Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City by Clarence Taylor (review)

Fight the Power might strike one as a timely book, though Taylor's primary objective is to demonstrate that resistance to police power has a long history spanning much of the twentieth century. The book catalogs decades of leftist activism to defend African Americans, humanize victims of police brutality, and place restraints on police authority. Taylor views the Black Lives Matter Movement, which he briefly discusses in the final chapter, as only the most recent incarnation of a protracted campaign to publicize police abuse and protect African Americans from targeted violence.

The narrative begins with a survey of exposés on police brutality published in the People's Voice—Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell's progressive newspaper published between 1942 and 1948. Taylor aptly views this publication as tied to the frustration about the Harlem Riots of 1935 and 1943, each of which was sparked by police assaults on people of color. The People's Voice—unlike the popular press, which demonized rioters as criminals and rabble-rousers—documented multiple cases of police violence against innocent black victims.

The next three chapters take a similar approach in contrasting white-owned media reports about crime and disorder with the alternative versions provided by the Communist Party, the Nation of Islam, and the mainstream civil-rights movement. The middle chapters document the Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant Riots of 1964, the contrasting strategies of mainstream and militant civil-rights organizations, the establishment of a temporary Civilian Complaint Review Board (ccrb), and the backlash of the Policemen's Benevolent Association (pba). Taylor compares Mayor John Lindsay's police-reform initiatives favorably with the intransigence of his predecessor, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., but ultimately sees Lindsay's agenda as undercut by pba racism. Fight the Power is especially good at documenting the ways in which the pba tapped into white anger, blaming blacks and Latinos for rising crime rates and "help [ing] to foster a false narrative that the interests of black people were diametrically opposed to those of whites" (190).

At this juncture, Fight the Power takes a curious chronological leap from the 1966 referendum defeat of the ccrb to the 1994 mayoralty of Rudolph Giuliani. This lengthy gap includes several seminal events in New York City law enforcement: the 1968 police beating of student protestors at Columbia University; the 1969 Stonewall riots; the police-abetted 1970 construction workers' riot; the 1972 police raid and shootout at Harlem Mosque No. 7; the 1970s fiscal crisis resulting in a climate of racial fear and the layoffs of thousands of police officers; the tenure of the Benjamin Ward (1984–1989), the city's first black police commissioner; and the 1991 Crown Heights riot. The Giuliani chapters briefly mention the all-civilian review board established in 1993 by David Dinkins, the city's first African-American mayor, but its primary focus is on how Giuliani gutted the board's power. The next chapters cover a familiar story of aggressive policing, including the "broken windows" theory, the "zero tolerance" campaign, the Street Crimes Unit, "stop and frisk," and the high-profile police assault of Abner Louima and the murder of Amadou Diallo.

Fight the Power provides a favorable view of the restraints placed upon aggressive policing during Michael Bloomberg's and especially Bill de Blasio's administrations. Taylor commends de Blasio for banning racial profiling, passing "right to know" legislation, implementing police-sensitivity training, and decriminalizing marijuana possession, but he depicts his reform agenda as incomplete due to de Blasio's unwavering support for the "broken windows" approach. The overall tone of the final chapter is one of partial triumph, including a minority-majority police force and "policies that could not have been imagined in the 1970s and 1980s" (248). Taylor's enthusiasm is tempered by the continued criminalization of African Americans and Latinos and the disproportionate spending on...