“Reasonable, Warranted and Consonant”: Police Violence and Police Sovereignty in 1960s Newark

Abstract

This article examines the defensive politics of police advocacy, which prized independence and was explicitly tied to the issue of police violence, that emerged in Newark, New Jersey, during the mid-1960s. In response to charges of brutality and calls for civilian review of police misconduct, law enforcement officers and their supporters advanced a vision of policing that was entrenched in a belief in police sovereignty—a term I offer to name the notion that law enforcement officers alone should define the boundaries of police work. Abundant violence, uninhibited by civilian authorities, was an essential element of this vision of proper policing. Analyzing this political discourse reveals the fashioning of a white, conservative ideology of policing rooted in the valorization of police violence.