Reformed Resistance: Social Work, Policing, and Black Liberation in Los Angeles, 1965–78

This poster examines the role of social work in shaping law enforcement reform in Los Angeles between the Watts Rebellion (1965) and the passage of Proposition 13 (1978). It argues that social work functioned as a key administrative mechanism through which the state responded to Black resistance to police violence, absorbing demands for structural change into reform initiatives that preserved racial hierarchy and state authority during a period of growing fiscal constraint. The poster presents this history visually by charting a series of conjunctures—moments of political, racial, and fiscal rupture in which established governance strategies proved unstable and new logics of intervention emerged (Stuart, 1978). A central timeline situates these conjunctures between two overdetermined events: the Watts Rebellion and the tax revolt culminating in Proposition 13. Through comparative charts, the poster traces how crises of police legitimacy and crises of public finance intersected, producing shifting configurations of care, punishment, and reform.

Archival documents from police departments, social service agencies, municipal commissions, and state legislative bodies are paired with select quotations from oral history interviews with social workers, social service professionals, and community actors. These sources illustrate how social work was framed simultaneously as a humanitarian response to racial unrest and as a tool for managing dissent. Visual panels juxtapose reform rhetoric emphasizing prevention, treatment, and community partnership with institutional outcomes that expanded administrative oversight while leaving coercive policing structures intact. A key section focuses on Proposition 13 as a conjunctural resolution to the crises of the late 1960s and 1970s. The poster uses budgetary charts to demonstrate how austerity was institutionalized unevenly, detailing how social services became conditional and vulnerable to retrenchment, while policing and carceral capacity remained comparatively protected. This fiscal restructuring transformed racialized anxieties about disorder and dependency into durable policy, codifying scarcity as a governing principle.

Drawing on archival research, oral histories, and policy analysis, the poster traces continuities across three moments: post-Watts welfare expansion; late-1970s austerity and rollback; and the reemergence of social work–police collaboration in twenty-first-century “community safety” and “trauma-informed” initiatives following the 2020 uprisings. Across these periods, reforms incorporated elements of critique, such as calls for accountability or community engagement, without dismantling the racial foundations of policing. By situating social work within the longer history of neoliberal crisis management, this poster argues that the expansion of “care-based” reforms should be understood not as a departure from carceral governance, but as one of its recurring historical forms.

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order. Macmillan. SCIRP Open Access