Biden’s Blue Authoritarianism: Stuart Schrader on How America’s Police Seized Power From Below

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It is Tuesday, 04/14/2026, more than four years ago. We did a show with the Washington DC based writer Rosa Brooks. It was back in March 2021. She had a book out then called Tangled Up in Blue, Policing the American City. It's a book that did very well, almost a thousand positive reviews on, Amazon, Washington Post book of the year. And I thought in the in the book, Rosa took a slightly sympathetic take on what it's like to be a police person in America these days. She became a police person. She's from a quite a left wing American family, but the book itself is complicated and interesting, perhaps reflects the complications, of the American police force. We have another book out with the word blue in it, today. It's called Blue Power, How Police Organize to Protect and Serve Themselves. It's a different take, I think, on the police, more of a critical one. It's, by my guest today, Stuart Schrader. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and he's talking to us from Brooklyn where he lives. Stuart, did you read, Tangled Up in Blue, Rosa Parks not Rosa Parks, Rosa Brooks' book?

00:02:03 Stuart Schrader: No. I didn't. I read a bunch of the reviews, though.

00:02:07 Andrew Keen: What do you make of, shall we say, the the Brooksian position that being in the police is a bit of a complicated thing and that perhaps we need to be a little bit more sympathetic to those who criticize the police?

00:02:25 Stuart Schrader: Well, I think that lots of institutions in The United States are complicated, and lots of jobs are difficult. The argument I make in Blue Power is trying to take a different perspective. I think that, you know, my understanding of that book and many of the books that have been written about the police, emphasize their operations, the challenges that officers, encounter in their day to day activities that oftentimes do lead to, what people would characterize as injustice or, violations of civil rights and so forth. And and I pivot away from that kind of operational perspective, which I think we have a pretty good understanding of nowadays, to an analysis of how police have engaged in politics in The United States since the nineteen sixties. So the background of police operations is, of course, crucial to the story I tell, but I try to put in the foreground a story that is a little bit less well known and less well understood, which is how police have, been engaged in political organizing.

00:03:44 Andrew Keen: You wrote an interesting piece recently for the New York Review of Books called "Authoritarianism from Below." Do you suggest in this piece and in Blue Power that the police have, in a perhaps almost unconstitutional way, seized power in America without many people actually realizing it?

00:04:06 Stuart Schrader: Yeah. I think there's two dimensions to the authoritarianism argument. I mean, one, again, is the operational picture, which is to say that in police operations, they wield a great amount of discretion to resolve situations as they see fit in the moment. And the decisions they make in those activities are basically irreversible and unquestionable at least in the moment. Questions may be asked afterwards. But, again, yeah, there's another dimension that I'm looking at when I think about authoritarianism, and that is the question of how police have mobilized using many of the tools of our, you know, democratic political processes in The United States in order to squelch or at least limit, the power of voters and elected officials over police conduct and operations.

00:05:09 Andrew Keen: So is your argument in Blue Power how police organize to protect and serve themselves that it's a conscious form of authoritarianism from below that the police since the nineteen sixties have gone out to essentially seize power, not just in American cities, but perhaps in American politics?

00:05:33 Stuart Schrader: Well, I don't know that I would use the word conscious. I don't have a view into their minds. I mean, in that article, "Authoritarianism from Below," I was trying to wrestle with the claims that people have been making about the Trump administration as being authoritarian, and I was trying to analyze the way that police have been supportive of the Trump administration. But more generally in the book, I do look at the ways that police have, over and over again at city, state, and even federal levels, managed to use the political process to get their ways. And in many cases, it's quite remarkable how successful they have been in achieving gains that other types of political actors or, you know, interest groups have not quite managed to do.

00:06:31 Andrew Keen: You say police get their ways. Are those ways bureaucratic, economic, political?

00:06:39 Stuart Schrader: Yeah. All of the above.

00:06:40 Andrew Keen: And can one generalize? I mean, we've done quite a few shows on the police in one way or the other. We did a show a few years ago with Michael Hayes on the behavior of the New York Police Department, and then another one with Neil Gross who portrayed three police chiefs who defied the odds and tried to change American cop culture. So can we generalize about the police?

00:07:13 Stuart Schrader: Yeah. I think so. Again, I think in operational terms, the way that police operate around the country is quite similar. I mean, obviously, there are differences rural to urban in terms of their mission and how they accomplish it. But yeah, I do think that generalizing is possible. And in the book, I show that the associations, organizations, and unions that police belong to engage in really quite similar tactics, from one city to the next. Now, of course, not every city has a police union, but even if a city doesn't have a police union, there oftentimes are other types of associations that police belong to, you know, fraternal and other types of associations that do have quite a bit of influence and political clout. And I also show that police have developed national networks and organizations that operate at all levels of our politics to coordinate and plan political processes and campaigns across jurisdictions.

00:08:37 Andrew Keen: But what is motivating the police? Is it ideological — the law and order agenda? Is it to put more police on the street so that more criminals, or supposed criminals, can go to jail? Is it bureaucratic — designed to pay police more, to get more officers on the street, to establish more and more political power? Where do you see the real drive for Blue Power?

00:09:19 Stuart Schrader: Well, the book begins in the nineteen sixties, which, of course, was a moment of intense social upheaval and turmoil in The United States. And the police union movement, really got its start in that period. There was a drive for greater public sector unionization that had been brewing for some time, and laws and policies started to change that allowed public sector unions to form in many states — and police unionization was made possible by some of those legal transformations. But at the same time, police were also called upon to respond to and even put down many of the types of social protests and rebellions that were happening in the nineteen sixties. There was an intense fear of increasing crime in many American cities that was also linked to the fear of urban rebellions. And so police were being called upon to manage some of the social upheaval that was happening at the same time as they were gaining more workplace power. And so they were using that workplace power to try to gain better compensation, better working conditions, better benefits, etcetera, like many of the other public sector unions. But I think they linked it or married it to — as you suggest — a kind of law and order agenda, arguing that social welfare and other types of social programming responses to urban rebellions and crime that were popular and even dominant among a certain sector of society at that point, really were not the answer. Instead, police were the answer. And not just police and the law and order agenda, but well-compensated, well-remunerated police officers who would be given a fairly long leash to figure out how to enact that agenda. There was a great fear about the growing rights revolution, where the Supreme Court decided in favor of criminal defendants' rights and the broader civil rights revolution. A lot of police encountered that as really constraining them and leading to the possibility of greater external oversight by people who are not police. And so they used their growing political power and authority to push back against that possibility.

00:12:24 Andrew Keen: So are you saying that Blue Power, or the origins of Blue Power, is very much bound up with Black Power or perceptions of Black Power? Was it very much supported by the Republican Party? Of course, when one thinks of police violence in the nineteen sixties, one thinks of the riots or the police violence in Chicago in 1968, Democratic Convention, and the police were ordered then by Richard Daley, who was the Democratic mayor of Chicago. So is this political, I mean, in terms of the Republicans and the Democrats? Or do you find that the beginnings of Blue Power in the sixties is bipartisan — as much in the Democratic Party as the Republican Party, or more localized?

00:13:15 Stuart Schrader: Well, it started out more localized, and of course many cities had Democratic leaders. One of the histories I tell in the book, in fact at the outset of the book, is about Detroit. The book really starts in Detroit. And Detroit in the nineteen sixties had a very young, charismatic, progressive, Democratic mayor. And the police union there, which was trying to gain recognition, trying to actually become an official police union, really waged a pretty nasty campaign against that mayor, ultimately derailing his political career in many ways. He was kind of never heard from again. Of course, there was also the 1967 rebellion in Detroit, which didn't help, but I tell a story in the book about ways that the police union was actually much more active in the rebellion than historians have typically understood. But the point here is that in many cases, yes, Democratic leaders had their careers challenged or thwarted by mobilizations of police. But, surprisingly, the elected officials, particularly at the federal level, who came to be the greatest champions of Blue Power were themselves Democrats. Perhaps the most famous is Joe Biden who, as a senator, was a really strong supporter of law enforcement and repeatedly worked quite hard to help unify police, because they were not always on the same page. Rural and urban, command rank and rank and file police didn't always see eye to eye on all of their political goals. And figures like Biden played an important role in getting them to put aside some of their differences and ensuring that legislation coming out of Congress would meet most of the demands and requirements of different police organizations representing different types of officers.

00:15:39 Andrew Keen: Stuart, how much of this was bound up in the hysteria over crime? I mean, it's a continual theme from Richard Nixon to Reagan to Trump, and you mentioned Biden and Clinton as well. Did the police stoke this hysteria? Were they themselves infected by it? Did they understand the disconnect — which seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong — between the American obsession with crime and the reality of the numbers, which don't reflect that hysteria? What is the police's relationship with this hysteria?

00:16:29 Stuart Schrader: Yeah. I'm glad you pointed that out. I think it's really important to note that police learned early on, as the crime hysteria, to use your term, was growing in the nineteen sixties.

00:16:45 Andrew Keen: Is it a fair term? I mean, I'm perhaps not quite as critical of the police as you, but I've always understood it as a kind of —

00:16:52 Stuart Schrader: No, I think it's a good diagnosis of American politics. There is a clear overemphasis on crime, certainly in the media and among elected officials. And it began in the sixties. Obviously, it's deeply linked with the transformations having to do with civil rights and Black Power, the changing demographics of cities, and the rise of new immigrant populations in America. But police were quite ready to use crime statistics and the fear that crime rates might be continually rising as a kind of cudgel. They would basically say, if you don't want crime to go up, make sure that you sign a really good contract with our union and give us the kind of pay and benefits that we're asking for. Basically, the trend in The United States was for crime to be more or less increasing in a lot of categories until the nineteen nineties. And then by the middle of the nineteen nineties, it starts a really epochal decline all the way to the present, of course with some variation. And social scientists — those who are honest — will often say we really don't know exactly why. The explanation is quite hard to figure out: why there was such a dramatic increase and then just as dramatic, or even more dramatic, a decrease. But even once crime started to decline, police still kept using the fears of it going back up again, or just the claim: hey, we were so successful in stopping the crime that was gripping our cities, so we should be rewarded and remunerated properly. And it's not a particularly surprising set of arguments to make, but especially when you compare it to other public sector unions, there isn't quite a strong connection between performance and demands for compensation. For example, this past winter was really snowy on the East Coast, but I haven't heard sanitation workers saying, hey, we plowed a lot of streets really well, so we should get a huge raise — or something like teachers pointing to test scores. You could go down the list. It's just not common for other unions to wield those types of relatively small and hard-to-explain blips in crime stats that come out every quarter or every year as political tools the way police do.

00:20:14 Andrew Keen: And how much of this is really just about race? I mean, we've done many shows on this. Obviously, race in America is — perhaps — the dominant story in the country's history, one way or the other: the imbalance when it comes to criminal justice, the number of Black and Brown people in prisons. How much of this obsession with crime and the seizure of power by the police in Blue Power? I mean, not all police are white. There are many black policemen as well, of course. How much of this is really about race and the hysteria about black men in particular being criminals?

00:20:57 Stuart Schrader: Yeah. I would totally agree with you that if I had to name the one most important question in understanding American politics, it is the question of racism. But on the other hand, you're right that by now in many major cities, New York City, for example, Los Angeles, the police forces are no longer majority white as they once were. Now that doesn't mean that command rank officers are as diverse, although that's also changing. And it also doesn't mean that police union leadership is as diverse. That is really quite slow to change, particularly in cities like New York. Police unions do tend to remain majority white at the leadership level. But nevertheless, I do try to make sense of how these demographic changes within the police forces themselves became an object of contention that actually fed into the sharpening of Blue Power. There were really intense fights led largely by police unions against the imposition of certain affirmative action goals in the nineteen seventies. And this continued all the way into the eighties, but the seventies was the most active decade for this, where police unions thought that quotas and other types of transformations to hiring and retention strategies would actually be unfair to the incumbent, largely white, police departments. And so they pushed hard, and oftentimes there were lengthy, drawn-out, acrimonious legal battles over increasing the number of Black officers, female officers, Latino officers, and so on. And although the ultimate outcome was that many of these departments did diversify, in the process the police unions gained a great deal of experience in fighting public relations campaigns, working through the courts, and dealing with federal bureaucrats in charge of equal opportunity processes. So on the one hand, the diversification of police forces was not what most police unions wanted at the outset, but the process of diversification didn't weaken or undermine Blue Power. In fact, it actually gave them a great deal of experience that they would go on to use in other settings.

00:24:03 Andrew Keen: So what's the problem with Blue Power, Stuart? Some people watching this might say, well, maybe he's got a point, but I don't mind having lots of police on the street. There are criminals. Maybe there's a degree of hysteria, but, there is still, nonetheless, some criminality in America. What's the problem for law abiding people with blue power?

00:24:29 Stuart Schrader: Well, first of all, I would simply say that I don't see much of a correlation between the compensation that police receive and crime rates. Throughout the book, I show that police have consistently been pushing for better and better forms of compensation, not just in salaries, but in lots of other types of benefits and perks. And so — is there a connection between that

00:25:06 Andrew Keen: So what you're saying is that the police are, so to speak, a kind of overcompensated interest group — that they control the process, the system, better than teachers or garbage workers or firemen.

00:25:27 Stuart Schrader: Yeah. That's right. And beyond that, what has increasingly become the case is that police — because they have achieved many of their goals in terms of getting really strong contracts — have moved into other realms of political activism and mobilization that really have little to do with effectively controlling the threat of crime. They have been engaged in what I would call culture war battles. Because the Republican Party has become so consumed with fighting culture wars — around not just immigration, but questions of gender and sexuality, and so on — many police unions have increasingly been echoing or even initiating some of these discourses. And I think that really puts them — especially in cities — out of step with average people who would be concerned about crime, but not so concerned with seeing police make arguments about, say, gender and sexuality. For one recent example: the Chicago Police Union magazine. Many police unions put out a monthly magazine. The cover of it a few months ago was a picture of Charlie Kirk — it was a sort of memorial issue for Charlie Kirk. And we could just wonder: some people may be upset that he was killed, but what does that have to do with the bread-and-butter issues that police actually face?

00:27:37 Andrew Keen: I'm sure they didn't have an equivalent George Floyd issue a few years ago. Going back to Rosa Brooks — when we had that conversation about Tangled Up in Blue back in 2021, it was the height of the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of George Floyd by the police. Things have changed in the last few years, particularly in Trump 2.0. Now we have the rise of ICE as an alternative police, maybe a kind of paramilitarized force that exists in a different form. There's a recent piece in The Guardian about video of an ICE shooting shattering an agency's story, and of course the incidents in Minneapolis. Some of the stories I've read, Stuart, suggest that the police don't like ICE — and that in an odd way, this emergence of ICE as Trump's private militia has actually made the police look credible. How does the Blue Power story change in the age of Trump 2.0 and ICE?

00:28:55 Stuart Schrader: Yeah. It's a good question. I think there's one important factor, which is that the union — particularly of the Border Patrol, but also ICE — has been a strong supporter of Donald Trump going back to 2016. In fact, the Border Patrol union was one of the first unions to come out and endorse him. And they've been rewarded — certainly with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which gives unimaginable amounts of money to the Department of Homeland Security. More generally, they've been rewarded for that support. In particular, officials within the Border Patrol union have gained roles in the Trump administration. But you're right that there is a seeming conflict when ICE operates in cities, in the way that we saw last year — particularly extreme in Minneapolis — where they are not seeming to abide by the law, and certainly not abiding by what elected officials in those cities want. And according to the police chief in Minneapolis, who is quite outspoken about this, it really makes the local police look bad. The local police in Minneapolis had been engaged in a campaign over the past five years of trying to rehabilitate their image and redress some of the problems epitomized in George Floyd's murder. So there is that possibility of conflict. But on the other hand, as I argue in that New York Review of Books piece, there are also a number of police unions who have seen the possibility of these incursions by DHS as a kind of exogenous shock that might break a stalemate in their local political situation. Many of these unions are already engaged in conflicts with progressive elected officials, particularly on their city councils — in DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, and other cities. There have been fights between city officials and the police union. And bringing the feds in creates the possibility of overriding the progressives on the city council by brute force. And so police have tried to take advantage of this. In other cases, for example in Los Angeles or Washington DC,

00:31:55 Stuart Schrader: local police unions have kind of coordinated to say, look. ICE was really bad, and we don't seem so bad by contrast. So next time the contract comes up for renewal, let's make sure the contract reflects the esteem we've earned by contrast to ICE. And so you see these political machinations playing out. Police unions and their leaders are really quite savvy political operators. They're very knowledgeable about how local politics plays out, they have a lot of media contacts and clout, and they're oftentimes very good at figuring out how to use a particular crisis situation, such as has emerged with these

00:32:47 Andrew Keen: Well, I take your point, Stuart, but that's what any union organization is supposed to do. And it's clear in the way ICE behaves, in the way they look — wrapped up, anonymous — they seem to take pride in presenting themselves as riot cops or paramilitary figures. That does, I wouldn't say, bring out the civility of the police exactly, but by comparison, the police do look more civil than ICE, don't they?

00:33:24 Stuart Schrader: Well, sometimes. I mean, in fact there's been a lot of confusion in these operations about who is who, in part because ICE has been so reluctant to wear identifying insignia. And so many times people don't really know who is operating — is it local police? Is it ICE? Is it military? Somebody else? And that has also led to a lot of confusion and mistrust.

00:34:01 Andrew Keen: What is to be done, Stuart? We've done shows on defunding the police. That was certainly something that hasn't won the Democrats a lot of votes, especially in the presidential election. What would you like to see? You're clearly not a great fan of Blue Power, you don't want to see this authoritarianism from below — but where are the reforms? What should and can be done? Are you in favor of defunding the police?

00:34:34 Stuart Schrader: Well, I would say that Blue Power is one of the primary reasons why police haven't been defunded. Police have been able to thwart those demands from movements quite effectively, using the same types of political tactics that they've been using for a long time — which I analyze in the book. I think one real risk of the police reform conversation is that it gets too caught up in trying to turn the knob or tweak the switch within policing, when a lot of the questions are much broader — about how our society is organized. But I would say the fundamental question that recurs throughout the book is how will cities and states allocate their resources. In many cases, particularly in the nineteen seventies, cities started to experience fiscal crises because the amount of revenue coming in was shrinking and costs were going up. Police would be quite explicit — and I was really surprised to find this over and over again in my research — where they would say to city leaders: You don't have enough money to pay all the bills? Well, cut the budget for parks and rec, cut the budget for libraries, cut the budget for fixing potholes — but don't touch the police budget. Now, in a fiscal crisis scenario, that might have been sensible. But that argument has just recurred over and over again. What I would say is that it's not really just a question of defunding or divesting from policing — it's about finding strategies to invest in other forms of spending that will enable and encourage human flourishing.

00:36:46 Andrew Keen: Well, interesting and very important subject. And the book is out today: Blue Power: How Police Organize to Protect and Serve Themselves. Thank you, Stuart Schrader, so much, and congratulations on the new book. Really appreciate it.

00:37:03 Stuart Schrader: Thanks for having me.