Six years ago, during a different too-hot summer, protest footage dominated the news. On broadcasts, CNN, MSNBC, and other mainstream desks filled the evening slot with overhead shots of city centers taken over by marches in response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. In print, staff writers and opinion columnists weighed in on the cost of police violence. In 2020, Baltimore and Maryland at large saw the same shift as the rest of the nation: more marches and more repression. While protestors marched, organizations formed on and offline, reading lists grew, and everyday people confronted the contemporary reality of American life, police, pandemic, and all.
The marches aren’t dominating the news anymore, but policing and the historical, legal, and material conditions that direct its scope still demand our attention. Policing remains an institution of power that each of us must study critically or risk missing the vastness of its reach and the depth of its influence.
While some stories will recall 2020 as the powder keg that blew the lid off American policing in the public forum, I’m not interested in the quick and easy version of assessing police and violence in the United States. And I don’t recommend others accept the instant oatmeal version either because specificity and study are not our enemies.
Recent books from three Baltimore area authors — “Let Us Alone: The Origins of Baltimore’s Police State” by Michael Casiano; “Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back,” by Joshua Clark Davis; and “Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves” by Stuart Schrader — assess the historical impact of police and policing on American life.
Davis and Schrader offer new material on the national relationship between police organizing and resistance, and Casiano’s “Let Us Alone” especially focuses the lens on Baltimore’s unique history of police power. Their books, read together, are a great trio for understanding the rise of policing and the communities that have spent decades resisting police violence. In mainstream media, movements to reform or defund the police are cast as new age responses to contemporary issues, but Casiano, Davis, and Schrader dispel that myth, demonstrating that there has been a tense debate around policing since Reconstruction.
Casiano, a scholar of American Studies and professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, investigates how “Baltimore is the best city to provide a history of the consolidation of a post-Civil War urban police state.”
While Casiano admits that every city in the United States is the perfect city — because the United States is such a thoroughly policed nation — he follows through on Baltimore as a case study and how wealthy business owners, police officers, and other authorities in the city were “incredibly adaptive” in their establishment of Baltimore’s police state. Of the three books, Casiano’s is the only one that explicitly widens the net of policing beyond rank-and-file officers and government agencies: he lays out how classism, social work, and public education are strategic mechanisms tethered to Baltimore’s police state.
Casiano’s argument that police states originate and sustain themselves through more than badges and officers connects “Swann’s Cocaine Ordinance,” a 1908 among-the-first-in-the-country ordinance penalizing drug possession with Black criminality or “Negro rowdyism.” Using court documents, newspaper archives, and quotes from Black drug dealers who faced early criminal charges, Casiano outlines how drug possession and distribution charges were a means to an end for police and government authorities. Their goal? Jailing Black Baltimoreans to ease the business and real estate interests of the powerful.
Instead of the truncated view that the United States’ War on Drugs began in the 1980s with Reagan’s administration, “Let Us Alone” offers an elongated assessment that from the inception of drug possession charges they have been used to dispossess people of money, property, and civil protections.
Moreover, Casiano’s work clarifies that connecting Blackness, drugs, and the idea of both as dangerous threats to public safety have existed since the first laws were codified.
While Casiano examines the institutional priorities of police power, Davis aims to correct the misconception that activists and organizers in earlier centuries sidestepped police repression and left it for us to reckon with while also showing the extent to which police undermined and infiltrated movements. Lessons we could use today, as both local and federal officials have more tools than ever to surveil activists. Community archives, journalists, and organizers are still necessary records of movement building and resistance.
In the introduction, Davis writes: “One of the most persistent and pernicious myths about the movement was that it endured police violence without fighting it. More than a few contemporary commentators have claimed that a meaningful national movement against police violence did not materialize in America until the Movement for Black Lives emerged in the 2010s.”
As a professor of history at the University of Baltimore, Davis’s work is an investigation of a period and the network of organizers who lived it, mainly the Southern student movements of the 1960s. Davis uses firsthand accounts from filmmaker, bookseller, and Civil Rights activist Judy Richardson and others to show that police violence has been a threat to social and political movements in the United States since the inception of police departments.
As Casiano studies the consolidation of municipal power and Davis challenges reductive assertions about the past, Schrader examines the internal structures of the police unions that rank-and-file officers organized in “Blue Power.” A Hopkins professor of history and Africana studies, Schrader has spent 10 years studying police unions and their archives to understand how police in the United States have negotiated their powerful position. In a book that opens with “Cops were pissed off,” Schrader delivers 28 robust chapters on how that negotiation required collaborators, leverage, and acquiescence to cement police as the institution we know today.
“What sets the police apart from other government agencies is their authorization to engage in violence. This is true everywhere. What makes the United States unique is the scale of its police violence, outpacing any other contender among rich countries,” he writes, peeling back two layers of studying policing, the monopoly and concentration of violence, to reveal the gears underneath. He proves that police power is not a natural, inevitable result of U.S. societal progress, but a measured result of police union organizing that can be challenged. I’ve read many books on policing in the last decade, and Schrader’s is the first I’ve read that goes inside the clockwork of policing and finds the internal structures making the hands tick.
You can see threads to Baltimore’s modern day issues with police and policing in each of these three texts. The news stories of “dangerous” Black children descending on Baltimore businesses, dirtbikes threatening the tranquility of the city, and coverage of Baltimore’s overdose crisis are echoes of the early 20th century strategies that Casiano outlines as central to the origins of Baltimore’s police state. His assessment of Baltimore’s past illuminates the present. It cuts through the muck of how Black and poor Baltimoreans, especially children, are blamed for the mismanagement of public policy and industry. Why spend time explaining the intricacies of failing business models and a lack of infrastructure when you can blame Baltimore’s complex failures on teenagers having too much fun in public? Cue the paddy wagon, curfew, and “do you know where your children are?” combo. I appreciate each of these works for sidestepping lazy arguments about police organizing and resistance.
Since Reconstruction, however, policing has changed with the ebb and flow of funding, surveillance, and control. Studying those changes with rigor and specificity helps us understand the scope of police power now, not as an abstract ideology, but as an institution with modern mechanisms that we — in varying ways — can challenge.
With the remains of the post-Freddie Gray consent decree fading away, a record-high $656 million proposed police budget, an impending police and military training facility, a push to recruit more Baltimore City Schools Police, and masked federal agents in cities throughout the country, policing is seeing gains at every level in Baltimore. Each of these scholars offers new study material for understanding the legacy of policing in Baltimore and nationwide that can help us all better understand the stakes of police power.