Max Felker-Kantor. Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD.

Abstract

The summer 2020 rebellions against police violence sparked conversations from both liberals and conservatives about implementing police reform measures designed to end police violence while simultaneously maintaining law and order. Politicians and law enforcement officials proposed comprehensive reforms that ranged from offering higher salaries to law enforcement officers to implementing new de-escalation training procedures. Proposals like these, however, are nothing new. As Max Felker-Kantor demonstrates in Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) enacted similar types of budgetary and training reforms in the aftermath of the Watts uprising in 1965, and he argues that these approaches resulted in the police gaining more power and authority between the 1960s and the 1990s. Furthermore, such reforms failed to address systemic inequalities as well as the antagonistic relationships between the LAPD and the city’s Black and Brown populations. Felker-Kantor contends that these failures ultimately produced the conditions under which Los Angeles erupted in rebellion in 1992, after the acquittal of six police officers for the brutal beating of Rodney King.