The Political Development of Police Organizations in American Cities

• In Event: Contemporary Problems in Work and Labor in the U.S. in Historical Perspective

Abstract

How do the police try to influence politics? In an ongoing book project, I use historical case studies to trace the emergence and development of modern police political activities (issues and tactics) over time. This paper starts with New York City as a theory-building case. I describe how organized police political activity started there in the 1890s with the emergence of a new fraternal organization. Initially focused on issues like wages and pensions (and navigating the politics and corruption of the Tammany Hall era), this organization eventually shifted its attention to more contentious issues related to race and civil rights due to a confluence of local and national factors in the critical 1958-1964 period. Police protest activities also shifted from more subtle tactics (like signing paychecks with the phrase "under protest") to more combative ones (like pickets, petitions, and the threat of strikes). Perhaps more controversially, police organizations also began to endorse political candidates and engaged in a public campaign, culminating in a contentious referendum vote, to stop civilian oversight of police misconduct in 1966 (an issue that would again be protested by police, although unsuccessfully this time, decades later). I conclude by describing some general theoretical principles derived from this work that might be applied to other cities to assess what factors explain variation in police political behavior across cases, as well as within cases over time.

Author

• Steven White, Syracuse University