Police Power and the Politics of Safety

During the 2014 Christmas shopping season in New York City, two unsuspecting police officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, were fatally shot at point-blank range in the back of their heads by Ismaaiyl Brinsley in Bedford-Stuyvesant. That evening, Patrick Lynch, the President of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association (PBA) of the City of New York, charged “there’s blood on many hands tonight—those that incited violence on the street under the guises of protests, that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did every day. […] That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.”¹ That evening, when Mayor Bill de Blasio went to the hospital to pay his respects to the officers’ families, the police officers present turned their back on him in protest. De Blasio received the same treatment at both Ramos’s and Liu’s funeral services, in spite of Police Commissioner William J. Bratton requesting that officers stop.

Before the tragedy of the killings, Lynch, the PBA, and the New York Police Department (NYPD) had been wary and distrustful of de Blasio. During his campaign for the mayor’s office the year before, de Blasio ran on a platform of police reform. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLMM), the anti-police-violence movement that erupted in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer George Zimmerman in July 2013 and the litany of killings of black men in the summer of 2014, first Eric Garner by stranglehold by Officer Pantaleo in July in Staten Island, New York and less than a month later Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, de Blasio had asserted that protestors had the right to demonstrate peacefully. During a press conference, the mayor candidly admitted, to the chagrin of the NYPD, that in order to ensure his biracial son’s safety, he urged his son to “take special care” when speaking with the police.²

Lynch and the NYPD’s dramatic display of resistance was more than symbolic. Across the nation, the NYPD’s and the fallen officers’ sympathizers showed their support by posting images of Blue Lives Matter, a countermovement spurred by the belief that the BLMM was antipolice. President Barack Obama condemned the murder of the officers and urged all Americans to respect police officers. Reverend Al Sharpton, representing the Garner family, also condemned the violence, as did the family of Michael Brown, stating unequivocally, “we reject any kind of violence directed towards members of law enforcement.” It was expected that Obama would publicly mourn the death of police officers, but why would the Garner and Brown families address this matter when they certainly had nothing to do with it, when their expressed objective was to obtain justice for their slain loved ones? This was a demonstration of police power.

Over the last several years, historians in the burgeoning subfield of carceral studies have produced scholarship that has transformed how we understand the social, political, and economic landscape of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This work has been diverse in topic and historical period, from black women prisoners in late-nineteenth-century Georgia (Talitha L. Le Flouria, Chained in Silence, 2014; Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here, 2016), prisoners’ resistance movements (Dan Berger, Captive Nation, 2014; Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water, 2016), and federal and state crime policymakers in Washington, DC, California, and New York (Elizabeth Hinton, From War on Poverty to the War on Crime, 2016; Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting...