Blue Power, Stuart Schrader writes, is “a biography not of a person but of a political force.” The force he has in mind is the development of police power as a durable political presence in American life, one that has proven remarkably resilient, even as public trust has eroded.
Scheduled for release in April, Blue Power traces how police departments and their unions accumulated political leverage over the second half of the 20th century. Schrader, a historian of policing at Johns Hopkins University, is interested in how police organizations learned to defend themselves: how they organized, how they borrowed from the labor movement and how they ultimately charted a different path.
That divergence sits at the center of the book. Police never formed a national union on the scale of industrial labor, nor did they fully integrate into the broader labor movement. Yet they adopted many of its tactics, including collective bargaining, coordinated job actions and political lobbying, while leaving behind its universalist commitments.
The result, Schrader argues, was not a unified workers movement but a dispersed and highly disciplined political force, able to shape public policy while avoiding many of the constraints faced by other public-sector unions.
Through organizing and contract negotiations, police organizations secured protections that insulated officers from discipline and liability, even as their authority to use force expanded. That insulation, Schrader suggests, has had lasting consequences, not only for accountability, but for the growth of the American carceral state.
The book’s history begins in the 1960s, when policing came under sustained public challenge. Civil rights activism, urban uprisings and media scrutiny unsettled long-standing assumptions about police authority. Many officers experienced this moment as a loss of legitimacy, and departments responded in two directions at once: more aggressive enforcement on the street and deeper political organization off it.
The idea of Blue Power itself emerged as a response to Black Power, as cops began worrying about their perception especially following inordinate violence they perpetrated against Black Americans. Blue Power, Schrader says in the book was “the political force by which radicalism, student demonstrations and Black Power can be blocked.”
Police were also dealing with more familiar labor issues. From 1945 to 1960, factory wages rose at roughly twice the rate of police pay.
Dissatisfaction over wages and working conditions pushed officers toward collective action, culminating in a series of illegal but carefully coordinated protests. The most notable took place in Detroit in 1967, when the city’s police association orchestrated a mass sick-out, called the “blue flu.” Within a week, nearly a third of the force had called in sick.
Such action demonstrated solidarity, but it also produced an unexpected result. Crime did not rise.
“With these job actions, Detroit officers revealed a paradox that the political project of the police cannot escape,” Schrader writes. Police present themselves as indispensable in maintaining order, yet their withdrawal allowed for a test of that claim. “As it turned out,” he notes, “crime did not skyrocket during the blue flu.”
Moments like this help explain why police unions ultimately diverged from organized labor. Many began not as unions at all, but as benevolent associations or fraternal clubs. “Because of that origin outside the labor movement,” Schrader said in an interview, “some of the cultural tendencies of those organizations persisted even after they became unions.”
Those tendencies included strong internal loyalty and a deep suspicion of outsiders. Especially because what distinguishes the police is their ability to engage in violence, cops expect other officers to cover them, given they might be faced with a similar situation. Officers socialized with other officers, reinforcing cohesion while narrowing the boundaries of trust.
As external scrutiny increased from civil rights groups, journalists, courts and internal anti-corruption efforts, police organizations mobilized in response. “Police mobilization grows in tandem with external pressure,” Schrader noted.
Amid these pressures, rank-and-file officers began to grow frustrated with their command, who, beginning after World War II, were heavily concerned with the “professionalization” of their units. Mario Biaggi, a decorated member of the NYPD, championed a federal bill of rights for law enforcement officers, which outlines the basic rights and protections for cops.
The fight for the bill of rights, in defiance of management, was a galvanizing moment for officers in the early 1970s. Biaggi offered it as a counter to the civil rights movement for Black Americans.
As Schrader writes, “the emergence of the law enforcements officers bill of rights was part of a shift in the balance of power within the police writ large, away from command toward the rank and file.” In recent years, the NAACP has sought to eradicate the officers’ bill of rights, arguing it gives officers facing investigations procedural privileges and protections different from normal citizens.
Mobilization thus began to focus less on wages and more on protecting officers from discipline. Blue Power further documents how this played out in New York City, where municipal government increasingly absorbed the financial consequences of police misconduct. Between 1994 and 1996 alone, the city paid roughly $70 million in settlements and jury awards stemming from abuse cases, while the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association provided legal defense, and officers remained insulated from personal responsibility.
As a result, taxpayers wind up paying the cost of damages in civil lawsuits brought against cops and police departments. From 2010 to 2020, this cost reached as high as $3.2 billion.
Schrader writes, “Human Rights Watch noted that while Ed Koch was mayor and Phil Caruso led the police union, the city began subsidizing a legal defense fund for officers. The result was that ‘taxpayers may be charged three times for officers who commit abuses: for their legal defense, for their salaries, and for civil settlements or jury awards.’”
For Schrader, this system reflects the political consequences of the cultural distinctiveness of police unions themselves. Built on tight internal loyalty and a deep suspicion of outsiders, police organizations developed a form of solidarity that proved especially effective when translated into politics.
Over time, that cohesion gave rise to durable protections – officers’ bills of rights, expansive due-process guarantees, and contractual barriers to discipline – that insulated rank-and-file officers from oversight.
As Schrader puts it, “Police unions do this in two main ways: by providing legal defense and expert support to officers facing investigations, and by reshaping the legal landscape – through officers’ bills of rights and other protections – that make discipline and oversight more difficult.” These mechanisms did not emerge in isolation. “I hope the book makes clear,” he adds, “that these forces develop in direct response to one another.”
Future installments will focus on how police dynamics described in Blue Power took concrete shape in New York City, where police power, municipal governance and labor politics collided in ways that continue to structure public debate as well as on what Blue Power means for the future of policing and accountability in American cities.
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