“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: The book begins in 1960s Detroit, where a young, charismatic, progressive Democratic mayor found his political career effectively destroyed by a police union fighting for recognition. That wasn’t an accident. Police were simultaneously being called on to put down urban rebellions and gaining new workplace power through public sector unionization laws. They married those two things together: law and order rhetoric plus well-compensated, long-leashed officers. The Supreme Court’s rights revolution — criminal defendants’ rights, civil rights — felt to police like an existential threat. Blue Power was their answer.

•       Biden and the Bipartisan Consensus: Schrader’s most counterintuitive finding: the greatest federal champions of Blue Power were Democrats. Joe Biden, as a senator, was one of the most important figures in unifying police organizations — rural versus urban, command rank versus rank and file — and ensuring legislation met their demands. The law-and-order consensus wasn’t just Republican. It was built by Democrats who were terrified of the crime hysteria, and police who were expert at stoking it. Even once crime began its dramatic decline in the 1990s, police kept using the fear. We stopped the crime wave. Now pay up.

•       Crime Hysteria as a Political Weapon: Police learned early that crime statistics were a cudgel. Sign a good contract or crime will go up. And the tactic worked — not because the connection between police compensation and crime rates is real (Schrader says it isn’t), but because the fear was real. Social scientists still can’t fully explain why crime rose dramatically through the 1960s-80s and then declined just as dramatically from the mid-1990s. Police can’t explain it either. But no other public sector union operates this way. Sanitation workers don’t demand raises because they plowed the streets well in a heavy winter. Teachers don’t point to test scores. Police do.

•       ICE, Blue Power, and the Trump Paradox: ICE — anonymous, paramilitary, answerable to no one, reluctant even to wear identifying insignia — has paradoxically made local police look credible by contrast. Some unions have tried to exploit this at contract renewal time: we’re not ICE, so pay us accordingly. Others have quietly welcomed the federal incursions as a way to override progressive city councils in Chicago, LA, DC, and elsewhere. The Border Patrol union was one of the first to endorse Trump in 2016 and has been rewarded handsomely. Blue Power is nothing if not adaptable.

•       Why Defunding Failed — and What Actually Matters: Blue Power, Schrader argues, is the primary reason defunding didn’t happen. Police used the same political tactics the book describes to thwart those demands from movements — the same lobbying, litigation, public relations, and contract leverage they’ve been deploying since the 1960s. The real question isn’t defund or not defund. It’s how cities allocate their resources. Over and over again in his research, Schrader found police saying explicitly: cut parks and rec, cut libraries, cut pothole repair — but don’t touch our budget. That argument, made in fiscal crisis after fiscal crisis, has never really stopped.

About the Guest

Stuart Schrader is associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism. He is the author of Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves (Basic Books, 2026) and Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (University of California Press, 2019).

References:

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

•       “Authoritarianism from Below,” New York Review of Books, 2026. By Stuart Schrader.

•       Episode 2021 [March 2021]: Rosa Brooks on Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City — the sympathetic counterpoint to Schrader’s critique.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

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Chapters:

• (00:31) - Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue, and the sympathetic take on policing
• (03:44) - Authoritarianism from below: how police seized political power
• (05:09) - Conscious strategy or structural drift? The origins of Blue Power
• (08:37) - What drives Blue Power: ideology, bureaucracy, or money?
• (09:19...