A Police State of Mind: How Police Professionalization Changed Public Opinion and Helped Ronald Reagan win California in 1966

Abstract

Since the 1960s, punitive crime laws with bipartisan support have increased the presence of law enforcement in American society while diverting ever more tax dollars to the benefit of police organizations. At the same time, domestic policing has begun to resemble foreign counterinsurgency efforts more and more. While researchers have deftly outlined the political machinations that led to the rise of the American carceral state, few of them have identified the political effect of that development. The aim of my thesis is to explore the potential effects of these changes on politics and public opinion. To better understand those effects, I attempted to situate my project outside of the political context that led to the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1968 and the beginning of the carceral period by focusing on California, the epicenter of police professionalization. By analyzing the 1966 gubernatorial election, I argue that police professionalizers standardized tactics during the 1960s that were explicitly designed to manipulate public opinion by leveraging media sources and political influence. Further, implicit racial and political biases were codified in standard procedures by basing policing strategy on empirical data produced by police departments who engaged in racially and politically motivated behavior without compunction.

By analyzing government documents, campaign materials, media sources, and internal documents from the University of California Berkeley, I show that both local law enforcement in California and federal law enforcement agencies in the FBI used tactics prescribed by police professionalization efforts to manipulate the opinions of elected officials and the public, particularly regarding crime and the student protests at the University of California Berkeley. They used events such as those student protests and the Watts Rebellion to craft a narrative that suggested that permissive liberalism created a permission structure around crime that threatened to send American society into anarchy and chaos. Police interlocutors used this narrative to aid the campaign of Ronald Reagan both directly and indirectly and helped bring about his victory in 1966.