Soul Patrols: Race, Representation, and the Limits of Police Reform in America, 1962-2022

Abstract

Uncovering recent histories of race, representation, and reform in policing provides indispensable clues to understanding how police research undergirded the remaking of police professionalism and police administration in America in the mass incarceration era. My examination is the first of its kind to give historical treatment to both the development of proactive police science—a body of knowledge invested in the systematic study of how policing works and doesn’t work in practice—and the emergence of multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural forms of urban law enforcement. It strives to make sense of how discourses about race and police reform and debates over police research and crime control influenced critical shifts in police practices during and after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. More importantly, it strives to make clear the centrality of race and research in retooling popular law enforcement theories, tactics, and strategies in urban communities of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Foregrounding America’s oldest urban police force, the Boston Police Department (BPD), this dissertation spotlights novel strategies through which Black Americans, police practitioners, and police researchers reshaped conventional and special unit policing for better and for worse. By spelling out dramatic changes in police employment, operations, and community partnership-building, this study traces pathways through which shared ideas about race, criminality, and police reform irrevocably altered police business.

The emergence of police scientists, multiracial patrols, and special unit police forces in American cities is an overlooked turning point in the history of law enforcement. This study demonstrates that a second professionalization movement consumed the American law enforcement tradition in the post-Civil Rights era. Police reforms introduced in the wake of Civil Rights and Black Power struggles fixated on upgrading police performance and rethinking police professionalism through scientific research, technological development, and police-community relations programs. “Soul Patrols” ultimately shows how policing functions through the lens of police research in order to illuminate why cosmetic and incremental police reforms, such as race-based and gender-based representation in policing, habitually fail to secure the right to life and freedom from fear for all people, as a result of their lived experience, legal status, or zip code.