"}To understand how these public safety advisors then advanced punitive\n modernization and the carceral state at home, we must return again to \n1947. At the very moment the National Security Act took effect, another \ncrucial document in the history of U.S. law enforcement emerged. The \nPresident\u2019s Committee on Civil Rights had been investigating how law \nenforcement could safeguard civil rights, especially black civil rights,\n in the United States. The committee\u2019s report to President Harry Truman,\n To Secure These Rights, advocated for what Mary Dudziak has \nlabeled \u201ccold war civil rights.\u201d It was necessary to ameliorate racial \ninequality, this argument went, because the Soviet Union frequently \ninvoked lynching and racial abuses to highlight U.S. hypocrisy.
Although the committee was unflinching in its assessment of how the \nfundamental civil right to the safety of one\u2019s person had been violated \nfrequently (Japanese, Mexicans, and African Americans, as well as \nmembers of minority religions, suffered the most), it also understood \nthese problems of racial injustice to be the effect of white \nextrajudicial violence and \u201carbitrary\u201d individual actions by cops, \nparticularly in the South. Its solutions were thus focused on \nstrengthening law enforcement and assuring its adherence to due process \nand administrative fairness. Similar to Kennan, the committee (and the \ngeneration of reformers it influenced) believed it was possible to use \nthe tools of policing and prisons fairly, unlike in the Soviet Union.
Political scientist Naomi Murakawa has shown, however, that by \nframing the problem as arbitrary and as growing out of lawlessness, the \ncommittee effectively ruled out the systematic and legally enshrined \ncharacter of racial abuse. What made it predictable, rather than \narbitrary, was its consistent object: racially subjugated peoples. By \ndiminishing the structural aspects of the abuse of minorities, liberal \nlaw enforcement reformers opened the door to a wider misunderstanding of\n what needed to be reformed. The response the committee endorsed\u2014to \nenact procedural reforms and modernize law enforcement in the United \nStates\u2014rode the high tide of police professionalization initiatives that\n would crest in the following decades, and which called for a \nwell-endowed, federally sanctioned anticrime apparatus. As historian \nElizabeth Hinton and Murakawa have argued, this effort to reform law \nenforcement and codify its procedures actually made it more \ninstitutionally robust and less forgiving, contributing to the country\u2019s\n march toward mass incarceration.
What is less understood, however, is the fundamental mismatch between\n what reformers and police chiefs imagined reform to look like. For \nliberal reformers, injustice looked like a lynch mob. For many police \nexperts, steeped in Cold War ideology and trained in \ncounterintelligence, it looked like the Soviet secret police. Mob rule \nhad to be avoided, but so too did centralized authority over police \nobjectives. Underlying reasons for what police did daily, and to whom, \nwas not the concern of either party.
Command-level cops across the United States, after all, were quick to\n absorb the lessons and perspectives of public safety officers. In \npolicing\u2019s professional literatures, CIA officials published articles on\n topics such as policing in the Soviet Union, which emphasized the \ncentralized governing hierarchy. The fact that Soviet police at the \nlowest level enacted the tyranny ordered at the top resonated with a \ngeneration of U.S. police reformers who had watched corrupt political \nmachines in U.S. cities be dismantled. Police reformers thus demanded \nthat police answer primarily to their own professional guidelines, free \nfrom political interference. In this way, the negative model of the \nauthoritarian state was misleading: it may have prevented centralized \ndictatorial rule, but it left police power largely insulated. And so \nCold War U.S. empire abroad found its replica in the War on Crime at \nhome: to break the political syzygy of an authoritarian state apparatus \nin Sacramento or Saigon, in Wichita or Tokyo, police needed to be \ntechnically adept, flush with cash, and insulated from political \nmachinations.
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\nThe War on Crime was a creature of federalism. Federal appropriations \nfor upgrading police, courts, and prisons came embroidered with a \ncommitment that no usurpation of local authority or discretion would \nresult. Policing remained decentralized. Even when police killed unarmed\n people during unrest, causing public complaint, police were protected; \noutrage could be an orchestrated communist plot, the thinking went, \nintended to take control over law enforcement by undermining its \nautonomy. In this way, the reform effort preserved the petty despotism \nof the nightstick and localized tyranny of the police chief that was at \nthe root of the racial crisis. By insulating police from federal \noversight or control, while also affording them increased resources, \nparticularly for capital-intensive repressive technologies, the War on \nCrime allowed the underlying structure of Jim Crow policing to persist.\n\n