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Despite the construction of massive amounts of subsidized housing assigned on a nondiscriminatory basis, the existence of a longstanding and vigorous set of social and political institutions in the black community, as well as a mayor's office dedicated to defusing racial tensions and “empowering” minority leaders by appointing blacks to higher offices and to civil service positions, the city of New York did not remain immune to the rising national racial tensions of the 1960s. Significantly, the rallying cry was once again police brutality, although the incident that triggered the prolonged and better organized protests was hardly as “minor” as a fruit riot, nor did it begin within the confines of Harlem.

This chapter examines the 1992 reuprising in Los Angeles. Although the narratives describing the events of the 1992 riot do not deviate much from those of 1965, current analysts, many of them African American, are more sophisticated in interpreting the meaning of the revolt, albeit more pessimistic about any potential alliance between African Americans and Latinos in the changing terrain of Los Angeles politics. The immediate trigger also involved police brutality, but ignited only after a year's delay, revealing that the riot initially was a frustrated response to injustice, not just a reaction to ongoing brutality. It represented outrage over the court decision, whose legitimacy was deeply questioned, if not completely rejected. It was also a sign that little had improved for the residents of South Central Los Angeles in the intervening twenty-seven years.

This chapter chronicles patterns of racialized and gendered interracial police brutality in Washington, D.C. and the efforts of black women and men to end this violence. Between 1928 and 1938 white police officers in the city shot and killed forty black men in the city. While white officers did not shoot and kill black women and girls, but subjected at least twenty nine to a range of violent behaviors, including street harassment, racial epithets, physical assaults, and intrusions into their homes. In addition to these abusive encounters, white officers employed a double standard by refusing to conduct investigates when black women were abused, raped, or murdered; this was a form of negligence. Black women who were the victims of police violence resisted interracial policy brutality by fighting back, alerting the press, and pleading innocence in police court. Black women activists joined with men to stem the crisis of interracial police violence through protest parades, mock trials, mass meetings, and congressional lobbying.

This chapter explores how Afro-Caribbean activists in London adapted the raw material of U.S. soul style to combat racial discrimination and sexism in England. Members of the Black Panther Movement Youth League in Brixton appropriated the language and imagery of U.S. soul to frame their own version of Soul Power that drew upon their Afro-Caribbean musical, culinary, aesthetic, and political traditions and responded to the discrimination and violence they encountered in their daily lives. Focusing on the brutal beating of young Afro-British Black Panther Olive Morris at the hands of the London police, this chapter shows how soul style was read as a sign of black criminality and civil disobedience—especially when worn by gender nonconforming women—by agents of the state.

Chapter five focuses on the years from 1960 to 1967, aligning with the tenure of Chicago Police Department Superintendent Orlando Wilson. Hired in the wake of a massive scandal within the police department, Wilson came in as a departmental outsider, and with aims to reform and professionalize the department and ensure greater accountability to the public. For these efforts, Wilson is remembered as perhaps the most consequential leader of the CPD in the department’s history. He implemented the first Internal Investigations Division and labored to better the image of the police in the eyes of the public. However, he was also a strong law-and-order proponent who firmly believed in an expansive police power, leading to an evermore aggressive police presence in Black neighborhoods that would have longstanding consequences and a contentious relationship with Chicago’s civil rights movement (known as the Chicago Freedom Movement) when it sought to use civil disobedience in pursuit of racial justice. At the same time, Wilson’s reform efforts—especially those intended to bring more oversight and accountability to police behavior—were fought tooth and nail by many of his subordinates, led by groups like the Chicago Patrolman’s Association, the Fraternal Order of Police, and other police organizations that were direct ancestors of modern police unions. In the end, this meant that systems of accountability, while technically implemented during this period, were dysfunctional in actually halting police brutality and other abuses of power.

The demonstration for Abner Louima in 1997 in New York City marked a new stage in the growing involvement of Haitians in local politics. Many protest signs blamed Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for what happened to Louima, a victim of police brutality. Issues of secrecy, especially the malevolent kind, are overdetermined in relation to anything that has to do with Haiti, a country and culture that, in the eyes of white America, is virtually synonymous with black magic. The dense, racially charged images that public personalities and journalists called up so effortlessly in commentary on the cases of Louima and Amadou Diallo, who was shot and killed by New York City police, are representations constructed “in the shadow of the fetish”. Like the charms Haitian Vodou priestess and healer Mama Lola made to help Louima, they are wanga.

The final chapter documents the wide range of Black-led activist efforts to reform the police at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s. The launching point is the assassination of Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, in a 1969 killing orchestrated by the Chicago Police Department, the Cook County State’s Attorney, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the aftermath of his killing, a wave of community organizations mobilized or expanded their protests about Chicago’s police. This included groups like the Afro-American Patrolman’s League, comprised of Black CPD officers seeking to end police brutality and ensure better police services for Black Chicago. It included U.S. Congressman Ralph Metcalfe using the power of his office to expose police violence and harassment, and the fight for community control of the police led by the Black Panthers. Some activists who advocated for police reform sought more responsive police services to better community safety from escalating gun violence; others, such as those involved in the push for community control, pursued visions of semi-abolition of the police as currently constituted. Binding them together was a common understanding that the CPD was not working for Black Chicago.

This chapter examines the black community's moral outrage against police brutality involving sexual assaults in postwar Memphis and its major ramifications for the politics of racial justice. It discusses how police sexual assaults of black women galvanized African Americans and put race, manhood, womanhood, and sexuality at the center of postwar political tensions in the city. The chapter also considers efforts by southern moderates and veterans' groups to banish corrupt political machines after the war and the response of officials behind the Crump machine to such efforts. In addition, it looks at the exacerbation of racial tensions in Memphis during World War II due to an influx of migrants and servicemen, including shore patrol and military police. Finally, the chapter describes police campaigns against vice and syphilis, and how they intensified the authority of white policemen.

This chapter analyses the behaviour of the police during violent confrontations. The democratic Third Republic strove to control the behaviour of the forces of order, hoping to inculcate a respect for citizens’ democratic rights in the policeman. However, in the heat of the moment, officers frequently lashed out at political activists and innocent bystanders. They thus earned a deserved reputation for gratuitous brutality. As political conflict worsened during the 1930s, the Mobile Guard riot police were increasingly called to maintain law and order, sometimes with fatal consequences. While the authorities deplored such killings they nevertheless recognised that lethal force was sometimes necessary to defend the regime.

This chapter provides an in-depth study of the living conditions and attitudes about race relations of white and black residents of Louisville, conducted by Roper Research Associates. It notes that the resulting report documented the stark differences in whites' and blacks' living conditions, the “dismal” state of the latter, and the “frightening” lack of awareness and concern of the white community about both. It reports that the author's stark conclusion was that in 1969, despite purported gains in civil rights over the last decade, in Louisville whites and blacks continued to live in two separate and unequal worlds. It notes that Louisvillians continued to work outside the system to bring about social change. It reports that the NAACP, BWC, and a number of smaller organizations used protests and boycotts to put pressure on business and government on issues on police brutality and jobs.

This chapter charts a dramatic transformation in the city’s criminal justice system. While homicide rates fell, especially among African American New Orleanians, convictions rates skyrocketed for African American suspects and plunged for white suspects. The chapter examines a small surge in bank robberies during the late 1920s and early 1930s, explaining how this modest crime wave led to widening racial disparities in law enforcement and criminal justice. Police homicide and police brutality became tools of racial control during this period, increasingly targeting African American residents. Drawing from coroners’ reports, witness testimony, and court records, Chapter Five explores the shifting dynamics of police violence during the 1920s and 1930s. The chapter devotes particular attention to the district attorney who spearheaded the transformation of the local criminal justice system and used prosecutorial discretion to bolster white supremacy in the city.

The proliferation of screen media and the saturation of everyday life with digital culture led to dramatic shifts in public communication, challenging our sense of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century. Digital technologies have expanded the capacity to author and circulate information in unforeseeable ways. Cell phone video recordings became evidence of an unprovoked police attack, leaving traditional news outlets with little original content. Shifts in online engagement and mobile recording patterns at the turn of the century have enabled people who exist outside of business, state, and mainstream media sectors to create visible documentary moving image discourse that circumvent traditional media content. The standardization of the internet at the turn of the century brought people together in new ways, paving the way for social media and newly formed social networks. Visibility through digital production, online self-publishing, and circulation through social networks offer more than the opportunity to gather an audience; these forms of communication consistently disrupt, contribute, penetrate, challenge, focus, and reframe important public conversations in our culture. This chapter focuses on accidental witnessing of racial struggle and representation of police brutality in documentary history. This chapter has implications for what bodies get to move freely through a documentary commons and what bodies do not.

This chapter tells the story of how the Great Society’s vision of community action intersected with the Newark Police Department. It provides a historical sketch of the history of police reform in Newark, which, as in many places, produced distance and hostility between the department and, especially, the increasingly black community it served. Several efforts to open the department to the community are covered – including citizen observers and various police-community training efforts, including one funded via President Johnson’s pioneering investments in local law enforcement – as is the rearguard action waged by the police department and its largely white supporters, for whom the department was the last administrative redoubt in an increasingly black city.

In this interview chapter, Sandra Hines, President of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality, discusses the origins of the Coalition, the role that it has played in reducing police brutality and violence in Detroit and areas in which the Coalition is active within the city. Hines also critically discusses the injustices of the city’s current renaissance, framing it within racial perspectives and in the form of a ‘white takeover.’

In 1952, Ella Baker was elected president of the large New York City NAACP branch, becoming its first woman president. During 1952 and 1953, under Ella Baker's leadership, the New York City NAACP branch built coalitions with other groups in the city and carried out aggressive campaigns focused primarily on school reform and desegregation and on police brutality. In the course of these campaigns, Baker employed the whole range of protest tactics she had taught others to utilize: sending public letters of protest, leading noisy street demonstrations, confronting the mayor in front of the news media, and even running for public office after temporarily taking off her NAACP hat. In her efforts at coalition building, Baker tried to avoid the divisive Cold War politics that defined the national scene during the early 1950s and threatened to infect the debates over local issues.

The first chapter opens with scenes from Chicago’s Red Summer race riot in July of 1919. It explores the cascade of white violence that characterized the riot, as well as the armed self-defense that Blacks deployed in response. It also tracks the ways in which both police brutality and police neglect were features of how Black Chicagoans experienced the Chicago Police Department during those awful summer days in which thirty-eight Chicagoans in total were killed. From there, it shifts in the 1920s, when segregation in Chicago became more rigid, and explores how police corruption and political corruption worked hand in hand to shape the city’s Prohibition decade. It documents how politicians especially used the police department to their advantage, in particular by variously allowing vice operators to set up shop in less politically influential Black neighborhoods, and subsequently cracking down on low-level vice offenses by Black people. It also explores the long reach of police torture of civilians in 1920s Chicago.

This chapter examines racism, segregation, and police brutality that engulfed New York City at the height of the New Negro era. It argues that black self-protection activity in Harlem operated as a rejection of “white definitions of black rights, opportunities, and sociability” in residential and public places during the period, with New Negroes actively asserting their “claims to citizenship and equal civil and political rights with whites.” It juxtaposes the trope of Harlem as the “Negro mecca” with the lived experiences of Harlemites waging physical battle over urban space in the first three decades of the twentieth century. By analyzing the combined forces of racial violence and black self-protection practices, the chapter highlights the still prevalent conceptualization of interwar Harlem as primarily a site of New Negro cultural and intellectual production and even as a model of racial comity. It insists that the political radicalism of New Negro politics persisted throughout the 1920s and 1930s, as opposed to most scholars’ claim that the New Negro of Harlem marked a moment of black political decline, with an increased focus on culture.

This chapter examines Harlem’s home front during World War II, centered on the 1943 uprising and its lasting impact on police-community relations. The 1943 Harlem uprising joined a series of revolts across the nation in response to long-standing racial resentments and animosities. The Harlem uprising was a direct response to the system of discrimination, segregation, and police brutality that plagued the community up through the 1940s. The upheaval called public attention to the plight of black Harlemites, especially its youths, as they contested the urban landscape and sought equal access to wartime benefits. The excessive policing employed to quell the uprising in Harlem agitated the relations the police had built in the community in the 1930s and negatively influenced youth perspectives of state authority and carceral sovereignty.