Crisis and Redemption: The History of American Police Reform since World War II

Abstract

This introduction to the special section on police and cities surveys the repeated rounds of exposure, disruption, and redemption urban American police departments have undergone since World War II. Rather than telling the history of modern law enforcement as a story of uninterrupted growth, this article emphasizes the crises in police legitimacy that punctuated the postwar period. New citizenship models, new social practices, and new understandings of democratic governance repeatedly forced urban police to re-authorize their power. Moreover, these challenges to police legitimacy sparked and steered much of the postwar expansion of police power. As a result of these past crises, modern police now root their authority in a racialized harm principle and in the seemingly contradictory ideologies of police professionalization and community partnership. This introduction concludes with a discussion of the special section’s essays, highlighting how each contributor uses the police to expand our understanding of urban governance. Collectively, the essays explore the vast range of urban actors—including community activists, academics, black mayors, liberal police chiefs, and rank-and-file officers—who attempted to use disruptions in police authority to reshape postwar law enforcement. The essays also consider different types of cities—including deindustrializing metropolises, small cities, and cities in America’s territories—to help us more accurately identify national trends. Together, the essays in this special section make clear the central role urban police have played in the histories of American citizenship and democracy.