Stuart Schrader's "Blue Power"

Stuart Schrader is an Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He is also the Director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism. His PhD is in American Studies, from NYU, in 2015.

Schrader applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, and shared the following:

The Page 99 Test finds the introduction of a central tension in Blue Power, as I begin the seventh chapter, “A Colorblind Counterrevolution.” One key argument of the book is that police developed political power at municipal, state, and federal levels in reaction to the progressive and even revolutionary social movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s, including Black Power. Blue Power was a counterrevolution. This counterrevolution, however, would have to contend with the transformed social conditions of the era, including the racial integration of police departments. The Page 99 Test, therefore, does not offer a snapshot of the overall argument about the impact of police political power, but it shows how this political power was responding to the times.

This chapter introduces the upstart Bluecoats, a group of mostly young officers who took over the San Francisco Police Officers’ Association at the outset of the 1970s. It shows how the Bluecoats advocated a new approach to police hiring and promotion that discarded patronage, in favor of more fair, transparent, and widely applicable standards. This approach was meant to be “colorblind,” meaning that white, Black, and other applicants would all face an equal chance of success. The colorblind Bluecoat approach arrived at the same moment that federal and other laws required equal opportunity, but the two were not the same. Affirmative action clashed with colorblindness, particularly in the stationhouse.

Page 99 begins with the report of the Kerner Commission (or National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders):

The Kerner Commission, appointed by President Johnson, found that rough and abusive encounters between white police and Black residents spurred the unrest of 1967 in Newark, Detroit, and elsewhere. It thus endorsed recruiting and promoting African American officers in its groundbreaking 1968 report: “Negro officers should be so assigned as to ensure that the police department is fully and visibly integrated.” Putting more Black cops on patrol in still-segregated Black neighborhoods was supposed to ease tensions and ameliorate relationships between police and Black populations, preventing further civil disorder. Moreover, Black officers, better able to work undercover among their own kind, could also provide sharper intelligence than white ones.

Increasing numbers of Black cops were put in the impossible position of both maintaining a social status quo and alleviating the problems of police racism.

Yet many cities, as I detail on this page, had already hired Black officers, though not necessarily in numbers proportionate to those cities’ Black populations. This preceding integration exemplified the problem the Bluecoats wished to solve: some incumbent Black officers had obtained their jobs because of what the Bluecoats called “juice”—who they knew and what favors they were owed.

New recruits wanted merit-based hiring or at least clear standards, but those standards, if applied to some veteran officers who got their jobs through patronage, could, in effect, disqualify the older generation. Worse, the new standards, in many cases, became the basis for new exclusions. Fresh testing or educational standards often prevented, rather than hastened, the hiring of new so-called minority officers.

Clashes ensued: between older and younger generations, between rights-seeking marginalized groups and police unions, between police unions and the federal government’s civil-rights enforcement arms. A key takeaway from this chapter is that these battles over racial integration within police departments afforded police unions and other organizations critical experience with litigation, public appeals and media messaging, cultivating relationships with elected officials, and galvanizing broader constituencies.

Although resistance to integration failed, Blue Power strengthened in the process, honing its tactics. The fundamental problem of racist police practices inspired the Kerner Commission to push for accelerated integration. Unfortunately, those practices would persist, protected by Blue Power.

Visit Stuart Schrader's website.

The Page 99 Test: Badges without Borders.

--Marshal Zeringue