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Stuart Schrader, "Blue Power: How Police Organized to Serve and Protect Themselves" (Basic Books, 2026)
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A
hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host Michael Stoutch, and today I'm here with Stuart Schrader to talk about his new book, Blue How Police Organize to Serve and Protect Themselves, which is out now from Basic Books. Stuart Schrader is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also the director of the Chloe center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism. His first book was Badges Without Borders How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, and he is the author of many important articles about the history of policing in both academic and public outlets. Stuart, welcome to the show.
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Thanks so much for having me. Great.
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Well, let's start with the title. So what is Blue Power and why does it Matter?
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Well, Blue Power is not my term. It's a term that I take from my historical actors who I'm looking at. One of the key figures in this book is a guy named Carl Parcell, who was the president of the Detroit Police Officers association, the Detroit Police Union, and he was one of the people who helped to disseminate this term, blue Power. He wasn't the only person who used It. Some people who are critical of the rise of police unionism or at least wondered if the rise of police unionism signaled a kind of transformation in both policing and the labor movement. You know, people were raising questions, but they. They used the term blue power in. In. In the end of. Of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. And when parcel and other police union militants used that term, they were quite explicit that it was in reaction to black power. It was a reactionary political formation. Par. Excuse me. Parcel says something along the lines of if. If they, meaning black people, can espouse a doctrine of black power, which we interpret as an attack on the police, we in response, can espouse blue power.
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Right, right, right. Well, that leads me to one of the other questions that I had was about Detroit explicitly. You begin with Detroit, which was known as the Model city for different reasons throughout the 1960s. But your claim is that it's also a model city for the creation and maintenance and kind of like incubation of blue power. How did that work?
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Yeah, that's exactly right. So the term model city is a term that many scholars of urban history and of the 1960s will be familiar with because the Johnson administration implemented a program called Model Cities, which was really about trying to implement the War on Poverty and the Great Society through the process of developing and expanding kind of social welfare programming in urban areas. And so it was a kind of focused program to transform what urban life would look like in. In. In cities that. That were, you know, undergoing a certain amount of social turmoil, so to speak. And, you know, as. As some other scholars of the. The history of mass incarceration and the carceral state have observed, including Elizabeth Hinton, Model City is the investment from Washington in. In urban redevelopment and urban transformation. You know, quickly some of these fund funds were redirected toward policing and other more kind of carceral forms of expenditure. And Detroit was considered one of the kind of showpieces of urban liberalism, of the fight against poverty, the fight against, you know, inadequate education and housing and so forth. And so the. The mayor of Detroit in the 1960s was a very promising young official whose name was Jerome Kavanaugh. And, you know, he was an ally of the Johnson administration. And in some ways, he was a supporter of civil rights. In some ways, people imagined that he might become a standard bearer for the Democratic Party. He was young and charismatic. In many ways. He was a kind of mayoral version of. Of John F. Kennedy, I would say. And, you know, nowadays, even among urban historians, you know, Jerome Kavanaugh is somewhat forgotten. And I would say that the reason that this guy who in the 60s was like, getting national media coverage, in part because of the poverty alleviation programs associated with. With things like model cities and. And the. The successes, seeming successes of urban liberalism, the reason he is now forgotten is the rise of Blue power. The Detroit Police Officers association made it their mission to basically destroy his mayoralty and really go to war against the kind of great society urban liberalism that he represented, which was again, pro civil rights, in favor of alleviating poverty and also, of course, alleviating some of the abusive tendencies of the police force. The Detroit Police force had a really vicious history of engaging in both individual forms of, you know, bigoted and prejudiced policing against black people across the city, but also of repressing the really robust black and other social movements in the city that were. For trying to push for a more just and equal society. And, you know, really, the police department stood in the way of that. And the Detroit Police Officers association was kind of the. The organizing vanguard of very reactionary politics with. Within the department and the city and even. Even Michigan more broadly.
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Right, right, right, right. Okay, well, tell me a little bit more. Now, one of the things that I find interesting, this manifests itself later in Detroit, especially under the Coleman Young administration, when there's kind of like disagreements between administrative levels of the police department and the rank and file. Um, but there's also kind of very generally in your book, a kind of tension between chiefs as managers and patrol officers as rank and file. So could you talk a little bit about where that tension comes from and how it manifests, you know, in. In police work, for example, on the streets as well as within departments, this. This tension between the rank and file and management.
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Yeah, absolutely. And this is another factor of. Of For. For why I refer to Detroit as the model city, because, you know, if it became the. The model for blue power, in one way, it was about the organizing work that Carl Parcell and the Police Officers association did to assert its influence and. And say, over municipal politics, but also for how to reject both the kind of progressive or liberal tendencies of the mayor and members of the city council, but also some of the reformist measures that police commanders were trying to introduce to make the Detroit Police Department more effective both at reducing or controlling or deterring crime, which was on the upswing, but. But also to keep the sort of social peace and make sure that social unrest did not break out. You know, quite interestingly, I found, you know, we know, we think of Detroit as, as a city where there was a massive social rebellion in 1967, which, which, that, that, that happened. But before that, people in the Detroit Police Department and even observers from outside thought, well, the Detroit Police Department is, you know, among the best prepared in the country for preventing social rebellion. They have a set of plans and, and blueprints for what to do if, if, if you know, rioting breaks out and they will be effective at putting it down. Well, obviously that turned out not to be true. Why were those messages disseminated nationally? Well, it was because the, the police commanders in the city were, had a kind of national reputation and they, they were able to get attention from journalists, both kind of within the profession, but more, more broadly, you know, journalists around the nation, in part because one of the commissioners himself had been a journalist, so he was quite media savvy. But they, they were generally reformers and they were very, very strict about trying to change the practices of the police force. And some of this was really basic stuff, just changing patrol routines, changing the kind of distribution of resources within the police department and so forth. And this is a story that I, I found was true in many cities in, in the, the period that I, I would refer to as the professionalization period. It was really about trying to make police more effective by changing the way they operated, changing who they were recruiting, changing what the, the, the training once people were recruited actually looked like. So in the 1950s and 60s especially, this was a trend across the nation. And you know, Washington ultimately through, through especially the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets act, was very eager to fund these types of reform and professionalization measures. And so the Detroit police rank and file were resistant. They just did not want to have their routines changed. They did not want to be told in a kind of top down way this is what you have to do and how you have to do it. And especially they did not want to be told that you are going to be disciplined if you don't adhere to these transformations that we're implementing. And including some of those were meant to root out corruption and graft, of course, and that was true in many cities as well. So the reactionary position that that blue power entails was both against the police command and their reform measures and against more broad social transformations associated with civil rights feminism. Of course, you know, black power after some time as it develops. So there was a sociopolitical component of rejecting the transformations that the 1960s represent generally, but there was also a more specific reaction against the internal transformations of the police Department, which again were mostly implemented from the top down without much say for the officers. Police departments are hierarchical archical organizations and you know, command is able to issue imperatives from the top and then they kind of flow down the, the rank. You know, the, the captains tell the lieutenants, who tell the sergeants, et cetera. And so rank and file officers at the bottom of that rank hierarchy were oftentimes quite displeased and, and didn't want to change their work routines. And so that powered some of the unionization efforts. They didn't just want better compensation and, and, and you know, benefits. They also wanted to have more say over their work routines. I think ultimately Blue Power as a multi decade project was really successful at getting better compensation, but it was a little bit less successful at actually resisting changes to working conditions because ultimately it wasn't quite clear that, that these were bargainable. You know, it's, this is, this has been true in many, you know, union contracts that there are limits. You know, you can perhaps control how many hours you work, when you get paid for overtime, etc. But the actual conditions of the work while you're on the job are not necessarily something that unions under American labor law are able to control. Now that doesn't mean that they didn't, police didn't assert their, their ability to control their working conditions anyway. They just didn't do it through the contract process. They did it through other means. And that is another essential factor for understanding Blue Power which is that police were quite successful at gaining a lot. But then what they didn't get, they were still able to do through, through other, other sort of less legally codified means. I'll put it that way. Expedia and visit Scotland invite you to come. Step into centuries of history that await in Scotland Castle steeped in legend. Walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. 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All right. Well, you've given us a lot to chew on there. That's really powerful. I love the framework of Blue Power against both management and social movements or movements for social change. And I think it's really smart to think about it in terms over time, especially of rank and file police officers winning compensation, but not being able to resist the onslaught of change that's coming from above. And as you say, within the union contracts, there's lots of things that are negotiable, but generally speaking, managerial prerogative is not. And so there's kind of over time, the rank and file are losing that battle. I wanted to kind of drill down. There's a couple of things that I wanted to like, know more about in terms of the framework that you've just laid out. One is that you mentioned in the context of Detroit. There's this kind of, there's all sorts of manifestations of rank and file dispute, disagreement, discontent prior to the rebellion in 67. What's the, are you, are you suggesting there's a relationship between the exercise of Blue power and the, and the emergence of these uprisings? Because I've always thought of the upris things as related to police brutality and a response to it and kind of like, generally speaking, police practices. But just, I, just to be clear, I'm, I'm just curious about what, how those things are related, if, if at all.
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Yeah, this, this is a really important aspect of the analysis that I try to develop in the book, which is to say that first, as I already mentioned, you know, lots of people are quite familiar with the Detroit Rebellion of 1967. It was a really critical moment in U.S. history. And of course, the rebellion in Newark happened around the same time as well. And there were many, many other smaller uprisings and rebellions. And yes, the vast, vast, vast majority, as the Kerner Commission and other investigations found, the vast majority of them were in response to police brutality or other types of police misconduct, abuse, whether actual or, you know, immediately, like somebody was, somebody was brutalized and then people rebelled or a kind of longer term buildup of resentment over, over, you know, abuse that had been occurring. But you know, what I, what I'm trying to think about in the Detroit case, as once I was alerted to how the Detroit Police Officers association was organizing during this period is to say, well, you know, we have a lot of really great scholarship on the rebellion. The, There's a massive book and look at it on my shelf here called Violence in the Model City. You know, it's a really thick and extremely detailed excellent book by I think the author's name is Sidney Fine, if I'm not mistaken. And no, it, it like very briefly mentions the Detroit Police Officers association across like, you know, I don't know, 700 pages or something. But, but the, the Police Officers association had just engaged in the, you know, first really big city police strike, I think in, In June of 1967, right before the rebellion. Now in the history of police strikes, the, the previous big, big police strike in, in a big city had, had happened in 1919. So almost 50 years elapse in the United States without a major police strike. Now that doesn't mean there weren't, you know, episodes of discontent among police. But it wasn't until Carl Parcell organizes what is called a quote unquote Blue flu, which is officers calling out sick en masse. And this actually came on the heels of a, of a slowdown. And the reason was that the Detroit Police Officers association was trying to get collectively bargained contract and Jerome Kavanaugh was dragging his feet. He and the people around him. You know, there were fiscal challenges that Detroit was facing, the kind of anti poverty stuff that Detroit was doing. You know, the, the feds were, were providing some funding but it just wasn't enough to, to really cover the, the costs. And so they had the sense that a new contract with the police union, you know, initiating a contract would be quite costly. And in fact they were asking for really a large, large raise. They wanted to become, you know, I think one of the best paid police departments in the country. And so, you know, I word my claim very carefully in the book. I think in, in the context of a podcast I can maybe be a little bit less careful or maybe, maybe I should be more careful, I don't know. But, but basically what I would say is that the, the Detroit Police Officers association created a situation of weakening the mayor first by going really going to battle against him at a moment of kind of rising social discontent. The union also created a lot of discontent within the police department so that officers I think were not really first of all, they had, you know, more or less stopped doing their job in large part during the blue flu. And they were also just you know, really not adhering to policies and procedures that I think represented a breakdown in kind of discipline within the department. And there had been a long history of Detroit police officers engaging in really vicious and brutal forms of racism across the city, including particularly in the neighborhood where the rebellion ultimately broke out. And so when the rebellion did ultimately occur, you know, I would say that there was an underlying condition of, you know, really deep discontent with the. Among the black population of the city. But there was discontent within the police department. There was an effort to kind of go to battle against the mayor. There was an effort to try to, I would say, manipulate social conditions to the advantage of the police department. And so the rebellion breaks out. You know, it's a kind of international incident. It's a really, you know, horrifying moment of intense violence and turmoil. You know, many people are killed. Many. Many people are inj. Injured, and ultimately thousands are arrested. So it's a horrifying incident in many ways, but I think we are not quite, or historians have not quite been attuned to how quickly the greatest beneficiaries of the rebellion was the police union. Almost immediately in the aftermath of the rebellion, while the city is basically still smoking and, you know, national politics have been convulsed. It's in some ways the end of the Great Society kind of as we know it. It's. It's more or less the. You know, It. It derails Johnson's presidency domestically. The Detroit Police union gets a contract almost instantaneously. You know, the Kavanaugh administration gives up its. Its resistance to this. This unionization effort, and they. They get a lot of what they want. Not everything, but. But a lot of what they want. And so, again, you know, I'm not saying that the. That the police union caused the rebellion, like that would be. That would be a. A somewhat absurd claim. But I would say that the police union and the police department more generally both created conditions that led to and transformed the kind of politics in the city, such that a rebellion was more likely. And they were able to take advantage of the intense destruction and devastation to the Detroit political establishment, which, you know, they were able to take advantage of that and get a lot of. Of what they were seeking after the rebellion occurred.
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Yeah, well, it's. It's a provocative argument, and you make a powerful case for it. And what we can do in the podcast is. Is put it before people and say, hey, if you're curious and you want to see the sources and stuff, go read the book.
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Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And the Very precise wording that I try to use in the book.
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Yeah, there you go. Now I want to talk more about the national story. I don't want to stay on Detroit. But, but before we get, before we kind of move on to that, I wanted to ask a little bit about. Now there's, you've mentioned a lot about the tension between management and the rank and file within the police department. But I wanted to ask. You also mentioned that there's like a, there's always an element of cohesion or agreement that police have, and I think some of it is around discretion. Right. So can you talk a little bit more about the internal cohesion that kind of like keeps the police department unified to some extent through those types of practices?
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B
Yeah. I would say that as much as this book is about divisions, both, you know, horizontal and vertical within the police profession, meaning between rank and file and command and between different types of police agencies and, and associations that represent them. You know, kind of I talk about sheriffs, I talk about border patrol. Those types of law enforcement agencies tend to operate in rural areas. And then of course, I talk about urban police forces. I talk about organizations that are more union like or affiliated with organized labor. And then I talk about others that are really draw a strong distinction between themselves and organized labor. So, so there's a lot of divisions that the book tries to map out and, and explain how they affect both police operations and police politics. And that's, that's another distinction that, that I mobilize throughout the book. But yeah, you're right that there is also a lot of. There's both practical moments of, of unity and then more kind of symbolic moments of unity. And so the, in the political realm, there are moments of unity that are oftentimes the work of or the result of hard work by certain political representatives to get police to come to agreement over certain certain issues or pieces of legislation. And so I talk about two people in Congress, Mario Biaggi in the House of Representatives and Joe Biden in the Senate, who are two Northern Democrats who are tough on crime figures that they kind of paint a new kind of identity for, for the Democratic Party. They're not, you know, Southern segregationists, but they are tough on crime. And for that reason that Southern segregationists, who are the kind of old power brokers in the Democratic Party do see something they like in these kind of tough on crime Northern Democrats who put aside some of the concerns of Cold War liberalism to be much more explicit about the, the challenges of cities and crime by which they're often indicating that they're actually talking about black people when they talk about crime. And that's what the Southern segregation is sort of see in them. Even though they've. They develop a new kind of vocabulary to do this. And these guys, Biden and Biag, you know, really take it upon themselves at multiple points that I show throughout the book, to get different police organizations to come around the table and come to some agreement on different legislative initiatives. They try to find ways that they can write the legislation or develop the legislation in such a way that. That it'll give something to everybody. That's especially true with the 1994 crime bill. So that's a kind of political form of unity. There are also moments of unity where police departments, rank and file and command come together in a moment of crisis. If there's an episode where there's a really egregious form of abuse or police killing, even though there are these longstanding divisions between rank and file and command, in many cities, they will come together and consolidate in moments of crisis for unity, you know, develop unity for political and. And symbolic purposes. Obviously, also, if a police officer is killed, this becomes a kind of potent form of. Of symbolic unity. That, that. That is very effective in the kind of broader public. But you're right, you know, I. I think also the. The question of police discretion, which is at the kind of operational core of policing, no matter where we're talking about north, south, urban, rural, I would even go as far as to say beyond the borders of the United States, which is, of course, something that I dealt with more in my first book. But. But yeah, like, there is a kind of irreducible essence or core or, you know, unitary factor within policing, which is its situational exercise of discretion. And what, what blue power, in some sense is. Is. Is about. Is. Is. Is not just like I was saying, you know, getting an effective contract that will give officers good pay, a good pension, you know, overtime, vacation days, sick days, etc. Etc. Not. It's not just that, but it's also about protecting the ability of officers to engage in discretion so that they are not at risk of punishment or other types of disciplines. Discipline for doing the job that they're expected to do on a daily basis. And so how this ultimately plays out, of course, there come to be Supreme Court decisions and lots of different, you know, state and other. Other court decisions that protect officers and the decisions they make, you know, every day, multiple times a day. But, you know, the police union movement, you know, really tries to make sure that if officers are subject to discipline, they're going to be protected. And those protections come through both union contracts and in many cases state laws and the union movements, as I show in the book, the, the organizations that they're, they're, they, they cohere to, to, to develop, you know, are quite effective at getting state legislatures to, to write laws that, that protect officers. And so what this means is that they have representation and other types of professional advice helping them when they are under investigation or, or disciplinary processes are occurring. And they also have a certain set of kind of political support available to them, a whole PR strategy that might mobilize in these kind of moments of crisis as well. And unions are behind that. They don't just provide lawyers and kind of expert witnesses or whatever. They also are able to call up reporters and, you know, even if necessary, take out ads and whatever, you know, that whatever they might need to do to protect their officers. And so, you know, I would say that blue power is, is. Is. Is generally about, you know, kind of goes both ways. It's like using political power to protect the operational power of police to, you know, engage in discretion in the street, but also sometimes using their operational power to enhance or protect their political power, meaning using their ability to oftentimes be quite intimidating, and their kind of savviness about how cities work to be able to kind of, you know, get their way. So what that means is that police engage, you know, in, in protests and demonstrations as well as, you know, more unorthodox political tactics of again, like, you know, intimidating, for example, showing up in the middle of the night outside the mayor's house and, you know, having a noisy protest that really scares the crap out of the mayor and his family when he's trying to cut the budget or whatever. So, so there's lots of episodes like that throughout the book where the operational power and the political power of police come together. They, they become, they become sort of inter. Intertwined in particular moments. And that's how police are oftentimes able to get their way. And I would just say that this is really one thing that I think distinguishes blue power from the, you know, political power of other types of public sector workers. You know, of course, teachers have, in recent years, you know, there's lots of cases where teachers have, have gone on strikes. But, you know, teachers in general are not able to use the kind of what they, what you might consider their operations, which would be, you know, in the classroom or, or using, you know, books and lessons plans. You know, they're not able to use that so much to, to gain political power. Whereas the coercive force that police are endowed with to, to. To. To do their job, they also use that to protect their job. Where is Daredevil? I'm right here. Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. So what's next? I feel liberated. We're gonna take this city back over medicated in an all new season now streaming only on Disney plus. They're hunting us. It's time we started hunting them.
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A
I can work with that.
- [36:49]
B
This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again now streaming only on Disney plus.
- [36:55]
A
Right. Okay, good. Well, because we're on the topic of public workers and these kinds of things, you, you chart a paradox between police efforts to organize as public workers, using the mechanisms of the labor movement alongside police as the main antagonists of organized labor. And that brought the question up, which I was kind of grappling with, is like, is this a history of police unionization? Maybe that's obvious. Sometimes it feels obvious. But like, would you call, would you call this a history of police unionization?
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B
You know, when I set out to write the book originally, I didn't think it was going to be as focused as it is on police unions. You know, I thought first there's, there's multiple different types of organizations and associations that police belong to. You know, for example, there are many cities, especially big cities, will have lots of different ethnic associations and fraternities that police belong to. You know, I never, never really intended to write about that history. Other, other people can do it a lot better than I can. But it's just to say that if, if, if I, if I were to say that the book is about the kind of associations and organizations that police belong to, there's a lot of, than we could, we could talk about. But in terms of politics, the ones that are the most effective and have had the greatest success over the period from the sixties to the present are the unions. And, you know, the command rank officers do have their own association, the International association of Chiefs of Police, which was the dominant organization among police in the professionalization era, say in the 1950s and 1960s. And I, I became familiar with the IACP when I was writing my first book, Badges Without Borders, because it has a role that it plays in the police training program that the United States developed for police from other countries during the Cold War. So I was familiar with the iacp and I thought, well, you know what? I don't really know anything about police unions, but it's something that I'm really curious about. And nobody else seems to have written the book, so I guess I'm just gonna have to do it myself. But I thought it would be, like, maybe even one chapter would be about unions and the next chapter would be about the chiefs, and then we'd go back and forth. That was sort of how I imagined the book originally. But the research revealed to me that the chiefs really were surpassed. They did not maintain their. Their political stature and influence. You know, they still do have some power and influence in the profession, of course, but the police union, certainly at the municipal level, have way more influence and probably at a state level, too. The kind of reformist technocrats who compose the International association of Chiefs of Police to this day, they get called upon in moments of crisis. Barack Obama called upon them to help devise responses to, you know, the, the upsurge of, of protests that, that the Black Lives Matter movement represented in, in 2014, 2015. So, you know, his, his task force on 21st century policing, you know, called upon the, the reformist chiefs to devise some solutions. Those solutions were not really all that effective. And so then in 2020, there was another round of protests because police were still engaging in the types of really reprehensible acts of violence that had spawned the first round of Black Lives Matter protests. So, you know, reformers are still there. They're absolutely. You know, they get a lot of attention from academia, they get a lot of attention from philanthropy. But within police departments, I think that generally speaking, the unions have, over this period, maintained quite a lot of political power to shape what police departments look like and then more broadly to shape what our politics looks like. You know, I think that at the city, state, and even federal level, police unions have been really quite influential in shaping the discourse around law enforcement, around crime, around even racism. And, and, and the kind of apotheosis of this is the police union support that Donald Trump was able to marshal in both of both his 2016 and 2020 as well, that he lost, and then even the, the 2024 campaigns. And so that's kind of where the, the book ends is with police unions, including at the municipal level, going all in on Donald Trump.
- [41:52]
A
Right. Well, that. Maybe that's a good way to segue into a question that I had. You know, we're talking about Detroit as a model city for this type of reform, but there's also a national story which you've been suggesting here. One element of that does entail the International association of Chiefs of Police and this guy named Quinn Tam, who serves as the executive director. Just tell me more about the, about TAM and the International association of Chiefs of Police. They have a relationship to efforts that reform within police departments, particularly after the 1960s, I think. What is that relationship? What are they trying to do?
- [42:28]
B
Yeah, so Quinn Tam is a really interesting figure. And in some ways, you know, I wrote about him in my first book. I wrote about him a little bit in an article that was kind of the first attempt to make sense of the political power of police where I focused on the International association of Chiefs of Police. And that led me to some of the research that I did, did for this book. And I was really assisted by getting a copy of his FBI file which my, my friend and colleague Joshua Clark Davis shared with me. And he's, he's a real FOIA expert and he has a lot of, a lot of amazing FBI stuff, good to know in his holdings. Yeah, yeah, maybe I shouldn't have said that. I was going to get bombarded by emails from people seeking FBI files, but anyway, so Tam was an FBI high ranking figure in the FBI. He was an underling of J. Edgar Hoover. He kind of learned the tricks of the trade from J. Edgar Hoover, so to speak. But he, he had a role that, that enabled him to be in touch with officers all over the country. And you know, most, I think particularly in the 1950s and 60s, you know, most FBI agents and local police, you know, this is something that you kind of see represented sometimes in TV and movies, but they had a somewhat antagonistic relationship. You know, FBI special agents under Hoover, you know, they wore suits, they had to all kind of like look the same. Hoover had very exacting standards for what FBI special agents were supposed to be like that, you know, they weren't supposed to drink and they all had law degrees. You know, there, there's like a whole list of factors that made them really quite different from the average, you know, beat cop who in many cases, some of them, you know, hadn't even finished high school. They didn't, you know, they didn't wear suits and they definitely were not teetotalers on the whole. Right. So nevertheless, you know, Quintam, through FBI training practices and other practices having to do with its crime laboratory, Quintam got to know cops all over the country, and especially chiefs all over the country, and that he eventually was able to translate that under Hoover's supervision into a role in the International association of Chiefs of Police, where he was Kind of the FBI liaison. And Hoover wanted to control the iacp and he did a pretty good job of controlling it in some ways, although the, you know, the CIA also had a, had a role which again, I read about in the first book. But eventually tam, I think, came to this realization that like, he, as long as Hoover was, was in power and he worked for the FBI, he was never going to be able to get out of the kind of really strong shadow that Hoover cast over the profession of policing. And eventually he, he broke with Hoover and he, he quit the FBI and took on a job basically running the iacp. And when he did that, he was able to diminish Hoover's influence over the iacp. And I think that tam's was that the IACP would kind of rival the FBI in having an influence over the profession of, of policing across the country. It was a kind of risky gambit. And Hoover, who did not, you know, brook any kind of opposition or criticism, you know, he was infuriated by, by TAM trying to break with, with the Bureau. And so then Hoover was like, well, if he wants to break with the Bureau, consider it, you know, consider our relationship over and we're not going to really have much of a relationship with the IACP for, for some time. And so from that moment of the break until after Hoover's death, the FBI and the IACP were distant from one another. But this was the 1960s, and you know, this happened at the beginning of the 1960s. And so the IACP was able to assert its, its dominance over the profession at that moment. And then ultimately was able to have some influence over the passage of the 1968 crime bill. And so that led to the creation of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which provided funding from Washington to police all over the country. And so TAM was really supportive of that effort. And it also made police across the country less reliant on the FBI because now they had a sort of independent source of both technical expertise that they could draw upon and financial resources. And so, you know, this was the period when, when, when the chiefs were dominant. TAM really oversaw it. But, you know, he was, he was an older guy. He was kind of at the end of his career. He still maintained some of the proclivities of Hoover's FBI insofar as he was like virulently anti communist and you kind of saw communist conspiracy conspiracies all over the place. And, you know, that meant that when the rank and file insurgency among police broke out, I think he also was a little bit Ill prepared to deal with that. You know, he thought that if I just run the IACP in a somewhat authoritarian fashion the way that Hoover trained me to do, I can, I can keep this, you know, these young cops and their complaints, that can kind of keep them at bay. And that just did not prove to be true. The unionization movement proved way too powerful and the IACP kind of faltered in, in, in its efforts to try to, you know, tame, tame that, that rank and file insurgency. And ultimately, you know, there were other factors as well, of course. I mean, for example, I write about how the National Sheriff's association developed some political clout and power in this period as well. And as the IACP was in, there was a kind of scandal that emerged. And so the IACP was dealing with internal turmoil and the sheriffs were like, ah, we're gonna seize, seize this moment. And they started to gain a voice in Washington that they had never had before. Okay. By the 1980s.
- [49:15]
A
Okay. Okay. Well, that, that's great. There's this Tam story is in some ways a deep dive into the archives. So I wanted to ask a little bit more about archival stuff. Can I ask you about the writing process? What archives did you use for this book? How did you decide on a structure and the scope? Because it feels like it's geographically very broad. Chronologically, it covers a lot of ground. Yeah. What kind of things influence those decisions about the book's structure?
- [49:46]
B
Yeah, well, you know, look, I, I, I, I began the, I began the research when I was still finishing up the, the first book. And that's because I was working on the International association of Chiefs of Police. That was kind of why I thought that that would be a really important thread throughout the book. And I think it still is an important thread, but it, it doesn't dominate. So I was really familiar with the IACP and sources related to it, primarily its monthly publication, the Police Chief Magazine. And you know, I had already had just like, you know, thousands and thousands of photos of issues of the police chief. I had some, some copies of the magazine as well. And so, you know, that, that was, that was where I started. And I did notice in the magazine that that again, they were, they were trying to make sense of the rising power of police unions because it really did create a problem for a lot of police chiefs. And so chiefs would read the magazine and try to figure out, like, well, what do we do about this? And they would talk about it at their annual, annual conferences. But in terms of, so I guess I would just say that the The Police Chief is an example of police professional literature is what I would call it, the kind of internal. It's not private, but internal communication of, like, cops speaking to other cops. And that type of literature forms a large part of the basis for the research that I was doing. You know, there, there were a number of serials, magazines that Police produced, and they have different, different politics. I would say that the, the Police Chief magazine is a kind of, you know, center right. There's a magazine called Law and Order, which is just like really right wing. There's a magazine called. There's actually two magazines called Police. The, the first one called Police is a monthly that's really directed toward rank and file officers. And then there's another one, which I refer to in the book as Police Magazine that was actually funded by the Ford foundation and is a phenomenal publication. It's hard to find, but its employees and writers were almost all professional journalists. And they basically would. I mean, it's somewhat unimaginable nowadays, but the Ford foundation paid professional journalists to travel around the country, you know, embed with police forces and investigate them. And I think it's in the first issue of the magazine, the kind of, like, inaugural issue, where there's this really lengthy article about the Birmingham, Alabama Police Department. And this professional journalist, you know, goes. Hangs out with Birmingham cops, you know, presumably for a few months and just like, records the things they say to him. And, you know, they say that just like the most outrageous, outrageous, unbelievable stuff. And I didn't end up quoting that article because it was a little bit, you know, distant from what I, what I was concerned with. But the point is that whether it was professional journalists or, you know, cops and, you know, people around the profession say, like criminology professors and others, you know, I, I really try to use the, the, the, the ideas and words of officers when they're, you know, kind of being somewhat unvarnished, when they're trying to talk to one another and, and talk about their political strategies, their sort of hopes and dreams in political terms. Of course, there is a value in paying attention to their more polished and refined PR strategies. And of course, I can't ignore that in the book, but I really try to use the professional literature of policing to show how, how cops, how cops talk to other cops. And, and then, yeah, some, some journalism where cops are, are, you know, where journalists are kind of observing cops and seeing, seeing, you know, things going on from the inside. And as far as how I developed the strategy for, for, for writing, you know, the, the the book, you know, I, the, the first maybe half of the book is, is, is focused on particular cities. Detroit, Baltimore, San Francisco, there's a bit about Milwaukee and then there's a bit about New York City. And then in the last part of the book, I focus in more on the present. Over the past couple decades, I focus more on New York City. But the, the arc of the book kind of follows this trajectory of municipal political battles, state level political battles, in part because officers, particularly in San Francisco in that police union, they realized if they couldn't get their way at the municipal level, they should get their way at the state level. And they kind of devise a state strategy, state level political strategy. And New York officers did this as well. Following, following on that lead. And then I, and then moving into the, so it's kind of chronological and also changing in the, the scale or the level. And then by the, the 80s and 90s, I'm looking at national level, you know, debates in Congress. And so, you know, the, the, like I said the, starting with Detroit, I, I was, you know, fortunate to find that there was this really interesting story of Detroit kind of creating a model or a blueprint. I was, I relied on some of the secondary literature that existed. So there's a phenomenal book from the 1970s called bureaucratic insurgency by political scientist Margaret Levy. I think, I think it was her first book and she ultimately went on to be quite famous. I think she recently retired, but she's a very important person in the field of, of American politics. But that first book was about largely police unionism. And so she wrote a bit about Detroit. She interviewed Carl Parcel. So that was what tipped me off to look into Detroit. And you know, I think I, I largely agree with, with her analysis. I, I have access to some other sources that she didn't have access to. But you know, a lot of the literature from the 1970s that labor sociologists, political scientists, even, you know, some like labor lawyers, you know, wrote about the police union movement. Their argument was like, okay, yeah, these police unions have been really aggressive, really militant, but once they get their contracts, once they get their grievance procedures, once they maybe get arbitration abilities written into the contracts, they'll calm down, they'll relax, they'll become like every other plea, every other public sector union. And so if I had, you know, read again, Margaret Levy's fantastic book, if I had read it and said, well, this is the definitive word, I would have been a little bit misled and it's not her fault, it's Just that all of these folks, they looked at organized labor, in other words, domains and other places, and they said, like, look, there's a pretty straightforward trajectory here. Militancy begets contracts, which beget pacification of the militancy. And, you know, I had lived in New York city in the 2000s. I knew that the Police Benevolent association in New York City was anything but pacific. So I had a hunch that there was a history, there was a kind of historical question to be asked, which was if. If you look at this literature and, and it says that police should become less militant, but we know that in the 2000s, they're still quite militant and angry and consistently trying to get their way. Well, how do we explain that? And so, on some level, that is what the, the books set out to do. You know, I did have access to some sources that other people haven't used. The San Francisco Police Officers association has a monthly newsletter going back to the late 1960s. And to my knowledge, nobody else has used this source. It's really quite difficult to find. But I would say that if anybody wants to, you know, make. Make use of that source in the future, I would be happy to share the PDFs that I have. You know, and, yeah, I. I used some. Some federal records, including FOIA records, and I do make use of. Of newspapers. I really tried to cobble together sources as best I could because I started in 2020. My original plans, you know, I don't know if anybody remembers summer of 2020, but we all thought, well, the pandemic surely will be over soon. That did not turn out to be the case. So I couldn't travel as much as I had hoped to. But I was fortunate to get a Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress when it opened back up in spring of 2022, or I guess it was January of 2022. So I was able to do some research there. They have a lot of the kind of serials and professional publications that I draw upon. Yeah. So there's a wide range of sources. The Clinton Library has a ton of online sources. I was very intimidated to write about the 1990s because I never, you know, I lived through the 1990s, but I'd never done archival research about the 1990s. And that is, you know, a moment when sources start to become born digital sources. And so I was not really used to thinking about how, you know, I was just unfamiliar with how to do that type of research. But I was. I was happy to find that the Clinton Digital Library had a lot of amazing sources about the 94 crime bill and other political campaigns that, that, that Clinton was involved in having to do with crime and, and drugs and so forth. And so, you know, the research was, was, was fun and interesting because I was able to deal with materials that I hadn't worked with before. But I was also really aided by having just written another book about policing and that I was quite familiar with the sort of like landscape of police sources, especially in the 60s and 70s. I, I was less familiar as, as it went into the 80s and 90s and 2000s. But again, like my, my kind of existing knowledge base about police and police sources really helped me to make sense of what I was looking at. And you know, I talked to, to student grad students about this and unfortun, unfortunately I would just say that there's no shortcut to familiarity with sources. It's just a matter of putting in the work. And eventually once you're familiar with the sources, you're able to even just deciphering all the acronyms that police use. I try to not use a million acronyms in the book because they can just be so kind of brain atrophying. But, but you know, you have to know the difference between IUPA and IACP and ICPA or you know, whatever. I don't know. So you know, it just like maybe I don't, I no longer know the difference. I've erased that from my brain. But, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's tough and it just comes with time and experience. Yeah.
- [61:55]
A
Well, I thank you for your service in digging through those archives in order to come up with a story. One of my favorite anecdotes from the book really came from an unexpected place. And this was the story of Jello Biafra, lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, running for mayor of San Francisco and just giving Dianne Feinstein a really hard time. Can you talk about his campaign in the context of Blue Power in San Francisco?
- [62:22]
B
Absolutely, yeah. I was really glad to be able to put this in. And for, I would say for music fans, but especially for punk fans, there are several nuggets to find in the book, so to speak. You know, I, I was a was and remain a music aficionado and collector. That, that is my, my first and foremost priority in life. You know, being a historian comes second or you know, maybe third, I don't know. But anyway, so yeah, like, being able to find a way to integrate some of my knowledge about music into this history was quite Fun and exciting, and I don't think it's a forced connection at all. And Jello Biafra is a perfect case. So Jello, he recently had a stroke, and I hear he's on the mend. But that was sad to hear. But in the 1970s, as a young guy in the San Francisco punk scene, he was, you know, quite active, and he was a real attention getter. And so he parlayed that ability to grab attention through sort of outrageous antics into a run for the mayor's office. And to set the stage for this, the San Francisco Police Officers association organized a police strike in 1975, which is at the center of my analysis of that organization. In the aftermath of the strike, the, you know, politics in the city were somewhat scrambled. It both, like, empowered a some more conservative people running for office and more liberal or progressive people. Dianne Feinstein had been an ally of the Police Officers association, and I explained that history in the book. But she. She was the kind of classic, you know, centrist that. That she would remain for the entirety of her very lengthy political career. Already when she was on the Board of Supervisors, which is the San Francisco City Council, and as. As people may know to sort of fast forward a few years, the. One of the conservative officials who became a member of the Board of Supervisors was a guy called Dan White. Dan White had been a member of the Police Officers Association. He was a cop. He was also a firefighter. He left the Police Department and became. Became a firefighter. He had to resign that position when. When he became a member of the Board of Supervisors, as I recall. And so he was a conservative member of the Board of Supervisors. The Police Officers association was engaged in a battle, legal battle and political battle over affirmative action. There was a lawsuit by a organization of black police officers that had sued in the city. Dan White was one of the few reliable votes that the Police Officers association could count on on the Board of Supervisors. And what they thought was that the Board of Supervisors was going to have to vote on a settlement in this lawsuit about affirmative action. Police Officers association wanted it to, you know, the benefits of that outcome, you know, the outcome of the lawsuit to redound to the police union. So. But Dan White was. Was pretty miserable as a member of the Board of Supervisors, in part because being an elected official demands compromise. And he was an utterly uncompromising type of individual. I think he really embodied some of the sort of political sensibilities of police unionism in that regard. And he decided, you know, he also had money problems. So he decided to resign as a member of the Board of Supervisors. The Police Officers association got really pissed off at this because they were like, hey, buddy, you're our. You're our key ally on the Board of Supervisors. So he goes back to the mayor, who's a guy called George Moscone, and says, I want to rescind my resignation. And the mayor says, you can't do that. I'm. I'm already in the process of appointing replacement. Well, as people will probably know, Dan White murdered George Moscone, and he also murdered Harvey Milk. Harvey Milk was the, if not first, at least, certainly most prominent, openly gay elected official in the United States at this moment. So it's. It's a really horrifying event. And again, you know, in the book, I'm careful about how I frame this, but, you know, I think that we should understand that event, that episode as, you know, not just a kind of moment, momentary episode of. Of, you know, madness on the part of Dan White, but actually has a political cone to it. Not even undertone, but it's really an explicit political assassination. And the. I'm saying all of this, I mean, I think it's a really interesting story, ties into the history of police unionism, as I explain in the book, but I'm saying all this to get us to Jello Yaffro. Dianne Feinstein then becomes the mayor after the assassination. And the. The. The trial of Dan White ultimately results in. In, you know, he's. He's convicted, but on a lesser charge, and he ultimately is sentenced to a relatively light sentence. This leads to an uprising in San Francisco that is referred to as the White Knight Riots, where a number of police cars were set on fire. There's a famous photo of a line of police cars set on fire, which ultimately goes on to become the COVID photo of the first album of the Dead Kennedy's Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. Jello Biafra really, you know, steps into a city in a great amount of turmoil, political, social and otherwise. And so after the. The. The White Knight uprising, he decides that, you know, Feinstein has not really offered much to. To the sort of subcultural, countercultural queer and other denizens of San Francisco, because she has this very kind of corporate focus, you know, urban redevelopment focused position. And she also doesn't really want to pick a fight with the police department, which has more or less decided it's at war with the sitting city's growing queer community. So Biafra decides to run for mayor in the next mayoral election, and. And and much of what he says is going to be his platform is, is really poking fun at this political situation. So, for example, he says that there should be a. It's like, basically like there should be a statue of Dan White erected and people should be allowed to throw tomatoes and eggs at it. Something like that. You know, some of these are pretty absurd, obviously, planks for, for a political platform. But, you know, there's, there's, there's this communitarian ethos in the city which the historian Chris Agee has, has written about really excellently, in part in the context of writing about the police department. And Biafra also kind of lampoons that communitarian ethos by saying that police officers in the city should be elected by the neighborhoods that they're going to police. Now, this is not totally far fetched, in fact, because in the East Bay, in Berkeley, there has been a proposal in the 1970s for community control of police that was in fact backed by the Black Panther Party. And so, you know, Biafra is both embodying a sort of left wing politics, but he puts this sort of absurdist spin on it. He ultimately came in third in the mayoral election, which is pretty interesting. He didn't, you know, invest all that much money into the campaign. You know, people who know about punk history will know, I think, that Biafra did run for mayor. I think they probably think it was just a kind of, you know, ridiculous, you know, effort to, to sort of just. Just be. Be provocative. But I think that in the context of what was happening in the city, particularly around policing, Biafra was offering a pretty incisive and sharp critique of the political status quo, as well as of the San Francisco Police Department and the Police Officers Association.
- [72:38]
A
Yeah, no, it's great. I love hearing that anecdote and having some more context for that, because I had also known a little bit about that, but I didn't know all of the details. And my own Jello b offer connection, in addition to my love for the Dead Kennedys, was that I saw him tour in support of his if evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve spoken word. And it was this hilarious moment where I show up to, like, what's normally like a punk rock concert venue, and there's like, chairs set out in rows and we all sit in silence and listen to him deliver these speeches that he's already recorded, like word for word. It was very weird, but also awesome.
- [73:16]
B
Yeah. When I was a little kid, not, I mean, not that little, but, you know, maybe early teenager listening To Jello Biafra spoken word was, you know, somewhat transformative for my politics. You know, I mean, I think that like he, he embodies a certain type of politics that I think, especially for people of Generation X like us, at least, I think, I think, you know, you're of the same generation as I am. You know, he's, he's obviously older than, than I am, but, you know, he's maybe like old Gen X, I'm young Gen X. But anyway, it's like a certain type of post 60s, very anti establishment, very anti kind of like organization type of politics. And you know, that, that was very influential to me as a young person. I think I've, in some ways I have evolved, so to speak, but, but I can't, you know, I can't say that I've, I've completely left it behind in, in terms of my sort of political formation.
- [74:20]
A
Of course. No, yeah, it was important for me. I Propagandi was another one that was similar in that regard for me. Yeah. Well, as we conclude, I wanted to bring your analysis into the present. You make a claim about the relationship between protest movements and police power, suggesting that the uprisings in Ferguson coincided with a big national police strike, which you kind of mentioned earlier. And when we were talking earlier, you said there was. Part of what motivates the 2020 events is the unreconstructed practices from this earlier moment. But we usually understand it again as a movement against police brutality which culminates in the sort of widespread circulation of this idea of abolition. But what have we misunderstood when we misunderstand this, when we understand this period in this way?
- [75:10]
B
If I could put it most succinctly, you know, I would say that the reason that the demand to defund the police in 2020 was not totally successful, and the reason that the demand to Reform Police in 2014, 2015, was not totally successful is Blue Power. Blue Power is both a project and a process and an objective and an outcome. And the ability of police to maintain political support such that they are able to resist the efforts of social movements and even legislators to, you know, make concrete, palpable changes. You know, it's not just because police is, is a profession that itself is unreformable. I mean, I think that that is a, you know, a critique that we often hear on the left. There's something to that, but it's also because they have immense amounts of political power and sway and abilities to engage in types of campaigns, arguments, you know, other forms of suasion to to get, to get their way. And so blue power as a, as a kind of force throughout the history of the past, you know, several decades in the United States, I think is something that I hope people will, will read this book and be like, okay, this, this helps us make sense of why things have turned out the way they have as pertains to, you know, law enforcement and policing in this country. You know, this, this. I think a lot of people have a sense that in, in any particular given city, like the police union might be boisterous and you know, they might have, have the ability to get quotes in the newspaper. You know, they might be able to prevent budget cuts or whatever, but hopefully, you know, people who are already a little bit attuned to the way that like, municipal politics works and the kind of enduring presence of, of police unions, once they read the book, they'll realize, oh, this is actually a national story. It's happening all over the place. And in fact, these police unions are connected and they're using some of the same strategies very consciously. So they're sharing kind of blueprints and models for, for how to get what they want and, and, you know, succeed over and over and over again. And so, yeah, to bring it up to the present, you know, I do end the book by saying that, you know, a variety of evidence suggests that particularly after 2020, police really did lay off the, you know, in the sense that they, they stopped policing as intensely as before. And there's a variety of reasons for this and certainly the pandemic, you know, plays a role in this. But, you know, I would say that this was a kind of national level political reaction against the, the protest movements of 2020, which is just to say, like, oh, you know, you don't like what police are doing? Well, then we're just not going to do it right. And there, there, there are a number of episodes throughout the book where this happens. And of course, where we started our conversation in Detroit in 1967 is, is one of these. And I think that, you know, again, being attuned to the way that police are able to manipulate the, manipulate the occurrence of crime by transforming their practices both to, in some cases intensify their operations and other cases to lessen or slacken their operations, I think that also can help us make better sense of crime as a political problem. You know, it's not that like, you know, I think that the, generally in our, in our politics in the United States, every elected official is worried about crime going up because they're worried about Being dinged by an opponent for, you know, being soft on crime or whatever, not, not keeping their residents safe. But, you know, the, the, the reasons why crime occurs are quite complicated. But the. What police do is not just deter control, prevent crime, they also manipulate its occurrence. They take advantage of particular episodes of, of criminal activity and, and law breaking. And I think that we need to see this as something that is really crucial to our politics in this country for the purposes of being a little bit less credulous when those, you know, political arguments emerge of like so and so is, so and so is soft on crime or under Mayor xyz crime went through the roof or whatever, you know, like police use those types of arguments and their allies in the political sphere use those type of arguments as if they have nothing to do with the actual occurrence of, or recording statistical, you know, recording of crime, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, hopefully people will come away from this book with a little bit more of a multi dimensional and robust understanding of the relationship between kind of crime and politics. Insofar as, you know, I think that many of us know that this is a central feature of our history over the past decades, since at least the 1960s, but not the degree to which police themselves are a central actor politically in all of this. That's really what I hope people can take away from my analysis.
- [81:32]
A
Yeah, well, Stuart, it's an important insight in a book that's really full of them and it's been a pleasure doing history with you for our listeners. Blue Power How Police Organize to Serve and Protect Themselves is available now from Basic Books and you can find it wherever the finest books are are sold. Stuart, I thank you again for being on the show today. Congratulations on the book.
- [81:53]
B
All right, thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website, new books network.com connect with us on Instagram and bluesky with the handle ebooksnetwork and subscribe to our weekly substack newsletter@newbooksnetwork substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.