The Politics of Safety: The Black Struggle for Police Accountability in La Guardia's New York

For much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, public officials in cities like New York, Chicago, and Baltimore have criminalized uprisings as portending Black “thugs” throwing rocks at police and plundering private property to undermine complaints of police violence. Liberal mayors like Fiorello H. La Guardia have often been the deftest practitioners of this strategy. As the Depression and wartime conditions spurred youth crime, white New Yorkers' anxieties—about crime, the movement...