About this Event
Stuart Schrader visits the store for a reading and presentation of his book Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves. This is part of Red May, with this year’s discussions surrounding policing in the age of ICE. He is joined by UW Sociology professor Theresa Rocha Beardall.
Learn more about Red May here.
“A tour de force ... Read it now.” —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography
A history of police unions that reveals how American law enforcement built a political movement that made cops untouchable.
In America today, police enjoy unmatched power. On the streets, officers employ violence at their own discretion. Behind closed doors, they are even more powerful. In city halls, police strong-arm local leaders and nullify attempts at public oversight. And in state legislatures and Washington, DC, police lobbyists and union leaders zealously uphold a bipartisan consensus against even mild reform. Yet as recently as fifty years ago, police still served at the pleasure of democratically elected politicians, not the other way around. In Blue Power, Stuart Schrader narrates the rise of a bottom-up movement of rank-and-file officers who lifted policing above the law.
Organizers launched their campaign in the 1960s, courting a public backlash to urban uprisings and civil rights. City by city, county by county, they formed unions and other organizations and won control over working conditions, impunity from oversight, and insulation from lean budgets. By the 2000s, this movement had triumphed nationally, shoring up the power of the police to overrule the public interest in the name of law and order.
Through deep archival detective work, Blue Power reveals how police forced American democracy to back the blue.
Stuart Schrader is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, where he is the director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism. He is also the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. He lives in Brooklyn.
Dr. Theresa Rocha Beardall is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. She completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at Cornell University in 2019 and her J.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014. Dr. Rocha Beardall’s research bridges the areas of race, law, inequality, policing, family policing, indigeneity, and tribal sovereignty. Her scholarship is motivated by a commitment to better understand how law, legal institutions, and legal actors marginalize select racial groups in order to help reduce and reverse these systemic inequalities. Her research has appeared in Criminology, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, the Columbia Journal of Race and Law, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal among other venues. She is currently working on her first book examining the political economy of policing in race-class subjugated communities and conducting a three-year study funded by the William T. Grant Foundation exploring how tribal sovereignty can be leveraged to protect Native youth and families in the child welfare system.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States
USD 0.00
