A protracted war for order: Police violence in the twentieth century United States

Although a formal historiography of police violence has yet to develop, historians have had much to say about police brutality. Building on the insights of race theorists from critical legal, critical race, and sociological studies on racial formation and the law, they have argued that police violence has been constitutive to racial formation in the United States, that is has been a primary means through which crime is socially constructed, that is has always been employed in the interest of preserving order, that it has inspired sustained movements of resistance, and that its militarization and sustained patterns of brutality are a collective telltale sign of the failures of Great Society liberalism and the fragility of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. This article synthesizes the scattered historical literature to plainly articulate these prevailing arguments about the form, function, and consequences of police violence, much of which has been produced by scholars of Black American and labor histories, but which is also appearing more frequently in other ethnic histories as well as queer and gender histories. Historians can continue to take an interdisciplinary approach to shaping research questions and producing a body of work that attends specifically to the history of police violence. We will need to borrow sources from other disciplines and re-imagine data as evidence; create new archives, even as we rediscover old ones as we face the near-insurmountable challenge of extracting police misconduct information from police department archives; and consider that the challenge for developing a police brutality historiography is not in determining the magnitude of violence, but rather in teasing out the political and legal apparatuses that make such violence immune to reform.