'Public order is the first business of government': The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and the making of a liberal counterinsurgent police-industrial complex

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent studies of post-1968 U.S. policing have situated the neoliberal carceral state and the concomitant rise of mass incarceration within a liberal capitulation to conservative law-and-order ‘militarization’. At the putative domestic center of this story, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), established in 1968 by Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson and greatly expanded under Republican Richard Nixon, has often served as a useful, if underacknowledged, subject of police and criminal justice buildup. Instead of viewing Johnson and his administration as misled or miscalculated actors, however, this essay recontextualizes the bipartisan consensus of LEAA through a particularly liberal counterinsurgency project that synthesized police-military hardware and community software. As the state’s go-to response to the political-economic and racial-colonial crises brought on by urban rebellions, LEAA’s brand of liberal counterinsurgency was instrumental in mobilizing a police-industrial complex through partnerships between police, military, academia, and industry. Drawing on archival research into police periodicals, agency publications, and project reports, I consider how a revived analysis of LEAA’s police-industrial complex can help abolitionist scholars and organizers rethink this origin moment of mass incarceration and police ‘militarization’ as representative of a conjunctural fix to the fundamental counterinsurgent project of U.S. policing and state power.