Even before his historic election as New York City’s mayor in November 2025, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani had reportedly begun searching for “common ground” with the city’s rank-and-file police officers. He publicly apologized for prior statements describing the department as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” and for an earlier endorsement of defunding the police. He also signaled his “openness” to keeping Eric Adams’s NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch—a plan which he has since honored—despite her reputation as a law-and-order booster for “quality of life” policing, an opponent of bail reform, and a fierce defender of the city’s Strategic Response Group, a police unit known for its violent repression of protests since its creation in 2015, among other disreputable credentials. While Mamdani’s campaign featured a proposal to create a new Department of Community Safety, which would expand the city’s use of non-police “violence interrupters” and mental health professionals for nonviolent calls for intervention, he tactically avoided making police reform, and especially police accountability, a central flank of his campaign.
Mamdani’s reticence is not merely reflective of electoral calculation. It’s also the product of what historian Stuart Schrader, in his commanding new book Blue Power, defines as the phrase he uses for his title: the massive, impenetrable edifice of political might that cops wield through their unions and professional organizations. Through adopting and perverting methods of agitation honed by labor unions, such as collective bargaining, work slowdowns, strikes, and campaign organizing, police muscled their way to gain control over local and federal governments, “exerting,” as Schrader writes, “a veto power over democracy.”
It’s now relatively understood that the institution of policing, with roots in both Southern slave patrols and in Northern efforts to discipline Black and immigrant labor, is a purveyor of racialized state violence. But cops do not passively enforce orders, serving as dangerous but agentless foot soldiers for the monied elite. Rather, Schrader shows how rank-and-file cops pursued an “explicit, specific, [and] self-interested” political project that decisively augmented the police’s power and institutionalized their outsized influence over municipal politics. Blue power explains how police became so distinctly insulated from democratic controls, and why their distended budgets remain relatively untouchable. It demystifies how police repeatedly repel efforts to check and dismantle their power, even when public consciousness about policing’s functionally racist, extortionary, and excessively violent operation reaches a fever pitch. As Schrader writes, “atop steady-state racism and economic exploitation that shape every aspect of our political system, police have become experts in bending that system further to their will.”
Schrader’s analysis comes at an opportune time. Sparked by the 2013 Black Lives Matter protests and the 2020 George Floyd rebellions, police have faced a profound legitimacy crisis, opening up critical space to mobilize against policing’s destructive primacy in U.S. politics and culture. But this surge in popular abolitionism did not, by and large, translate into concretely defunded or dismantled police agencies—in no small part due to the political machinations of police unions. At the same time, greater numbers of democratic socialist politicians are winning elections, giving the left a rare pass at real municipal power. There is an opportunity for these elected socialists to challenge the police’s unchecked and deleterious influence, from a position of strength. And there’s good reason to do so: Schrader shows that the political power of police has helped sustain the longstanding patterns of racial and economic injustice that socialist leaders wish to disrupt and correct. While Mamdani’s arm's-length approach may buy him some time, a serious reckoning with blue power’s intransigence will eventually be necessary. In disentangling the contested politics that made police power so mammoth and impenetrable, Blue Power offers key insights for the fight ahead, mapping out crucial sites of political weakness that—when aggressively challenged—may hasten the police’s undoing.
Blue power’s origins date back to the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s), when cities and police leadership attempted to disentangle police from their brazenly partisan function as enforcement arms of local political machines. In the process, police commanders accrued significant power, and by mid-century they had earned “nearly completely control over policing.” The rank and file chafed at the newly “top-down operation” of their agencies, resenting “omnipotent, imperious” police chiefs who controlled decisions about hiring, dictated patrol strategy, and made final calls about internal discipline. They also bristled at police commanders’ imposition of professionalizing reforms like cracking down on graft, instituting training requirements, and—especially detested by all-white and notoriously racist beat cops—integrating departments.
Against these adversaries, police got organized. Cribbing tactics from a labor movement they’d just as soon crush into submission, police rode the mid-century wave of unionization, demanding better pay and control over their working conditions. Using their ability to sow disorder and manipulate municipal revenue streams as leverage, police chipped away at the commanders’ unquestioned authority and bent legislatures to their demands. For example, the Detroit Police Officers Association organized a ticket slowdown in 1967 as a tactic to force the city to recognize and negotiate with their union, costing the city $583,000 in revenue. They then engaged in a “blue flu,” where officers called in sick en masse, leaving the streets bare of police presence. Police absconding their posts did not, in fact, lead to an increase in crime or violence. Indeed, as Schrader writes, the absence of police made “Black Detroit felt for the first time in years that it could breathe.” But the strength of the action was its ability to humiliate Detroit’s liberal reformist mayor, Jerome Cavanagh, who understood that the mere image of police abdication made him vulnerable to accusations of stoking crime.
The DPOA’s actions led Cavanagh to negotiate with the DPOA and make major concessions regarding discipline and grievance procedures, which wrested control from commanders and insulated rank-and-file police from accountability. But on economic matters, the city stalled—until, Schrader shows, Detroit police used the 1967 Detroit rebellion, a multi-day uprising against racist police brutality sparked in response to an aggressive raid on an unlicensed bar “for political gain.” Schrader recasts the 1967 Detroit rebellion as not merely a monumental expression of Black revolt against the city’s enduring racial geography, but as a pivotal labor action for Detroit police. Having created the conditions that sparked the insurgency—that of relentless police aggression and violence against Black Detroiters—police then “capitalized” on the unrest, using their ability to “prompt disorder” to extract concessions from the city.
This “collective bargaining by riot,” as Schrader terms it, articulates the pernicious ways that police unionism is always enlaced with a revanchist politics of white power. While Detroit cops sparred with the city and their commanders, they did not do so to advance a more just municipal landscape, but rather to cement more control over and better compensation for the work of maintaining the city’s racial apartheid. To make the uprising an effective tool for extracting concessions, Detroit police amplified interpretations of the rebellion that read the unrest as evidence of Black criminality and stoked the fears of white Detroiters. They then positioned themselves as “professional guardians of order,” raising their public status and pressuring the city to meet their demands. Their exploitation of this racialized image of a “tense city on the verge of a maelstrom” yielded results: Detroit police won official union recognition, increased pay, as well as the reinstatement and awarding of back pay to Detroit police who had been suspended for participating in the blue flu.
Police are not the only crop of white workers, nor the only institution of organized labor, to advance an anti-solidaristic politics of anti-Black racism. Schrader perhaps simplifies a more thorny dynamic in U.S. labor history when he suggests that police are singular in their “bastardiz[ation]” of the “principle of labor solidarity.” Yet unlike, say, steel workers, police have both the legal authority to engage in discretionary violence and are bequeathed an unquestioned role as arbiters of a jurisdiction’s social order. These qualities imbue rank-and-file police with a unique capacity to coerce governments to their regressive demands, making police unionism and police political organization more generally a particularly powerful mechanism for preserving the U.S.’s racial regime.
Indeed, Schrader’s articulation of rank-and-file police’s discrete role in advancing and institutionalizing a racist politics of law and order is one of the book’s most valuable contributions, providing crucial insights into how the organizing of police degraded anti-racist possibilities in the post-civil rights era. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, police unions and professional associations transformed the police’s “unique capability” to “organize chaos” into tangible workplace “gains” that made it more difficult to hold police accountable for abuse. As Schrader details, police unions and associations in numerous cities agitated for legislators to pass a ludicrously titled police “bill of rights,” which “codified protections for officers, both against complaints of wrongdoing by the public and against discipline and retaliation by commanders.” Initially conceptualized by former NYPD officer and tough-on-crime Democratic Rep. Mario Biaggi, police unions across the nation successfully passed such bills at the state level, honing their voter outreach tactics, lobbying skills, and political maneuvering in the process. Once passed, these bills “became a superordinate tool to protect officers,” signaling the death knell of the “era of the authoritarian professionalizer chief” and weakening the public’s ability to rid their cities of racist and violent cops. Indeed, as Schrader writes, “concessions made to militant police early on” hamstrung later efforts by municipalities to “regain control,” entrenching a pernicious structure of near-total impunity for police that continues to thwart anti-police organizing today.
Beyond legislation, police unions used the tools afforded to them by union recognition to cynically preserve their license to racial cruelty. Third-party arbitration proved especially effective. While devised to protect workers against unjust treatment from bosses, in the hands of police unions, third-party arbitration became a nefarious tool for both shielding police from consequences for bad behavior and for “accumulat[ing] precedents” that “weakened disciplinary processes and won improved protections for cops.” Moreover, when police misconduct did lead to settlements or jury awards, the funds to pay for such payouts did not come from police officers or departments themselves, but rather from municipal budgets. Since they and their agencies were not footing the bill, there was little reason for police to alter their sadistic behavior. “Misconduct may be expensive,” Schrader writes, “but not for its perpetrators.”
In addition to making limitless violence a workplace entitlement, Schrader details how police union struggles over compensation and benefits played a consequential role in producing late 20th-century racial and economic inequality. That a whopping 95 percent of police spending today funds police salaries and benefits is no accident, but rather a political outcome from militant police organization. As Schrader explains, police unions and professional associations used their access to collective bargaining, growing political campaigning skills, and fundamental ability to orchestrate mayhem to force fiscally-strained and debt-burdened municipalities into increasing or sustaining police salaries and pensions. But this “plenitude for police,” Schrader explains, translated into “cost-cutting for the rest of the municipal workforce.” To meet contractual obligations regarding police salaries and benefits, cities slashed services that could have offered some relief (however imperfect) for those most vulnerable to racialized cycles of inflation and unemployment. When local elected officials seemed like they might waver, cops could always dial up the pressure by threatening disorder and feeding the media dubious but unchallenged claims about rising crime and the need for law and order, ultimately coercing leaders to submit to police demands, no matter the impact on the city’s finances.
Blue power’s ascent was not always seamless—and Schrader dutifully attends to moments where blue power faced limits as it attempted to calcify control—but its trajectory was upward. By the 1980s, police across the nation had rioted, picketed, and negotiated their way to impressive economic and political gains, able to fend off public outrage at continued police brutality and amass remarkable power at the municipal level, state, and federal level. Soon, two-thirds of all local police agencies allowed collective bargaining and had cinched “decent contracts” with “binding arbitration and a host of perks for individual officers.” But blue power never settled for mere backroom bureaucracy to preserve their paychecks and privileges. When threatened by budget cuts or encroachments on their authority to mete out violence, rank-and-file police continued to take direct action, from “familiar tactics like the blue flu” to “public relations efforts” to “more aggressive approaches.” This matured “rank-and-file fury,” Schrader writes, grew in political might and soon gained the power to thoroughly deform local governance, exercising a fundamentally undemocratic power over cities.
New York City, which Schrader describes as the “epicenter of blue power,” proves particularly illustrative. The city featured the largest municipal police union in the nation, New York City’s Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (renamed the Police Benevolent Association in 2019), along with four additional police unions representing different ranks. By the 1990s, the PBA “loomed large in officers’ lives” and had, due to its “size, resources, and zero-sum tactics,” established a kingmaking role in both city and state politics. While canny negotiations proved central here, so too did raw and symbolic expressions of police power in the form of police rallies and processions. In 1984, after NYPD officer Stephen Sullivan fatally shot Eleanor Bumpurs, an elderly Black grandmother in the process of being evicted, the PBA mobilized thousands of cops to rally outside the district attorney’s office where Sullivan received his indictment. The DA dropped the charges.
The PBA’s political maneuvering also arguably helped dash the political career of the city’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins. In 1992, Schrader explains, Dinkins attempted to revive a civilian review board of police, which the city’s police union had repeatedly blocked from materializing. In response, the PBA organized more than 10,000 rank-and-file officers into a full-blown riot, termed the “cop coup,” where cops raged in the streets to protest Dinkins's proposal. Though not the only factor leading to the city’s first Black mayor’s subsequent election loss to Rudy Giuliani, the PBA’s organizing—and generous donations to Giuliani’s campaign—ultimately contributed to Dinkins' “undoing.”
The PBA’s intransigence similarly undermined the attempted reformism of Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose challenges with the city's police likely looms large over Mamdani’s mayoral administration. As Schrader details, de Blasio, the father of two Black children, campaigned on police reform as part of his larger political vision for addressing the city’s post-2008 crisis of racial and economic injustice. After his election, in 2014 NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner, a Black unarmed man in Staten Island under arrest for selling loosies, by placing him in a fatal chokehold. A month later, police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, a young Black teenager, in Ferguson, Mo. These police killings sparked a mass protest against racist police brutality, which in turn “buoyed” de Blasio’s reformism, giving him newfound “confidence” in attacking the NYPD and expressing empathy with victims of racist police terror.
But the PBA proved durable against de Blasio’s efforts. PBA president Patrick Lynch, a larger-than-life political operator and firebrand, viciously condemned de Blasio and led the NYPD in a series of revolts against his leadership. Perhaps most infamous was the PBA’s coordination of thousands of police officers to turn their back on de Blasio when he spoke at the funeral of a slain police officer. More consequentially, the PBA and the Sergeants Benevolent Association orchestrated a slowdown that aimed to stop de Blasio’s mayoralty in its tracks. Though the slowdown did not actually lead to a surge in crime—a notably recurrent finding in Schrader’s analysis—the police’s unique authority to “shape the available discourse in public discussions of crime” meant that the action got translated into damning evidence of de Blasio’s inability to govern, inarguably bolstering what one writer has described as a “blue wall of opposition to his reformist agenda.”
It’s no wonder that Mamdani is treading carefully. While Blue Power avoids directly prescribing a left strategy for undoing the police’s hold on municipal governance, Schrader’s analysis provides critical wisdom for what these tactics might look like.
For one, Schrader’s analysis offers vital grounding for ongoing efforts to eject police unions from the broader organized labor movement. Originating from beat officers’ hostility toward commanders and city leaders perceived to be curbing their ability to dispense terror, police unionism has always been a reactionary project. Police unions have also routinely held cities hostage at the expense of other municipal union workers, eschewing true labor solidarity and, in the process, have hastened the premature death of predominantly Black and brown working-class people. Culturally, their leadership is right-wing, brutish, and often outwardly racist, helping stoke an already simmering politics of anti-Black and nativist rage among the rank and file. And as police have accrued more political power, they have increasingly expended it to steer the country rightward, whether through alliances with tough-on-crime Democrats like Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, who championed police union demands in the 1994 Crime Bill, or through their current entanglement with President Donald Trump’s flagrantly pro-cop MAGA coalition. To be sure, purging cops from official union spaces will have to be handled delicately, given the potential for the work to be co-opted by those interested in assaulting public sector unionization more broadly. But as labor journalist Hamilton Nolan writes, “labor unions empower working people,” while “police unions disempower working people.” Schrader’s study makes this distinction all the more lucid, giving anti-police-union labor organizers further fuel to disarticulate police from the labor movement once and for all.
While removing police unions from organized labor would damage their legitimacy, it might not dislodge their power at the local level, where contracts and a culture of intimidation help sustain blue power’s clutches. On this score, Schrader’s study offers some possible methods of counterattack. Schrader makes clear that police benefit from being widely viewed as unquestioned authorities on crime and public safety. Greater popular understanding of police as political and partial actors invested primarily in stage-managing crime statistics, draining city budgets, and evading consequences for brutalizing communities can help chip away at their legitimacy at the bargaining table, emboldening communities to push back against police union intimidation.
Changing the normative conception of police may seem like a tall order, particularly given the sweeping and bipartisan institutional investment in protecting their legitimacy. But as Schrader suggests in his conclusion, the “terrain” of political culture is an increasingly fruitful site for confronting police power. This is part because police unions have “been so successful in achieving material wins” that they have “pivoted to the less measured, sometimes ephemeral gains that cultural battles can offer.” The left, Schrader suggests, should not “cede” this arena, providing blue power with the “wide assent” it reflexively assumes when unchallenged. Organizers might, for example, point out the enduring fact that the absence of police has not led to crime spikes, raising questions about why municipalities continue to grow their force numbers and fund exorbitant salaries. Or, as popular support for democratic socialist policies ascends, anti-police organizers might politicize the ways that police undemocratically hamstring vital public resources that could be utilized for life-affirming programs like affordable housing and free childcare. Harder quandaries still portend: How might we practically deal with disarming a group of largely white men who have access to guns, are known for drunken riots, and show high rates of domestic violence remains an open question. But conquering the cultural front seems central to any effort to dismantle blue power’s hold. At a time when anti-police politics are perhaps more attractive at a mass scale than ever before, Schrader’s history of blue power will be essential in strategizing our way toward its demise.
Against continued efforts to normalize police as some kind of legitimate and reformable feature of social life, Schrader demonstrates how rank-and-file police have organized to make the already wretched and racist institution even more ironclad in its extractive and destructive capacities. In the process, blue power has helped make the police’s reactionary politics of racialized punishment and coercion an intractable feature of modern governance. But blue power, like the institution of policing more broadly, is not an historical given—it had to be struggled for and conceded to, and it is not, as Schrader writes, “inevitable.” With Schrader’s history in hand, it’s time for those of us reasonably incensed by the police’s undemocratic hold over our cities and states to get to work.
