“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.” — Stuart Schrader

Fifty years ago, America’s local police still served at the pleasure of democratically elected politicians. Not anymore. Stuart Schrader has spent years in the archives tracing how it happened. In Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, Schrader begins the story in Sixties Detroit, where a young, progressive Democratic mayor found his career derailed by a police union fighting for recognition. It was the opening move of a decades-long campaign in which rank-and-file officers took advantage of the tools of American democracy — unions, lobbying, litigation, public relations — to lift policing above the law.

Schrader’s most counterintuitive finding is that the greatest federal champions of Blue Power were Democrats like Joe Biden. With Trump 2.0, the story gets even stranger. ICE — anonymous, paramilitary, seemingly answerable to no one — has paradoxically made local police look credible by comparison. Some police unions have tried to exploit the contrast at contract renewal time. Others have quietly welcomed the federal incursions as a way to challenge progressive city councils in Los Angeles, Chicago, and DC. It’s almost as if today’s democratically elected politicians serve at the pleasure of the local police.

Five Takeaways

• The Detroit Opening Move. A young progressive Democratic mayor. A police union fighting for recognition. His career effectively destroyed. The opening move of Blue Power — law and order rhetoric married to workplace power, from the 1960s to the present.

• Biden and the Bipartisan Consensus. The greatest federal champions of Blue Power were Democrats. Biden unified fractious police organizations and ensured legislation met their demands. The law-and-order consensus was built from below, across party lines.

• Crime Hysteria as Political Weapon. Sign a good contract or crime will go up. Even after crime’s dramatic 1990s decline — which social scientists still can’t fully explain — police kept the fear alive. No other public sector union operates this way.

• ICE and the Trump Paradox. Anonymous, paramilitary, answerable to no one — ICE has made local police look credible by contrast. Some unions exploit this at contract time. Others welcome federal incursions to override progressive city councils. Blue Power is nothing if not adaptable.

• Beyond Defunding. Blue Power is the primary reason defunding didn’t happen. Police used the same tactics to thwart those demands. The real question: how do cities allocate resources — and who decides? Cut parks, libraries, potholes. But don’t touch the police budget.

About the Guest

Stuart Schrader is associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves (Basic Books, 2026).

References

Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves by Stuart Schrader (Basic Books, 2026)

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:

00:00:31 Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue, and the sympathetic take on policing
00:03:44 Authoritarianism from below: how police seized political power
00:05:09 Conscious strategy or structural drift? The origins of Blue Power
00:08:37 What drives Blue Power: ideology, bureaucracy, or money?
00:09:19 The 1960s origins: civil rights, urban rebellion, and police unionization
00:12:24 Detroit, Democratic mayors, and the bipartisan roots of Blue Power
00:15:39 Crime hysteria as political weapon: the police’s most effective tool
00:20:14 Race, Black Power, and the diversification fights of the 1970s
00:24:03 What’s actually wrong with Blue Power for ordinary Americans?
00:27:37 ICE, Trump 2.0, and the strange new politics of policing
00:34:01 Beyond defunding: how cities should actually think about resources