“You’ve Got to Start Where People's Heads Are”: Anticrime Organizing and Civic Disengagement in 1970s Philadelphia

During the 1970s many American cities were at an inflection point as all-white, traditional political regimes used militaristic police to squelch emerging multiracial coalitions. Nowhere was this battle more pitched than in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. By examining Philadelphia, this paper argues that liberal neighborhood activists and liberal downtown elites both attempted to build civic engagement through neighborhood anti-crime organizing. That history is critical to our understanding of the later emergence and splintering of the urban neoliberal coalition.

Liberal neighborhood activists of the 1970s believed that a multiracial coalition of “active” citizens could build a broadly responsive, service-providing government. Influenced by Black Power, the welfare rights movement, and the Berkeley School of Political Science, these organizers identified anti-crime organizing as the necessary first step in reaching disaffected voters. Philadelphia neighborhood activists organized volunteer street patrols, and this anti-crime infrastructure propelled Black voter participation.

Meanwhile, Philadelphia’s liberal business elites desired a smaller government responsive to white-collar interests. These downtown elites worried that crime and militarized policing were resulting in unstable vigilantism and radicalism. American business leaders thus looked for inspiration in Japan and found a Koban system in which neighborhood police organized civic participation. Liberal business elites and liberal neighborhood activists both embraced different visions of neighborhood anti-crime organizing and entered into a coalition that captured Philadelphia’s City Hall.

The existing scholarship correctly argues that neighborhood activists paved the way for a downtown-led neoliberalism. But the current historiography only considers anticrime organizing as an issue of crime control, and it has therefore misinterpreted neighborhood volunteer patrols as evidence of a diminished faith in government. Liberal, neighborhood activists, this paper argues, saw anti-crime organizing as a means of expanding the electorate and the government. The history of anticrime activism thus reveals the fissures that existed within the neoliberal coalitions from the very outset.