The Labor of Law and Order: How Police Unions Transformed Policing and Politics in the United States, 1939-1985

Abstract

This project narrates the rise of the police union movement in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows how after World War II, a segment of predominantly white, male rank-and-file officers of big-city police departments successfully articulated their resistance to new forms of managerial oversight and discipline enacted by the police professionalization movement to a broader struggle for law-and-order politics, developing a highly successful form of right-wing social movement unionism. Police unions had existed since the turn of the twentieth century but struggled to reproduce themselves or secure recognition and collective bargaining rights due to skepticism and hostility both from the labor movement and from their managers in the state. However, conditions changed dramatically after World War II. In cities across the United States, civil rights reformers and their allies in city hall and among the top brass fought successfully for administrative reforms intended to achieve equitable, race-neutral policing, police unionists argued that these reforms were inimical to good policing and empowered those police were charged to capture, punish and exclude form civic life: criminals, radicals, and other civic outsiders, whom they systematically conflated with African Americans in general and participants in the Black freedom struggle specifically. Beginning in the 1960s, many white voters, politicians, judges favorably received the police union argument favorably and, for the first time in U.S. history, granted them the cultural legitimacy, collective bargaining rights, operational autonomy, and political standing police unionists argued were necessary to defend the civic order.

The project also shows that police unionists were not content to alter their voice and bargaining power on the job in a narrow sense. As the violence workers who made state power effective, they understand the conditions of possibility of their work in fundamentally political terms and newly engaged in politics to defeat their opponents. Through media campaigns, lawsuits, political lobbying, protests, and other actions, they fought for new legal protections and social programs to reward the work they did and helped install politicians, judges, and prosecutors sympathetic to their law-and-order politics. In short, they assumed a new role as independent political subjects and used it to reshape statebuilding and the terms of American politics in their favor, especially but not exclusively at the local level. These efforts were not without opponents, resistance, and setbacks. Black officers sometimes organized through their own organizations in cooperation with civil rights politics and liberal police reform. Nascent neoliberal mayors rained budget cuts on police as much as on their colleagues during the fiscal crises of the 1970s. But police unionists survived these difficulties because of the political coalitions that defended them and past legal and political victories that institutionalized them in city police departments, making them an enduring part of the political landscape.

This project adopts a multiscalar analysis to capture a transformation of national scope that developed in distinctive ways in each city according to local circumstances. Its story centers on the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) in Philadelphia from the 1930s to the 1980s, a critical hub in networks of both police reform and police union organizing. But it also moves to other cities, other unions, and larger scales of analysis to capture the larger network of movement-building and political transformations in which Philadelphia played such a critical role.