Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the Lapd (2024)

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Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the Lapd

. By

Max

Felker-Kantor

. (

Chapel Hill

:

University of North Carolina Press

,

2018

.

ii

,

382

pp. $34.95.)

Steve Herbert

University of Washington

, Seattle, Washington

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Journal of American History, Volume 106, Issue 4, March 2020, Page 1112, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaz792

Published:

01 March 2020

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The Los Angeles Police Department (Lapd) has, for decades, been the subject of considerable controversy. Its questionable tactics were the catalysts for two of the most extensive and violent instances of urban unrest in American history. Its ardently militaristic approach positioned it as a national leader in aggressive law enforcement methods. Its approach to urban street gangs motivated unprecedented levels of intrusive policing. Its unlawfully antagonistic actions in its Ramparts patrol division in the 1990s garnered national attention and ultimately led to the U.S. Department of Justice's intervention.

The Lapd has thus earned its share of national disapproval and local opposition. Given this, one might expect to see its influence and power reduced. Yet throughout the contemporary period, the department has largely resisted meaningful reform and somehow has been able to emerge from each controversy stronger than before.

Max Felker-Kantor uses this volume to document and explain this paradox. This exhaustively researched volume shows how the Los Angeles Police Department retained its legitimacy even while responding to controversies on a fairly regular basis. He shows how, time and again, Lapd leaders used messages about crime—many of them racially coded—to scare the public and many elected officials into ensuring that officers had all the tools necessary to patrol aggressively. That same political rhetoric also helped the Lapd to significantly resist various oversight measures aimed at increasing accountability.

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