The Civic

We bring forth a civic realm with the mutual recognition of our shared humanity that allows us to repair violations of human dignity and to restore social coherence. Given our social inequalities, this takes the form of those who have resources (citizens) responding to the rightful demands of those do not (civilians). The paradigmatic model for civic engagement is the Civilian Review Board, where citizens listen and respond to civilian claims for justice and limits of the use of force. The civilian call for limits can be applied to the other three parts of the four-part framework: the Earth, humanity, and the social. This gives us permission to recognize that we have only one Earth, that death is a natural limit to human life, and that social trends, such as American Prosperity, should not be treated as limitless. Acknowledging these limitations is a necessary condition for creating a climate of justice.

Does Protest Against Police Violence Matter? Evidence from U.S. Cities, 1990 through 2019

An underlying premise of democratic politics is that protest can be an effective form of civic engagement that shapes policy changes desired by marginalized groups. But it is not certain that this premise holds up under scrutiny. This article presents a three-part argument that protest (1) signals the salience of a movement’s focal issue and expands awareness that an issue is a social problem requiring a solution, (2) empowers residents in disadvantaged communities and raises a sense of community cohesion, which together (3) raise costs and exert pressure on elites to make concessions. The empirical analysis examines the likelihood that a city will establish a civilian review board (CRB). It then compares the effects of protest and CRB presence on counts of officer-involved fatalities by race and ethnicity. Two main hypotheses about the effect of protest are supported: cities with more protest against police brutality are significantly more likely to establish a CRB, and protest against police brutality reduces officer-involved fatalities for African American and Latino (but not for White) individuals. However, the establishment of CRBs does not reduce fatalities, as some have hoped. Nonetheless, mobilizing against police brutality matters, even in the absence of civilian review boards.

Police Crimes and Power Abuses

Reflecting broader trends in cities that had elected black mayors in the 1970s, Tom Bradley’s politics rested on a belief that law enforcement could provide equitable police service by committing to pluralist policies that were responsive to all city residents. As this chapter shows, however, reforms, such as diversifying the department, enhancing human relations training, and adopting community-oriented policing, provided only a semblance of civilian control of the police. As the police continued to aggressively police communities of color, it produced a new phase of anti–police abuse organizing, led by the Coalition against Police Abuse (CAPA), calling for an end to police crimes and power abuses. Some of the most notable demands were for an end to the use of the chokehold and for a police civilian review board.

Dirty Work: Police and Community Relations and the Limits of Liberalism in Postwar Philadelphia

Police abuse of African Americans was an immediate trigger for the urban uprisings of the 1960s, and civilian review of police actions became a central tenet of civil rights liberalism. The failure of Philadelphia’s Police Advisory Board (PAB), the nation’s first independent civilian review board (1958), to meliorate police–community tensions suggests the limitations of civil rights liberalism: an inability to confront the role of police as “dirty workers,” who performed the unacknowledged but widely demanded function of maintaining racial hierarchy in the postwar city. Working-class African Americans, the most frequent victims of police brutality, came to see civilian review as a charade and rejected the limited vision of civil rights liberals. The PAB’s failure shows that police reform is impossible without a broader commitment to overturning racial hierarchy.