Criminalization of a Generation: The Delinquency Control Institute and Racialized Youth Policing in LA

The “Zoot Suit Riots” are one of the most infamous moments of racialized, and particularly anti-Mexican violence, in Los Angeles history. One response to the racialized targeting of Mexican and other youth of color in Los Angeles was to create the Delinquency Control Institute(DCI). In 1946 the Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, and the University of Southern California’s School of Public Administration inaugurated DCI which was set to become the nations top law enforcement training institutes for the emerging field of youth policing. My paper interrogates the history of DCI and its impact on the growth of criminalization, harassment, and brutality against youth of color in L.A. While specific cases of police brutality against young Black and Mexican Angelinos inform my analysis, I instead connect these specific moments of violence to the everyday violence of racialized and ageist surveillance, profiling, arrest, and targeting of youth of color. My paper asks three central questions. First, how and did L.A. law enforcement graduates of DCI implement racialized policies of youth policing? Second, how can we look at the construction of youth gang policing as a racial project? And finally, how might we as historians expand the meaning of brutality not only include the spectacle of violence but also the quotidian acts of racializing youth policing?