Black Police and Racial Authoritarianism

• In Event: In the Shadow of Democracy: Theorizing the Dark Ghetto

Abstract

How do black police officers operate within, define, and shape policing in a democracy characterized by ongoing legacies of repression and exploitation?

In response to both the conditions they faced in white-dominant policing institutions as well as the treatment they witnessed of their communities, black police organized across the country in the late 1960s and mounted a critique of racial authoritarian policing. Over the next decade and a half, these organizations constituted one of the most important movements against racially authoritarian governance and one of the least acknowledged, written out of our contemporaneous accounts of abolition, racial injustice, and modern movements against police power. In this paper, we explore the political efforts, resolutions, newsletters, first-person accounts, and sustained organizing by black police leagues during the 1960s-1980s including the Afro-American Patrolmen's League, the Guardians Civic League, the Bronze Shields, Officers for Justice, Shield Club, among others, as well as the larger federations they were a part of. We rely on an archive of 6000 league documents, as well as oral history testimony of their leaders, and articles in the black press that covered their work.

We find that these groups and their leaders were not only central to resisting and attempting to curtail abusive policing – passing resolutions against stop-and-frisk and wanton use of lethal force, uncovering "drop gun" practices on unarmed residents -- but also imagined and modeled a different way of responsiveness to black communities by promoting civilian review, "black power through the law" (AAPL's slogan), initiating bottom-up efforts to investigate instances of brutality (such as the AAPL's Brutality and Complaint Referral Services), opposing police unions, and collaborating with community demands for greater resource investment. It was not only that black police leagues saw themselves as being key intermediaries with black communities or contested the most extreme instances of police abuse or sought a more diverse and representative police bureaucracy; rather, they championed a different role altogether and enacted affirmative projects to serve the community and respond to safety deprivation, oriented toward non domination and black flourishing. Our paper recovers Black police leagues and argues that they were central actors in resisting authoritarian governance.

Author

• Vesla Mae Weaver, Johns Hopkins University