Policing Los Angeles was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2018.
On August 11, 1965, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in violent protest. If the uprising drew strength from decades of pent-up frustration with employment discrimination, residential segregation, and poverty the more immediate grievance was anger at the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department. Yet in the decades after Watts, the LAPD resisted all but the most marginal demands for reform made by residents of color and antipolice abuse activists, instead intensifying its power.
In Policing Los Angeles, Max Felker-Kantor unearths a dynamic history of policing, antipolice abuse movements, race, and politics in Los Angeles from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Using the explosion of two large-scale uprisings in Los Angeles as bookends, Felker-Kantor highlights the racism at the heart of the city’s expansive police power through a range of previously unused and rare archival sources. It is a gripping and timely account of the transformation in police power, the convergence of interests in support of law and order policies, and African American and Mexican American resistance to police violence after the 1965 Watts uprising.
For more information about Policing Los Angeles see the Shepard books review.