“Get Off Your Knees America”: Local Law Enforcement and Federal Crime Politics, 1960–70

During the 1960s, the issue of crime prevention—previously a local issue---increasingly became the focus of both Democrats and Republicans at the federal level. Particularly important to this period was the rise of the “law and order” movement that called for increased federal funding of crime prevention programs and more punitive crime policies. Historians and political scientists have shown that politicians, the media, and white voters all took part in shaping this movement, but absent from this historiography is any mention of the role of local law enforcement. Using federal gang policy in the 1960s and 1970s as a lens, this paper uncovers the significant role of local police departments in building the “law and order” coalition. In particular, law enforcement in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles used gang-policy debates to articulate ideas about urban criminality and to lobby for programs that would attract newly available federal funds for local crime prevention. Seen by the public as experts on crime, police officers offered testimony and statistics that supported conservative calls for federal intervention in crime control. This testimony placed certain police officers in national leadership positions within the “law and order” movement. At the same time, police officers were members of the white, working and middle class that mobilized for conservative politics. In their local communities, police officers became an integral grassroots component of the new “law and order” voting block that increasingly defined criminality along racial and economic lines. In the end, it was the efforts of local law enforcement in the 1960s and 1970s that helped bring down the crime control initiatives of the War on Poverty and heralded a new period of law enforcement’s political power at the federal level.