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US policing is an institution that changes over time. Policing is actually quite capable of responding to new problems and challenges, but it also has certain limitations. Overseas police assistance actually revealed a fundamental contradiction of American-style policing, in a sense: if policing is decentralized and devolutionary, with power vested at the most local level and not centrally controlled, how on earth are you going to institute reforms that can touch every precinct house?

Overseas, this often meant the United States faced great challenges getting the police to adopt the reforms that it wanted. OPS officials were consistently irked that police in recipient countries were quite happy to accept tear gas grenades, handcuffs, motorcycles, and other technologies, without taking any of the expert advice that was supposed to come along with them.

On the other hand, the United States could absolve itself of responsibility for abuses or atrocities, by saying its training manual did not actually command anyone to commit atrocities, for example. But police advisers were eager to take credit anytime something worked properly, whether a well-attended local Police Athletic League jamboree in Thailand or a nonviolent arrest of a communist revolutionary in Colombia.

The same dynamic unfolded in the United States with the War on Crime, initiated by President Johnson in 1965 and solidified in 1968. The War on Crime was an effort to institutionalize some reforms at the federal level, with the idea that they would filter down to local levels. Meanwhile, at the local level, the police didn’t want to be told what to do by a centralized authority in Washington.

The War on Crime took on a peculiar shape, built through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). One of the things that I point out in my work is that the LEAA and the Office of Public Safety had a lot in common. Not only did they share individuals — some people’s career trajectories took them straight from OPS to the LEAA — but the very structuring principle behind the LEAA was the same as the OPS’s. Both organizations were trying to figure out how to use a centralized set of resources to reform and professionalize law enforcement at local levels, which was precisely what OPS was trying to do, just across borders.

Badges Without Borders reveals how some of the key figures involved in designing the War on Crime’s bureaucratic infrastructure, which became the LEAA, invoked OPS as a model. The LEAA did not actually engage in operational crime-control activity, but it put tools, resources, and knowledge in the hands of the people who did engage in that work, including those employed by police agencies, courts, prisons, and jails. In the United States, the block grant, which sends money from Washington to the states basically without conditions on how it will be spent, emerged through the War on Crime. The LEAA was the first agency to make great use of this instrument, which became infamous later when wielded to undermine social-welfare programming.

The LEAA spent billions of dollars beginning in 1968 to increase the technical capacities of law enforcement. This occurred under the banner of reformism, gently acknowledging some problems in how policing looked at the time. But the program’s design meant it was impossible to guarantee that any reforms that took hold actually were oriented toward lessening racism, which was the real problem of policing in the 1960s and remains so today.

In the LEAA’s first years, because its enabling legislation was a direct rejoinder to black political insurgency of the 1960s, a major proportion of its funding went to “riot control.” The book details how federal riot-control planning, training for police and military, and technologies like the chemical weapon CS (mislabeled “tear gas”) all drew on lessons from OPS advisors and their experiences. OPS itself invented a cheap grenade system for delivering tear gas, for instance, which was widely adopted.

Through the War on Crime, the federal government increased the ability of local and state governments to engage in repression — and, as the experience of OPS overseas predicted, they turned around and used these resources to do exactly that, even when policing activities that could never be credibly labeled as riots.