From Chicago and D.C. to the U.S.-Mexico border and the coast of Venezuela, the hallmark of Donald Trump’s second term has been the unrestricted deployment of state violence. This carnival of coercive brutality comes after years of unsuccessful attempts, by the left, to curb our government’s use of force. The movement against racist police brutality that culminated in the protest wave of 2020 is now in retreat. Demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza — and the continuous supply of U.S. arms and funds that have enabled it — fell on deaf ears. 

Stuart Schrader, ​​Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism at Johns Hopkins University, is a leading scholar of the history of the American carceral state. His first book, Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (2019), showed that Cold War programs for subduing civil unrest that were designed to expand American imperial power around the world also contributed to the militarization of policing at home. The forthcoming Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves provides a new history of police unions. We spoke with him about abolition, copaganda, and the porous line between the military and law enforcement. 

Pundits have claimed that certain slogans about policing that were popularized in 2020 — “defund the police” and “abolish the police” in particular — were at least partially responsible for the right-wing backlash that culminated in Trump’s reelection. What do you make of that argument? How should we think about shifting public opinion on policing over time?

The idea that slogans like “defund the police” sparked a right-wing backlash is fundamentally at odds with the way that backlash politics in the United States actually function. Crime talk is never just about crime. The political scientist Vesla Weaver has shown that elected officials who opposed civil rights latched onto crime in the 1960s as a way to spread fear and reject demands for desegregation and black freedom. Or, as the political scientist Naomi Murakawa has put it, “The U.S. did not confront a crime problem that was then racialized; it confronted a race problem that was then criminalized.” So what some have called the backlash of the late 1960s was actually a transformation of simmering racism into something more open but also more acceptable. 

Today, the response is even more openly about politics. There has been constant contestation between right and left on issues around crime and law and order, and the right has a remarkable ability to win these arguments in the political, media, and cultural spheres. In the rare moments when the left breaks through — during the early Black Lives Matter upsurge of 2014 and 2015, and then again in 2020, for example — the media reaction is often condemnation. And many liberals invoke the specter of backlash to discipline the left. 

In 2014 and 2015, the Obama administration’s response to Black Lives Matter was not framed in the idiom of “defund.” Obama followed an established reform playbook, leaning on consent decrees that brought police forces under federal supervision in cities where police abuses had gotten really bad, and promoting what I would call a professionalizing set of reforms: better education of police forces, including sensitivity training, and stricter standards for conduct and transparency including the deployment of body-worn cameras and more robust collection of data on demographics of people stopped or cited. Those efforts failed to lessen police violence on a national scale. Instead, they directed more resources to police and solved some of their image problems. In 2020, George Floyd’s murder and other police killings confirmed for a lot of people that the previous five years of reform had been ineffective. “Defund” took hold as a way of saying, We don’t want more of these capital-intensive reform programs. Abolitionist critique has always centered around divesting from policies that are destructive and investing in policies that are constructive. But of course, “reallocate” doesn’t have the same ring to it as “defund.” 

Still, few of the policy shifts demanded by the people who were in the streets in 2020 actually came to fruition. Police forces were not defunded, but some cities did experiment. In Baltimore, for example, Mayor Brandon Scott has gotten a lot of credit for a public health approach to street violence, including investing in after-school, summer, and jobs programs for youth, as well as counseling and more direct violence interruption practices to mediate and reduce street conflicts. Of course, all this makes up a small portion of the city budget in comparison to the Baltimore Police Department’s over-six-hundred million-dollar allotment for the current fiscal year.

Meanwhile, the homicide rate in Baltimore is way down, though before we attribute that solely to Scott’s progressive policies, we would want to look comparatively at places where such programs have not been introduced. Most cities across the United States saw a spike in violent crime from 2020 through 2021, and then a significant reduction across the board afterward. 

Police killings are also down in large cities. Reformers tout this as a success. There was an interesting study done by the Wall Street Journal earlier this year that showed, however, that the geography of police lethality has shifted. Rural areas are responsible for a growing percentage of police killings now, in part because of sheriffs. It’s worth noting that most sheriffs are elected — and I’m not about to say that the left should start trying to get itself into sheriff’s offices, because I think the position should actually be abolished. Sheriffs are, at least in theory, more answerable to voters than police chiefs, who are usually appointed. There’s a political question here: are rural voters tolerant of police killings, or perhaps even encouraging a certain type of aggressiveness? I don’t think we have any data on this, but it’s worth asking. In general, we still lack a rigorous understanding of the feedback between policy implementation and the social situation that results from it, which is to say that we don’t really know why crime spiked so dramatically and then fell almost as precipitously, except that the pandemic shredded an already thin social fabric. 

Do you have a sense of how we might make better use of data and, in general, better communicate with people whose opinions may be shaped by anecdotal observation or sensational news stories? 

I’m not sure that we can return to a more hopeful moment of data- and social-science–informed policy, because so much of it depended on the geopolitical configuration of the Cold War that bequeathed a government- and foundation-funded system of expert advising. Now, of course, this apparatus of social scientific research is being destroyed before our eyes.

I do think that it is important for experts to communicate their ideas with the public. The real challenge for the left is that we are automatically treated as less than expert, because the old notion of objectivity still stalks political conversations among liberals and centrists. On the right, even more mainstream positivist social scientists are suspected of being Marxists merely for believing in the social as such. 

In New York, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has tried to acknowledge the mixed record of conventional police reform tactics while also distancing himself from the more radical rhetoric he adopted in the past. Why is it so difficult for left-wing municipal politicians to confront the police directly?

I find it ridiculous and inimical to democracy that police have veto power over elected officials’ decisions, and that politicians therefore need to walk on eggshells so as not to offend them. My forthcoming book, Blue Power, is about the development of police power in politics since the 1960s, particularly through police unions. I hope that by historicizing this influence, the book shows that it hasn’t always existed, and therefore doesn’t need to exist. 

In New York City specifically, police intimidate politicians. Going back to at least the nineties, Police Benevolent Association (PBA) members have had a tendency to show up unannounced at city council members’ or state legislators’ offices and try to scare them, basically in a shakedown. Police can also withdraw their labor. Because elected officials fear that police strikes will result in mayhem and crime sprees, police unions are able to exert power in ways that other unions can’t. Bill de Blasio’s time in office was marked by multiple attempts by the police to disrupt his ability to govern. It became personal and vindictive.

Mamdani has, in my understanding, been making efforts to reach out to the rank and file. He seems sensitive to the fact that nowadays a lot of NYPD officers grew up in the city, live in the city, and are people of color. They don’t necessarily see the old-guard, white leadership of the PBA as speaking for them. Right now, cops in New York City are angry about certain simple issues having to do with their working conditions. Mayor Eric Adams signed a landmark contract in 2023 that contained retroactive pay bumps to clean up the mess that resulted from PBA President Patrick Lynch’s spats with de Blasio. Lynch finally retired after that contract was signed, but the contract only lasted two years. For the last three months, PBA members have been working without a contract. As a lame duck, Adams is likely unmotivated to finish negotiations.

The need for a new contract puts Mamdani in a position to listen to rank-and-file members of the police department and find out what they’re pissed off about. Perhaps he can bypass the loudmouth leadership of the PBA. His decision, recently announced, to keep Jessica Tisch as the commissioner may allay fears of the billionaire class from whence she hails, but it is likely to annoy some patrol officers, who seem to dislike that her management style includes unpredictable shift allocations and mandatory overtime. Regardless, I hope that Mamdani will treat all city workers with the same level of sensitivity as he does the police, even though cops’ ability to enact violence makes them distinct from other municipal employees and puts them in the position to derail his mayoralty, as they did with de Blasio. I reject the common sense that says that mayors must listen to the police more than the policed. De Blasio tried to buck it. I hope Mamdani will bury it.  

Tell us more about police unions. Do you see them as qualitatively different from typical labor unions, or as an effective — if reactionary — form of labor organizing?

I would say both. Police have stolen ideas, tactics, and strategies from the traditional labor movement, and very consciously so. The police make phone calls, they make donations, they get out the vote — all very vanilla campaign activities that any interest group can undertake. Going back to the seventies, some of the most militant, uncompromising, effective police union leaders would be in front of City Hall on Monday screaming epithets, or inside quietly making threats. But then on Tuesday, they would go to a workshop led by a labor expert about how to get union members to go to the polls. 

In its early decades, the police unionization effort was intertwined with an overall growth in public sector unionism. There was a militancy to that initial growth that trailed off in other professions but was maintained among the police. Police unions also retained from the old school mid-century labor movement a vicious anti-communism, as well as a real commitment to seniority structures. All of the bad aspects of business unionism — including its tendencies toward rigid internal hierarchy, close and congenial relations with the boss, suppression of internal dissent, reluctance to diversify in terms of race and gender, and so forth — can be present within police unions, and they lack the rank-and-file efforts to promote social-justice unionism that we’ve seen in the labor movement in recent decades. 

One of the most striking developments of Trump’s second term has been the deployment of the National Guard, as well as ICE, CBP, and other agencies, in several American cities. How should we think about the relationship between federal and local law enforcement?

The two have already been converging for decades. This phenomenon goes back to the War on Drugs and the initiation of task forces that knitted together different police agencies to assist with federal enforcement. There came to be lucrative spoils available to municipal police forces and sheriffs’ offices because of federal asset forfeiture laws and policies. Cooperation between the feds and local cops meant sharing those spoils. This dynamic of cooperation was supercharged after 9/11, as the War on Drugs mutated into the War on Terror. We saw the continuation of Joint Terrorism Task Forces led by the FBI as well as the launch of the Department of Homeland Security, which developed Fusion Centers to share intelligence among a wide variety of law enforcement and private actors. As sociologist Brendan McQuade has shown, the DHS’s Fusion Centers don’t do very much work related to terrorism, which is extraordinarily rare; they are mostly concerned with property crime. The surveillance and data-gathering abilities of multiple police agencies were marshaled toward combating things like shoplifting. A lot of money goes into surveillance, civil liberties suffer, and it’s still a challenge to figure out when a real threat exists.

Thus, to some degree, the Trump administration is building on preexisting infrastructure in order to wage its political war on the left. After Charlie Kirk was assassinated, President Trump signed a “national security presidential memorandum,” or NSPM-7, which labels practically anything even remotely left-coded as tantamount to “domestic terrorism.” The vehicle for that order is the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which, according to NSPM-7, are supposed to crack down on anti-capitalist and anti-fascist activism under the assumption that they are no different from the ideologies that would lead to a repeat of 9/11. 

Certainly, saying that being anti-Christian is tantamount to domestic terrorism — as NSPM-7 does — is notable. The other real, important departure of the Trump administration is its unleashing of federal forces to engage not just in political repression or immigration enforcement, but in widespread crime control. One way to see this change is that it’s addressing some of local law enforcement agencies’ self-proclaimed deficiencies in resources and capacities. For that reason, some police unions are in favor of these federal deployments, because they feel like their own elected officials are not supporting them. 

The deployment of the National Guard for law enforcement purposes has raised hackles, and I think there is little question it is unlawful. But it is less clear that there is any legal restriction on using ICE and Border Patrol for crime and protest control. Longstanding tradition and custom in this country say that we do not maintain a federal police force, but ICE and Border Patrol have been growing for decades. Trump is facilitating an institutional transformation with his trademark willingness to toss tradition and custom out the window. He has his own political police force in the Department of Homeland Security, which has been created with bipartisan assent over decades. 

Perhaps a saving grace for the moment is the mess of interagency rivalries, as well as the lack of effective training and tactics. Many ICE agents who are now out on the street don’t have training or experience. This is why there are so many videos going around social media of these idiots dropping their guns or attempting but failing to wrestle suspects to the ground. These dudes have never done this before. ICE was not designed to be out on the street like this, going after random people. It has generally operated under the principle of needing to develop probable cause through long-term investigations in order to have warrants to break down doors, or to do workplace raids. And now, all of a sudden, it is operating under the typical street-policing approach of reasonable suspicion. This is not a defense of ICE’s activities, but it’s just an explanation for why the whole thing seems so haphazard. 

You’ve written about the way that American counterinsurgency operations abroad — from the Cold War to the War on Terror — returned home and contributed to the militarization of domestic policing. With Trump’s path to war with Venezuela paved by escalating strikes against alleged “drug traffickers,” are we now seeing the opposite, in the form of militarized domestic police paradigms shaping military activity abroad?  

I’m currently teaching a class about the Cold War, and I was just looking at a speech by a federal narcotics official given to a gathering of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 1965. The speech claimed that Fidel Castro’s regime, in league with the Cosa Nostra, was orchestrating cocaine trafficking into the U.S. It was a preposterous charge then. And the right-wing rhetoric about Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is similarly preposterous now, even though I don’t think Maduro and Castro are comparable. The narrative that Maduro is behind the production and distribution of fentanyl is obviously pretextual for regime change. Of course, the United States could get rid of Maduro, as it did with Saddam Hussein. The U.S. military is very good at killing people, no question. But what would happen after that? It would be a huge disaster: there would be a power vacuum and a humanitarian crisis. The chance for regional conflict would increase, and the United States might target President Gustavo Petro in Colombia, too. But the Trump administration does not care about long-term consequences. It has limited strategic thinking capabilities. Instead, it is exhibiting this highly macho vision of special forces operations as it conducts utterly illegal and totally barbaric airstrikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela. And it can’t even decide what its own legal rationale is. How can you say that a short range boat off the coast between Venezuela and Trinidad that has no ability to come anywhere near the United States is an imminent threat? It’s ludicrous, but it’s not about to be challenged in court in a way that is likely to be successful, as far as I can tell. 

One way to look at it is that the entire edifice of qualified immunity and judicial deference to police — or, as the legal scholar Anna Lvovsky puts it, the “judicial presumption of police expertise” — is now being brought to bear on lethal special forces operations overseas. The deference of courts to the national security state meets the deference of courts to police. All police officers know that after killing someone they should tell investigators that, in the moment, they feared for their lives. Imminent threat justifies lethal violence, and the legal standard is basically whether someone else in the same situation, with the same training and expertise, would find the action reasonable. Oversight comes after the fact, after the act. Police power is the ability to make these discretionary decisions in the moment and sort out the consequences later: in the act of enforcing the law, police are not bound by it. The analogy is inexact, but the Trump administration’s argument is that the people of the United States are in imminent danger, and therefore the threat must be managed accordingly. Trump tested this police-like approach with the January 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the high-ranking Iranian military officer. But the attacks on boats are just straight-up murder for the purpose of provoking and destabilizing a pariah regime. Military strikes within Venezuela loom on the horizon.

Some on the left have criticized American police departments for communicating with and visiting police and military forces in other countries, particularly Israel. How should we understand those relationships?

The relationship between American police and Israel is significant, but overblown. The number of American police officers who have actually traveled to Israel for training is not huge — likely between a thousand and two thousand. The trips have historically combined tourism and training without much rigor. The adoption of advanced technologies of surveillance and lethal violence, including those designed by Israeli firms, is more widespread. And in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, police agencies, including the NYPD, did develop close intelligence-sharing relationships with Israel. Some people claim that operational training abroad makes American police more racist and lethal. But the idea that American police are somehow innocent and pristine until they encounter bigotry elsewhere is hard to sustain.  

I do think that cross-border correspondence bolsters the appearance of expertise. It is part of a long tradition of peer-to-peer diplomatic exchange that American security forces — including the military — engaged in throughout the Cold War and even earlier. No country has a police force that is uninvolved in protecting the ruling class or maintaining racial or ethnic domination, but I do think that one could at least make the argument that the police in the United States could learn something from forces that are far less lethal than ours, as is the case in Scandinavia. 

What is the state of “copaganda” today? How much do cultural representations matter?

Every police show makes it seem like officers are working to solve violent crime 99 percent of the time, when, in fact, most cops are rarely engaged in operations that have to do with felonies. But of course it wouldn’t be entertaining to watch an hour-long episode featuring a cop sitting in their car playing games on their phone and responding to non-urgent calls, which is the reality. In general, mass culture is very limited in its ability to depict structural problems, including structural racism. (The Trump administration has said there’s no such thing as structural racism, which accords with the Supreme Court’s position since Washington v. Davis in 1976: that the only way to demonstrate racism is through individual racist intent.) Police dramas are thus constrained: they may depict flawed characters, but nothing more. Nevertheless, I do think that representations matter. Cop shows are not the reason cops are the way they are, but cop shows also aren’t irrelevant to public perceptions and expectations. 

Have you seen One Battle After Another?

I have. I think that the movie contains odd gender politics and a kind of right-wing take on black radicalism, and certainly on the Weather Underground. The writers must have read Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, because the movie feels like it adopts that book’s interpretation of the Weather Underground as sex-addled white revolutionaries who were enthralled by black radicalism and deluded into thinking their acts of violence might be popular. In terms of law enforcement, I do think that the movie reflects some real things going on now, particularly with ICE and Border Patrol rampaging through U.S. cities. The idea that it’s all for this weird cabal of white supremacist businesspeople: I’d maybe half endorse that, not fully. Again, Hollywood struggles to depict structure. The Benicio Del Toro character, who developed a below-the-radar aid network, was the most interesting to me, but even his actions to protect migrants from the authorities take on a somewhat conspiratorial cast. As Fredric Jameson might say, in the film, all collective dynamics take on the appearance of conspiracy — both the ruling class and the historical subject that might oppose it — thus draining any true collective mass action from this drama and removing the utopian dimension that Jameson was so expert at locating. Perhaps mere survival as the kernel of utopia is a fitting epitaph for our diminished epoch.