The вЂњprofiteeringвЂќ period is marked by growing fiscal commitments in government budgets to police, while other agencies are facing austerity. For the third period, which weвЂ™re living in now, I use the term вЂњprofiteering.вЂќ When it definitively began is fuzzy, but I would place it around the 1980s. If the early period, when police served at the pleasure of political machines, was the вЂњpartisanвЂќ period, then the mid-twentieth century was the вЂњprofessionalвЂќ period. If anything, it made it more effective and legitimate. This shift in organization did not change the function of policing, in terms of securing private property, maintaining racial hierarchy, and weakening and suppressing working-class power, of course. It was a slow process, but direct political control over police was mostly ended by the mid-twentieth century, and technical reforms were widely adopted.

Professionalization meant removing police from the political control of party machines and local power brokers. This is the shift toward professionalization. Historians of police in the United States tend to agree that there was a significant shift in police practice between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. JacobinвЂ™s Jonah Walters spoke with Schrader about how the police have come to serve themselves and why protestersвЂ™ demands will not be easily quieted by compromise. Today, the demand is unequivocal: only aggressive defunding and reallocation of resources away from police can satisfy the movement in the street. But reformers like Cizanckas could never resolve the contradiction at the heart of policing: that police power is premised on the discretionary use of violence, and therefore cannot be effectively restrained by procedural reforms or technical changes. In another paper - вЂњ More Than Cosmetic Changes,вЂќ published in the Journal of Urban History - Schrader analyzes the trajectory of police reform in the 1960s and вЂ™70s, showing how some figures, like Menlo Park police chief Victor Cizanckas, attempted to restore police legitimacy through вЂњdemilitarization,вЂќ by eliminating the rank hierarchy and introducing вЂњmodвЂќ uniforms that featured civilian-style blazers. Through this kind of fiscal intimidation, Schrader writes in Public Culture, вЂњpolice have come to protect neither party machines nor the legitimacy of the state but, rather, themselves.вЂќДЇor generations, liberal police reformers have responded to calls for increased police accountability by allocating still more money to police budgets, oftentimes earmarked for gadgets like body cameras or feeble gestures like implicit-bias trainings. Schrader, whose book Badges Without Borders analyzed the co-development of global counterinsurgency and American policing during the twentieth century, argues that police in the United States have developed into a self-interested social actor since the 1960s, helping eviscerate social spending by aggressively organizing to expand their own budgets. Los AngelesвЂ™s $1.8 billion police budget, for example, represents 17.5 percent of the cityвЂ™s total annual spending.ДЄs historian Stuart Schrader explains in the following interview, American police have been startlingly successful at claiming larger and larger pieces of the fiscal pie since the 1960s, even as nearly every other public agency has faced austerity. While New York CityвЂ™s police department is the most highly funded in the country, other cities also maintain exorbitant police budgets and allocate enormous percentages of their total public resources to do so. New York City spends over $11 billion annually on its police force - more than the entire military budget of Colombia. In the weeks since the killing of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter protests have thrust the demand to defund the police into the national conversation.ДЄround the country, police budgets are so bloated as to be grotesque.

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