Police Power and the Rise of Youth Caging in Los Angeles, 1950–65

In my poster I interrogate the expansion of police power by Los Angeles County Probation Department (LACPD) through the massive expansion of publicly funded youth detention sites. After WWII, the LACPD began experimenting with “gang intervention workers” and formed a specialized task force that would serve as the “velvet glove” to the LAPD’s “iron fist” approach to policing Chicanx and Mexican youth street organizations. However, by 1955 the LACPD focus turned aggressively toward Black youth street organizations during the height of Black migration to L.A. The program was demonized externally by the LAPD and in particular Chief William Parker’s “thin blue line” approach to gang suppression and his growing professionalization of police work that modeled itself after the military. Internally, the LACPD gave little resources to this youth gang program which attempted to dismantle Black and Chicanx youth street organizations with a focus on diminishing what they termed “group cohesion and anti-social behavior.” It was within this backdrop of expanded surveillance of youth of color street organizations that the LACPD began to aggressively expand construction of it's youth caging facilities.

Ultimately the LACPD ended their gang intervention experiment in 1966 in the wake of Watts, blaming the intervention workers in part for cultivating an antagonism with law enforcement and strong social bonds between club members. Law enforcement and researchers argued that Group Guidance workers expanded the base of four South Central street organizations: the Vikings, The Jokers, The Bartenders, and the Gladiators. They along with other Black gangs were cited by Chief Parker and the McCone Commission as the instigators of the Watts Uprising who were described as "guerilla fighters" akin to that of Vietnam. It was this police narrative that would lead the LAPD and the LACPD to be early recipients of the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in 1968 and engage in a now fifty year "War on Gangs." However unlike histories which emphasize Watts as the rise of L.A.'s aggressive policing regime, my poster provides data on the aggressive expansion of police power which start during 1950s.

Through a critical analysis of primary documents of the LACPD in conjunction with the interventions in Black youth and juvenile gang studies by scholars including Damien Sojoyner and Gilberto Rosas, my poster argues for a re-framing of the role, actions, and repression of the “youth revolt” that sustained the 1965 Watts Uprising in the context of a massive growth in youth camps, juvenile halls, and Probation regional offices a decade earlier. The data I present suggests that by historicizing the rise of anti-gang urban policing in L.A. during the 1950s through the lens of the Cold War, counterinsurgency and containment become foundational logics of L.A.'s growing carceral state.