Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

the urban poor and people of color. The professional model encouraged policeleaders to take seriously the elusive goal of preventing crime. Making the mostof the new squad structure, the police sought to reduce the opportunity for crime,experimenting with vehicular patrols, saturation tactics, and high-discretion techniqueslike "stoITand-search" or "field interrogation."IOI For exan1ple, in the late1950s, the San Francisco police used each of these approaches in tandem. ChiefThomas Cahill created an "S Squad" ("S" standing for "saturation") to be deployedin high-crime areas, with instructions to stop, question, and search suspiciouscharacters. During its first year, the S Squad stopped 20,000 people, filed 11,000reports, and made 1,000 arrests. Most of those they stopped were Black peopleand young people. t 02 The preventive aims of the professionals led the police tointervene in situations that had previously gone unnoticed, were ignored, or werenot even crin1inal. This encroachment promoted a generalized distrust on bothsides, as police grew ever more suspicious of the public and the public (especiallythe Black community) grew increasingly resentful of the police.lO] As we haveseen, this tension bore bitter fruit in the years that followed.UNIONIZAT ION AND BLUE POWERToday's police unions are the bastard children of the mid-century professionals.Though earlier union efforts had met with little success, the fissures andcontradictions of the professional agenda helped create conditions that madeunionization possible. While the rhetoric of professionalization lent legitin1acyto demands for higher pay and greater autonomy, the prescriptions of thereformers alienated the regular officers and produced additional strife withthe public. This situation created new tensions within police departments andbrought the idea of unionization back to the surface.Though coming as a direct result of the attempts to professionalize policing,union organizing efforts were of a quite different character. The movementfor police unions reflected a working-class labor perspective rather thana middle-class professional agenda, and found its support with the mass ofpatrol officers rather than with commanders. The International Association ofChiefs of Police recognized this difference as crucial, and described unionizationas sounding "the death knell of pro/essionalization." 104The influence of unionization has extended far beyond such basic matters aswages, working conditions, and grievances. Unionization, like the previous twowaves of reform, had the general effect of increasing the institutional autonomyof the department105 and the autonomy of individual officers. l OG But unionizationtook the latter as one of its principle aims, and for that matter, sought to providethe lowest-level officers collective power over the institution as a whole.107As the police unions grew, they set about negotiating policy matters, includingthose governing patrols, deployment, and discipline. l OS The agenda quicklybroadened to include "questions of social policy, including which type of conductshould be criminal, societal attitudes toward protest, the procedural rights ofdefendants, and the sufficiency of resources allocated to the enforcement of thecriminal law." I o'J These efforts represented "a phenomenon new to American society:the emergence of the police as a self-conscious, organized, and militant politicalconstituency, bidding for far-reaching political power in their own right" I 10133