Review: Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, Kristian Williams

Modern policing arose out of a series of compromises and historical contingencies.  Neither accidental nor guided by explicit design, the core functions of the police emerged in contexts ranging from antebellum Charleston, South Carolina to gentrifying neighborhoods of Chicago.  In Our Enemies in Blue, Kristian Williams shows (rather than theorizes) that “The modern police institution is at its base racist, elitist, undemocratic, authoritarian, and violent”(2007:236).  Through careful history, he shows that the modern police force is far from an ‘ideal type’ institution governed by a teleological mission toward perfecting social control.  Rather, the police have been subject to a varied range of logics and functions based on particular historical contexts.  The outcomes of struggles over the role of the police create a set of paths that have created hegemonic notions of what crime and disorder are, how they should be controlled, the proper relationship between physical force and the state, and the relationship between the state and its subjects.

Williams argues that police act (often with extreme violence and impunity) to maintain social order and its attendant hierarchies by historical design.  Each characteristic function of the modern police arose as a partial response to crisis (real or perceived) by political elites and through the inexorable expansion of bureaucratic power.  While police power is an incredible force in the contemporary United States, it is also historically contingent.  Modern policing arose as the state (or certain sectors of the elite) sought to expand its control in response to perceived and real disorders.  The responses to these particular disorders and the theory and practice of policing developed during these responses each brought their own momentum and raisons d’etre into the system. Each of these shifts changed the character and logic of policing until new challenges were confronted.  Williams challenges evolutionary or progressive theories of the development of the police by showing effectively that there is nothing natural or inevitable about their rise nor their ever expanding power.

Williams asserts forcefully that the management, containment, and terror of black slaves in the south and free blacks and ‘the dangerous classes’ in urban centers were the primary objects of America’s early experiments with police power.  However general the social forces might be however, regional trajectories varied widely and were often contested.  The development of nascent police forces was far from automatic or orderly.

In contrast to many historians of policing, Williams argues that the earliest American institution that resembled a modern police force was not the NYPD, but rather were the slave patrols and City Guard of the antebellum South.  Often in explicit conflict with individual white slaveowners who depended upon an anti-state ideology of individualism and paternalism, these early expansions of state and communal power arose in explicit response to collective white fears and governmental crisis provoked by the threat or reality of slave revolts.  Slave patrols, drafted from the white men of rural slaveowning communities served as a state and community mandated check on black communities’ mobility and ability to assemble as well as serving as a visible and potent reminder of the terroristic rule of white supremacy.  In cities such as Charleston, different economic structures and an urban environment led to the institution of an institutionalized City Guard whose sole purpose was to intimidate and terrorize the black community.  The explicitly white supremacist function of these early police forces developed and maintained substantial momentum, forming a core of what became common sense and ordinary for policing in later eras.

Following slightly different paths, Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities’ police forces developed in the context of machine politics and civic state building.  Illustrating both the general conditions of urban governance and the importance of local conditions, Philadelphia’s early experiments with policing arose out of specific conflicts over political power between ward organizations leading to a push for centralized power and the means to defend it.  Rival ward organizations, led by volunteer fire companies and youth gangs engaged in violent and widespread confrontations throughout the city.  Political bosses were loath to relinquish their control or to call of the conflicts. “Their personal fiefdoms were inextricably tied to the ward-based structure of government; it allowed them a distinct realm of influence and a base of support…”(Williams 2007:61).  After a failed experiment with city mandated policing, the state legislature intervened, mandating a precinct based police system managed by a single marshal.  Linking the process to European state formation, Williams argues that the creation of the police force enabled the co-optation or elimination of ward bosses.

The new police force , and others like it around the country, was under the exclusive control of the dominant political party, enabling the building of a sophisticated and powerful machine for the maintenance of political power and the punishment of rivals.  Simultaneous with the consolidation of political machines came widespread urbanization and industrialization and the familiar crises of poverty, political militancy and corruption that accompanied them.

… the police appeared when broad social trends intersected with local crises and the particular needs of the city.  Of course, the authorities only responded to the crises on a rather shallow level, never acknowledging the underlying causes that produced them.  Instead, local elites preferred to blame the crises of urbanization on the moral shortcomings of the poor, and the idea of the “dangerous classes” was born. (2007:67),

In both the Southern antebellum and industrializing urban contexts, policing arose out of historical contexts and political crises.  Policing was always already a partial solution to these crises, seeking management and containment of troubling/troublesome populations rather than resolution of the crisis’ generative conflicts.  These solutions for social control carried their ideological frameworks and practical routines (e.g. enforcing white supremacy, criminalizing poverty, thriving on corruption) into other contexts, becoming embedded in what became hegemonically understood as the proper function of the police.

If on the one hand, the core functions and institutions of the police arose and expanded as partial responses to crisis and varied by region, the bureaucratic organization of the police and their development of self-conscious political power further expanded their role and achieved a degree of autonomy from the control of politicians.  The police became both the power of the state and a power within the state (2007:148).  As technocrats and politicians sought to ‘rationalize’ police departments, rank and file officers began organizing into Fraternal Orders and Benevolent Associations.  They built political organizations through which they could resist bureaucratic management and assert their independent political muscle.  They became a vital constituency for local politicians to court and become beholden to, making and breaking many candidates.  Through this power, police organizations have been able to effectively expand their power and limit oversight.

While the police became ever more powerful, and continue to enforce the interests of capital and white supremacist social order, this state of affairs was far from automatic or natural.  Their power and constitution are the result of concrete policy decisions in response to political crises, the tendency of bureaucratic organizations to expand their interests (“inactivity is bureaucratic suicide”(Williams 2007:201)), and the organizing of police to articulate and defend their power.  Police power and social order are in a tightly interconnected relationship, each having profound influence on the other throughout American history.

Williams, Kristian. 2007. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Cambridge  Mass.: South End Press.