Beyond the Police Riot: The Politics of Chicago’s Patrolmen after 1968

What were workplace politics like for low-ranking Chicago police in the age of escalating police brutality? This paper asks how the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the deadly raid on Black Panther headquarters altered the dynamics of the police workplace in terms of hiring, discipline, and labor representation during the late 1960s and 1970s. These years were the crucible for the organizational upheaval that reshaped the Chicago police department in the late twentieth century. Two major strains of police rank and file protest developed into a new police labor militancy, dividing the rank and file from within and pressuring the department administration from below. The Afro-American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL), founded in response to Daley’s infamous “shoot to kill” order, pursued a strategy of aggressive litigation in its fight against discriminatory hiring policies. Its lawsuits froze millions of federal revenue-sharing dollars and drastically changed the composition of the Chicago police force by the end of the 1970s. Meanwhile predominately white police organizations raised grievances against police department discipline, insisting for the first time on negotiating a contract with the city to protect their workplace rights in the late 1960s. They represented a police force increasingly on the defensive, fighting back against departmental policies meant to control violence and appease public outrage.

Using direct action to resist discipline as well as to assert demands for collective bargaining, these rank and file organizations tested out their power to influence department policy and eventually won Chicago’s first police contract in 1981. The rise of militant police organizations within the department challenges assumptions about the loyalties of city workers in Chicago and demonstrates the complexity of institutional relationships within the seemingly monolithic Democratic Machine during the (Richard J.) Daley years.