Politics of Safety
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A01=Shannon King
Adam Clayton Powell
Author_Shannon King
Bedford-Stuyvesant
Black criminality
Blackness
carceral state
Category=JBSL1
Category=JKSW1
Category=JKV
Category=JPVC
Category=NHK
crime news
discourses of crime
disinvestment
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Fiorello H. La Guardia
Harlem
Harlem Riot of 1935
Harlem Riot of 1943
Jr.
law and order
Lewis Valentine
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
New York City
New York Police Department
police discretion
police power
police violence
policing
racial liberalism
Safety
white violence
whiteness
youth crime
Product details
- ISBN 9781469676173
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 155 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 16 Jan 2024
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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For much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, public officials in cities like New York, Chicago, and Baltimore have criminalized uprisings—portending Black "thugs" throwing rocks at police and plundering private property—to undermine complaints of police violence. Liberal mayors like Fiorello H. La Guardia have often been the deftest practitioners of this strategy. As the depression and wartime conditions spurred youth crime, white New Yorkers' anxieties—about crime, the movement of Black people into white neighborhoods, and headlines featuring Black "hoodlums" emblazoned all over the white media—drove their support for the expansion of police patrols in the city, especially in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Though Blacks also called for police protection and for La Guardia to provide equitable municipal resources, they primarily received more punishment. This set the stage for the Harlem uprising of 1943.
Shannon King uncovers how Black activism for safety was a struggle against police brutality and crime, highlighting how the police withholding protection operated was a form of police violence and an abridgement of their civil rights. By decentering familiar narratives of riots, King places Black activism against harm at the center of the Black freedom struggle, revealing how Black neighborhoods became occupied territories in La Guardia's New York.
Shannon King uncovers how Black activism for safety was a struggle against police brutality and crime, highlighting how the police withholding protection operated was a form of police violence and an abridgement of their civil rights. By decentering familiar narratives of riots, King places Black activism against harm at the center of the Black freedom struggle, revealing how Black neighborhoods became occupied territories in La Guardia's New York.
Shannon King is associate professor of history at Fairfield University.
