Police unions are widely regarded as a powerful interest group in American politics, yet the way they operate as organizations—their strategies, their relationships with police management, and their tactics for extracting concessions from cities—has been sparsely studied by social scientists. Stuart Schrader's Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves is a major contribution: the first comprehensive history of the rise of police unions from the 1960s to the present. Schrader focuses on the union role in shaping both the political identity and strategic organizing capabilities of police. The book argues that police in the United States have become a collective political force, “Blue Power,” if not always a cohesive one. Schrader's core theoretical claim is that understanding police as political actors, rather than simply as enforcers of the law or agents of state violence, is necessary to explain why police can operate with impunity. Schrader argues that while police have always had “operational power,” discretion to decide where and when to use coercive force, the “political power” of police, to defend their discretion from oversight and regulation, has grown over time. The two increasingly resemble one another in their affective militancy. Police unionism was not pre-ordained. The 1919 Boston Police Strike fractured alliances between the AFL and police officers. AFL-CIO President George Meany aptly characterized the attitude of organized labor to police unionization: “You have been kicking our members' butts on the picket line all these years,” (Schrader 164). The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) branded union membership as unpatriotic and synonymous with fascist and communist party membership in the 1940s. Moreover, police officers were often beholden to the patronage system and municipal political machines, while police fraternal associations usually functioned as politically feckless “beer drinking social clubs” (Schrader 17). Blue Power gives careful treatment to a broad set of forces that spurred unionization. Most important was a counterreaction to mid-century racial politics: the union movement gained traction in the 1960s as a bulwark against the Black freedom struggle. Unions curried favor with white voters by framing their workplace demands as necessary for officers to oppose Black militancy and chaos on the streets of American cities. This was not merely political cover but constitutive of the unions' strategic identity. In Baltimore, for example, while several unions including AFSCME scrambled to organize officers, the Fraternal Order of Police, which eventually emerged victorious, distinguished itself through its opposition to civilian review and its willingness to defend officers who had killed Black residents. Another important force driving unionization were the rising public sector labor movement, which created the legal infrastructure for police to demand collective bargaining rights. The hopes of liberal mayors and political commentators that police unionization would lead cops to internalize the “liberal social viewpoint of the labor movement” backfired (Schrader 43). Schrader details widespread union opposition to the racial integration of police departments, including resistance to the equal employment discrimination lawsuits filed by Black police officers' associations. In San Francisco, the Police Officers' Association (POA) called a lawsuit filed by Black officers challenging discriminatory civil service exams “political blackmail,” and published the complainants' personal information in a union newsletter. Schrader reveals that while police unions were relentless in their defense of white officers, they ranged from tepid to actively hostile when it came to defending Black workers within their own ranks. While police management were hardly enthusiastic about integration—the IACP criticized EEOC affirmative action guidelines—unions went on the offensive. Future research should investigate how the police union case relates to sociological scholarship on racial exclusion within the labor movement. Union officials like Carl Parsell, president of the Detroit Police Officers Association (DPOA), were instrumental in transforming police associations into well-oiled political machines. Parsell coordinated the 1967 ticket-writing slowdown and Blue Flu that forced Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh to negotiate a bargaining agreement with officers, first winning new grievance procedures and the reinstatement of suspended officers, and then later improved pay. Schrader interprets the Detroit union case by applying Eric Hobsbawm's concept of “collective bargaining by riot,” where workers in proto-industrial occupations won concessions from owners through seemingly chaotic tactics (e.g., loom smashing) as a strategy to exact concessions, despite their lacking formal union representation. Schrader positions DPOA actions similarly, arguing that the department-union standoff created the conditions for the 1967 Detroit uprising. The union was then able to capitalize on the subsequent protests in their contract negotiations with the Mayor: “the union's success was possible only after Detroit had gone up in flames,” (Schrader 56). Parsell established a template that later union leaders would refine, most notably Pat Lynch, president of the New York City Police Benevolent Association (PBA) from 1999 to 2023, with whom Schrader closes his narrative. One of Schrader's key analytic moves is to frame the rise of police power not as a monolithic story of cops versus the public, but as a shift in the balance of power within the profession itself. His account is rightly attuned to the divide between the rank-and-file, with unions as their steward, and professionalization movement of police management, spearheaded by groups like the IACP and the FBI. Where the professional vision of police managers focused on spending for better technology, equipment, and training standards, rank-and-file officers pushed for higher wages and benefit packages and, above all, the preservation of discretion over street-level police behavior. Unions organized the rank-and-file to wrest control from police managers. The irony Schrader emphasizes is that professionalization, by severing police from the old political machines, created the conditions for rank-and-file police officers to become a new kind of political actor subject to far less supervisory control. Lurking beneath the surface of Schrader's account is that Blue Power contains two books in one. The first half, the union book, relies on deep archival accounts of a set of cases, Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and San Francisco, to carefully reconstruct competing models for how police were organized. The second half shifts between that focused union narrative and a broader history of post-1970s law enforcement politicking, with chapters on the bipartisan War on Drugs and the Border patrol. The tactical and organizational strategies of the union movement surely shape these political struggles, but how they directly relate to the police labor history that precedes them is not always clear. Moreover, the distinctive analytic frameworks that Schrader uses to make sense of police collective action fade into a more episodic, potted narrative. Schrader's account advances policing literature in the social sciences with an excavation of the organizational and political dimensions of police power in general and of unions in particular. Future scholarship should take the rich archival detail of Schrader's cases and embed them in broader theories of urban governance to produce systematic accounts of why Blue Power was more successful in some cities rather than others. While Detroit's DPOA exacted concessions in the direct aftermath of urban crisis, San Francisco's Bluecoats, despite their success in the state legislature, were punished by voters through reduced pay formulas and pension cuts after their 1975 strike. How does urban political economy, the broader strength of organized labor, the presence or absence of political machines, or the differing racial composition of cities explain these trajectories? And might this tell us something about the structural limits or weaknesses of Blue Power?
Aaron Stagoff-Belfort (Fri,) studied this question.