When the Los Angeles
neighborhood of Watts erupted in violent protest in August 1965, the
uprising drew strength from decades of pent-up frustration with
employment discrimination, residential segregation, and poverty. But
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 limited demands for
reform made by activists and residents of color, instead intensifying
its power.
In
Policing Los Angeles, Max Felker-Kantor narrates the dynamic
history of policing, anti–police abuse movements, race, and
politics in Los Angeles from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Los
Angeles rebellion. Using the explosions 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. His book 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 Watts uprising.