The quiet rise of police power in American politics

Part one of a multi-part review of Blue Power by Stuart Schrader

Blue Power, Stuart Schrader writes, is “a biography not of a person but of a political force.” The force he has in mind is the development of police power as a durable political presence in American life, one that has proven remarkably resilient, even as public trust has eroded.

Scheduled for release in April, Blue Power traces how police departments and their unions accumulated political leverage over the second half of the 20th century. Schrader, a historian of policing at Johns Hopkins University, is interested in how police organizations learned to defend themselves: how they organized, how they borrowed from the labor movement and how they ultimately charted a different path.