it seems to me that the police chiefs never really regained the kind of stature that they had under Obama, who was in favor of the type of technocratic police reforms the IACP had long supported. Serpe: Critics of policing often treat departments as institutions with a more or less unified set of interests. As your book shows, however, there have been many moments of conflict between top brass and rank and file—while at other points, the rank and file see the “boss” not as the chief of police but as a politician. Where did these conflicts crop up between officers and commanders, and how did they shape the nature of these police organizations? Schrader: The project of police reform and professionalization—the idea that police needed to be better trained, have more education, use scientific techniques and advanced technologies, and maintain discipline—began in the 1930s and reached its apogee by the 1960s. The technocratic reform program found support because of the endemic corruption within policing and the sheer ineffectiveness of many police forces, particularly as crime rates were rising and becoming highly politicized in the electoral realm. But that reform program was led from the top down. It was imposed on police officers, who did not appreciate being told that they were corrupt, inept, ineffective, or racist. They also did not want to change their routines. For example, many officers in the 1950s patrolled during daylight hours. Crime, of course, was more likely to occur after dark, so a very sensible reform effort was to reconfigure shift allocations. But police officers who were used to patrolling during the day were not thrilled about having to stay awake all night and be away from their families. This was the kind of relatively small-scale, but on a personal level consequential, type of change that led to the push from below to resist reform pressure. There was a political dimension too, however. When reform pressure came under the banner of blue-chip commissions in Washington set up by Lyndon B. Johnson, or from the Department of Justice’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grants for innovative experiments in policing practices and technologies, police again were resistant and skeptical. Many thought this was all a liberal, or potentially even communist, conspiracy to control police. Civil rights demands, it seemed, were meant to weaken or neutralize police power, as were Supreme Court decisions that protected defendants. All these changes fed into the feeling that the police were besieged from above, so they tried to muster power from below: “If the chief is going to insist on certain changes to our patrol routines, we’re going to muster a response to say not so fast. And on the political level, we’re going to start campaigning in our own defense for our autonomy. We’re also going to claim the mantle of professionalism, and because we’re professionals, we should be paid accordingly.” This is where the command and the rank and file eventually came to a kind of compromise, agreeing on raising compensation and benefits. The police union movement emerged in reaction to a lot of the pushes for change in American society in the 1960s, but it also in many ways saw itself as consistent with them. “We cops are also standing up for our rights. We’re also trying to demand respect and social approval.” Police union militants took the language and, in some cases, the political repertoires of protest from some of the movements active at the time, even when in their day-to-day work they were on the other side of the barricade. Serpe: Part of the context of this moment is a broader surge in public-sector unionization in the 1960s. In the book you show how police unionization does and doesn’t fit in that story, where there were different roads taken. How much of that has to do with things that are inherent to the nature of policing, or to the kinds of demands that police had. How should we understand police unionization or professionalization in relation to the rest of the public sector? Schrader: Police unionization became legally possible in many states and cities at the same time that unionization for other public sector workers became possible. In most cases, police had a greater challenge unionizing than sanitation workers or bus drivers. There was a long history of a strict separation between the labor movement and police, going back to a wild incident in Boston in 1919 when police went on strike because they weren’t allowed to join the American Federation of Labor, which led to violence and looting. Police also saw organized labor as too close to the communist movement. Of course, the labor movement was skeptical of police as allies, because when there were pickets or strikes, police were there to bust heads and protect scabs. When the possibility of public sector unionization arose, however, some police did try to seize the moment. The key question ultimately was, are police going to sign on with organizations like the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), or are they going to try to form their own police-specific associations? Organizations like the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) had existed for a very long time, but they were akin to social clubs. In some cases, they provided insurance or credit unions. They did not understand themselves as political organizations. They did not engage in lobbying, and they did not have collective bargaining rights. It was a difficult question for a rank-and-file police militant: Could you transform one of these organizations into an effective labor union, or did you have to go a different route? In Baltimore, there was a three-way struggle between a very powerful, imperious, authoritarian police chief who understood himself as a reformer and two groups of police militants from the rank and file, with some who wanted to affiliate with AFSCME (some of those individuals had been in unions before they became cops) and others who were very skeptical of the labor movement but interested in the FOP, which at the time was an explicitly right-wing organization. There was a vertical contest between the commander and the rank and file, and then a horizontal one between two competing officer groups. What ultimately happened was that the FOP became the representative of police in Baltimore in the 1980s, but not before a chaotic strike that I discuss in the book. Serpe: Many cities dealt with fiscal crises in the 1970s. How did police organizations navigate these crises? Did they sharpen their sense of being separate from the rest of the union movement? Schrader: In a relatively short period, police went from not having unions to having unions. They were starting to win much higher levels of compensation, pensions, etc.—and then very quickly, many cities experienced this massive fiscal crisis. Cities like San Francisco, New York, and Detroit that had very powerful police union movements were now experiencing severe fiscal challenges. Each case is a little different, but to generalize, police were very unforgiving about the challenges that elected officials were facing. Bureaucrats were tearing their hair out over budgets that just would not balance, but police unions had little sympathy. Their leaders had cultivated these militant, vociferous, uncompromising constituencies among police officers, and it was really hard as a leader of one of those organizations to say, “OK, guys, now we’ve got to play nice.” That was not in their vocabulary, and that has basically remained true until this day: Police unions cultivate militant memberships. As soon as leadership tries to tap the brakes, they find themselves ousted, and a new, more militant leader comes in. In New York City in the ’70s, the officer’s union cycled through a bunch of leaders, each one more militant than the last, for exactly this reason. At the moment of fiscal peril, the union spearheaded the Fear City campaign, which was meant to scare away tourists. It’s like they wanted to deepen the decline that was already happening and make it harder for the city. Fewer tourist dollars meant fewer tax dollars meant less money in the bank to pay rising police salaries. Police union militants in Detroit basically demanded the city stop spending money on everything else but the police, which is more or less what ultimately happened. These approaches created a vicious cycle where revenue declined, and taxpayers fled. Police were also fighting in this era for the ability to live outside cities. They were not paying taxes into city government. They were not affected by the libraries closing down, the parks equipment falling apart and rusting, the potholes in the streets, the reduction of garbage collection—all of these things that worsened quality of life. If you’re living in a leafy suburb an hour away, you’re not bothered by it. Meanwhile, the teachers and sanitation workers and other public sector workers who did tend to stay in the cities were paying taxes that were going into their own salaries, but they were not getting services in return. This led to friction that challenged efforts to try to unite politically around compensation and other questions facing public employees. Ultimately in New York City the fiscal crisis was at least temporarily resolved when some of the public sector unions agreed to invest their pension funds in bonds. The patrol officers’ union was reluctant to participate in that bailout of the city, even though its members were at risk if the city went bankrupt. They did not see themselves as part of a collectivity where everybody would share in either the rising fortunes of a city or its decline. Police were constantly trying to set themselves apart. Serpe: You describe how this era of urban crisis coincided with the rising political profile of sheriffs and their county-level departments across the country. Schrader: The IACP went into crisis in the 1980s, amid accusations of corruption. This was also the moment when the National Sheriffs’ Association, which until that point had been a very sleepy organization, started to become more politicized. It took advantage of the crisis of the IACP to assert itself as a different type of management voice for police. There are a few thousand sheriffs who have unique jurisdictions and authority, and also run jails in many counties. As they started to become more politically organized, the Reagan administration was fairly responsive to them. One of the most obvious examples of increasing sheriff pull in Washington was asset forfeiture revenue sharing from federal investigations. Sheriffs got a lot of money from this, especially in parts of the country where there was the potential for federal investigations related to drug smuggling in the ’80s into the ’90s. You send one sheriff’s deputy to a drug smuggling federal task force, and then you share equitably in the proceeds from any assets that are forfeited. Billions of dollars in assets were forfeited, and the proceeds have gone to police and sheriffs all over the country. Serpe: The name of your book, Blue Power, is not a term that you coined, but one that you borrow from a police militant. You’ve already said how the police unionization movement took a lot of cues from social movements of the 1960s, but Black radicalism seems to be a very important obsession of these organizations. Why is that, and how has it persisted long after the peak of Black Power had passed? Schrader: Until recently, you could look at the website Police Benevolent Association of New York City website and find some piece decrying Black radicals, because some police officers were killed by Black Liberation Army or other Black militant formations decades ago. Police unions see themselves as the ultimate defender and protector of police, and they became obsessed with Black Power, especially with the violence that it supposedly represented. When police union leaders (and observers) started to use the term Blue Power, at first it was to declare they were going to push back, to offer a political rejoinder to these critiques of the police that are coming out of Black radical circles, and to assert their own power and autonomy, making an uncompromising demand for respect. As the 1960s wore on into the 1970s, and Black Power became more associated with what police saw as a kind of irrational, violent impulse, Black Power became a talismanic opponent for police to organize around. When an officer did get killed, whether or not it was actually an assassination by a Black Power radical, which was very rare, it was often portrayed that way, so it became an event to organize around. It’s politically useful for police to say that they’re under threat and therefore deserve more and more in terms of respect, approval, and material resources. Blue Power, for me, refers to both the process of organizing toward those goals and the achievement of them, their entrenchment. Serpe: I noticed a number of points in the book where you cite radical newspapers as a source for reporting about police misconduct. I was curious about how you ended up using these sources—if that was in part because these were some of the only outlets that were covering these events without reiterating police press releases. Schrader: I’m glad you noticed that. I wanted to try to take seriously the perspectives of people who were most likely to be on the receiving end of police street practices of arrest, citation, and worse, and also those who were being targeted politically. That meant looking at the radical press from the 1960s through the 1990s, ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Black Panther Party to various Trotskyist and Maoist organizations, and then ultimately more subcultural groups, like punk bands. Mainstream newspapers and journalism did, of course, give some coverage of the political activities of police, but often it was not particularly critical. In contrast, these other organizations saw themselves as in a kind of constant battle. They were quite conscious of what the police unions in various places were doing and how they were talking. On the flip side, the police unions are also very explicit about these types of organizations. There’s this hidden, off-stage combat, discursive and in some cases literal. If you read only the New York Times and Washington Post, you would be completely oblivious to it. Still, a lot of this history is very hard to investigate. The records of police departments and police unions are virtually impossible to access, which is one of the reasons why nobody has written much of this history before, although other scholars are now writing more about police unions in various places, like Aaron Bekemeyer on Philadelphia and Imani Naiema Radney on New York City. Serpe: At one point you call Blue Power “acephalous”; you also write about the “pointillist achievements” of individual departments. Are there challenges to trying to trace a general story across so many jurisdictions and representative organizations? Schrader: I find these terms useful analytically, because Blue Power is not a conspiracy. Nobody is pulling the strings from the top. But at the same time, there are militants who were trying to forge connections across the country. They engaged in long-distance political organizing, going from one city to the next and saying, “Here’s what we did in our city. Here’s what you should try in your city.” Each city and state does have its own political ecosystem, and there’s no guarantee that what works in one place is going to work in another, but these connections were constantly being forged and nourished. That was a real revelation for me. Serpe: It’s almost like an American Legislative Exchange Council model, right? Schrader: Absolutely, and they do share model legislation, model contract language. Dusty old books sitting in university libraries or the Library of Congress present contract language for police to share, with blanks to fill in for your own city and so on. And they used these models! It makes perfect sense, but historians were not really aware of that before. Serpe: Your book ends near the present day, including chapters on the protest cycle of 2014–15 leading into the much bigger protests in 2020. How did police associations and unions respond to these moments of protests—rhetorically, electorally, in terms of workplace action? Schrader: In general, their response was to put up a brick wall: We’re not going to brook any criticism. These protests are based on dubious claims. They’re unfair to police. They are manipulating public sentiment against police. They’re unjustified. The police officers in question, whether it’s in the killing of Mike Brown or Eric Garner or later George Floyd, at the very least deserve due process and a fair investigation of the evidence. They should not be condemned in the court of public opinion, and maybe the claims being made against them are lies. The videos don’t show what people think they show. The defenses that police unions mounted of officers who were accused of these killings were multifaceted and robust, and then when the protests broke out, they strongly denounced them. As I mentioned earlier, after the first round of protests, the country entered an era of police reform, shepherded from the top by Obama in Washington with his Task Force on 21st Century Policing. This led to some reforms, including body cameras. There were new types of training, new forms of data collection. In some cities, there were consent decrees issued after Department of Justice findings of patterns or practices of civil rights violations. All of this was quite expensive. Body cameras are expensive. Consent decrees are expensive. New training is expensive. And five years later, by 2020, it was not really clear that all that investment had led to much of a transformation in policing. Police were quite reluctant to admit mistakes, and they were aided by their unions in resisting any kind of transformation imposed by jet-setting consultants who worked for various professional police reform organizations or the DOJ, or by the new chiefs that were appointed in many cities. Scholars have amply studied the challenge of imposing reforms that prescribe a unified set of procedures; it’s really hard to make it work in the street because police enjoy so much discretion and flexibility in how they deal with the situations that they encounter. Reforms that mandate a new set of practices often fall apart on the ground. We get to 2020, and not much has changed. The rate of police killings in this country hasn’t really changed, and then an incident of grotesque police violence was caught on camera at the same moment when people were home from work because of COVID, and the weather happened to get nice right at that moment. People are starting to go outside, and they’re also getting checks from the federal government that allow them to not have to go to work. All these circumstances, plus real anger nationally at Donald Trump, went into this next round of protests. The language changed to defunding police instead of focusing more on penalizing the officers who had done something wrong. Because of the failures of reform, there was a kind of organic consensus among people who were morally and politically outraged that the whole system needed to change. And experienced organizers seized the moment. In some ways you couldn’t have come up with a better phrase than “defund the police” to piss off police union leaders. Many of these guys had their father in the police union, maybe even their grandfather. They were put on this planet to make sure that the police budget is as large as possible. And the vast majority of every city’s police budget goes to compensation—salaries along with various types of insurance and benefits and pensions. So protesters say “defund the police,” and you can see the steam coming out of their ears. It’s not as though there hadn’t been police layoffs or budget cuts before, but now there was an organized national and seemingly even international movement arguing for cuts to police budgets. Separate from the arguments that a lot of progressives have indulged in about whether it was a politically savvy term, it was a dagger pointed at the heart of Blue Power. The political response from police was vehement and well-organized. They used all the experience they had in lobbying behind closed doors to make sure that if there were going to be budget cuts, they would be to the least important parts of the police budget. In Baltimore, at first they weren’t going to make any cuts to the police budget, but there was a public outcry, and so they decided to cut the equestrian unit and the marine unit—the two units that are least likely to engage in, say, a stop-and-frisk that goes wrong and leads to a police officer killing someone. In the end even those units survived in modified form. In many cities, even if there were cuts in that first year, they were restored almost without exception a year later. At the same time, many police departments experienced a lot of attrition due to retirement and resignation, so their actual expenditures may have declined. Beyond preventing the types of cuts that people were calling for, police unions also engaged in a number of other political strategies, including pursuing culture war battles around law and order, crime, and public safety. As I discuss in the book, some police union militants allied themselves with Trump and his re-election campaign in 2020, notably Police Benevolent Association leader Pat Lynch in New York City, who until that point didn’t have much reason to collaborate with a Republican, especially a Republican running for the White House, because New York had become such a reliably Democratic city in a reliably Democratic state. But he didn’t feel like he had many friends on the Democratic side of the aisle anymore, and he saw something in the revanchism and lock-them-up attitude that Trump offered. Another example is Bob Kroll, who was the police union head in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed. He was responsible for defending the abusive practices that had been allowed to occur in the Minneapolis Police Department, and he created the T-shirt that says “Cops for Trump” and started selling it on the internet. He shook Trump’s hand at a rally very prominently. These people are experienced backroom operators. They know how to lobby in the legislature. They and their lawyers know how to read a complicated budget, contract, or piece of legislation. But they also start engaging in these really outrageous public and cultural battles. Meanwhile, operationally, a lot of police officers decided to stop policing. There was a kind of extortionate demand made by police to the American public: Respect us, or we’re not going to keep you safe. And cops across the country engaged in a quiet, undeclared strike beginning in 2020. It’s not that police disappear entirely, and certainly a strike was not openly declared, because it would be illegal in almost every place for cops to go on an official strike. But they slow their response times, and proactive patrol slackens. They choose not to respond to certain less-urgent calls. They choose to respond slowly to calls in the districts of council people who are critical of them. They cease traffic enforcement. They refuse to collect the newly mandated racial demographic data to prove whether they’re operating with bias. The way this sort of quiet strike it plays out is not that all calls for help go unanswered, but normal operations recede. And in many cities, specialized task forces are put together to pick up the slack from the reduction of regular patrol routines, and these organizations then engage in rampant abuse. Examples include the Gun Trace Task Force in Baltimore and the Scorpion unit in Memphis, which killed Tyre Nichols. We can’t really make sense of what policing on the street has looked like over the past six years without understanding it in the context of this longer history of police political mobilization. Again, Blue Power is both their goal and the means by which they achieve that goal. One reason that many police feel like they have to engage in these types of activities, changing how they patrol and respond and so forth, is actually because they have less traction in state houses and city councils now. Self-identified democratic socialists and progressives are getting elected. The kind of reliable balance of Democrat and Republican in state legislatures is going away, with more trifecta control by single parties. Certainly, that’s true in Maryland. It’s true in New York. The way it used to work—you peeled off a few votes here and there, and you eventually got your way—just isn’t as possible for these police unions and their lobbyists. Without the ability to be fully effective in the backroom strategy, they have a more public strategy of fighting culture war battles, going to war on Twitter, and engaging in these slowdowns and undeclared ticket-writing strikes and so forth. Where we err is when we try to analyze what’s going on with law enforcement, what’s going on with crime, as if cops are behaving in a politically neutral way. Instead, we should situate our analysis in the context of this massive, multicity, multistate project of political mobilization that’s been going on since the 1960s, which I call Blue Power. Serpe: Media savviness may be very important to Blue Power. But it strikes me that as the police have become a more unified MAGA bloc, there are potential limits to those efforts to mobilize public opinion from an imagined silent middle concerned about crime. Schrader: Far be it from me to give a police union leader advice, but I don’t really see how it is politically savvy to ally yourself with just one party when the history of your success overall is fairly bipartisan. The book analyzes successful efforts pass transformative legislation, which were bipartisan, with police organizations able to get support on both sides of the aisle. Choosing to ally yourself with only one side seems like it’s limiting your chances of political success. On the other hand, it is also true that the current Democratic Party, with its generational fracture and growing left insurgency, isn’t obviously hospitable to police power. It isn’t necessarily all that clear how police unions are going to be able to marshal the types of friendships and allies that they’ve had over the decades. We’re in a moment where what’s politically possible may be changing. It could be the case that Blue Power as we have known it, as my book characterizes it, is entering a terminal crisis. Stuart Schrader is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of two books, Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves (Basic Books, 2026) and Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (University of California Press, 2019), and the co-editor, with Julian Go, of the forthcoming volume Imperial Entanglements of Policing, to be published this fall by Duke University Press. Nick Serpe is a Dissent senior editor.