If you want to stop police officers from mercilessly gunning down minorities and the poor, liberals argue, all you need to do is push for more reforms. If, however, you force officers to put on body cameras and add black female officers to the beat, only to discover that the police still kill black men with reckless abandon, it must be the result of “a couple of bad apples,” so the argument goes. Yet this argument fails to acknowledge that the system of policing itself is rotten. Improving policing is not done by making superficial changes, but by fundamentally abolishing the current system, limiting the power of the police, and figuring out what role they ought to play in society.

For the past thirty years, the left has argued that the way liberals think about police reform is unsound. The liberal idea is that as long as it looks like things have changed, there has been “reform.” Criminal justice professor Alex Vitale has critiqued liberal reformism, arguing that this “agenda stems from a belief that police are the legitimate mechanism for using force in the interests of the whole society.” In response, the left has pointed out to liberals that the only “legitimate mechanism” the police serve is to protect wealthy people’s property and control black and brown lives. If the police have better racial bias training, but they continue to beat and kill minorities at the same rate, reform has clearly failed. In studying the criminal justice system, this has been pointed out time and again. “Reform” is really a way for liberals to get around having to address systemic injustices like low wages and employment discrimination.

Leftists have argued that police reform must take into account the institutional power of the police: The police have a monopoly on the use of violence, and they often abuse this monopoly to terrorize minorities and the poor. If the police can use their power to harass and abuse people with impunity, and are never held accountable for their actions, then reform means nothing at all. As Naomi Murakawa argues in her book The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, it has been the “liberal misconception of the nature of policing that has led to the inadequate police reforms of the past and present. Reformers have focused on improving the ‘professionalism’ of police in an effort to reduce bias and unlawful behavior rather than questioning the justness of what police are asked to do.”

In his new book Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD, historian Max Felker-Kantor shows how police reform has utterly failed to change the racist, abusive policing of the LAPD. But in doing so, he recounts multiple instances in which antipolice abuse activists’ attempts have been able to impact the way the LAPD conducts itself. Somebody on the left will often argue in reponse that “Police reforms might make officers slightly more well-behaved, but still do nothing to fundamentally change the institution of policing itself.” Felker-Kantor argues that this is not the same as complacency. In fact, he says, we can honor the work of antipolice abuse activists and advocate for a fundamental change in policing.

The title of Felker-Kantor’s book is a reference to the ways in which race, antipolice abuse activism, and the growth of the LAPD have interacted for the past thirty years. Felker-Kantor argues that this intersectional dynamic truly captures the way the LAPD had become a bastion of racial domination. He believes that this is critical. Indeed, he says that “intensified police power and racially targeted policing were not incidental but mutually constitutive.”

Felker-Kantor explains that since the 1965 Watts Rebellion, the LAPD has been LA’s primary method of dealing with urban economic and political upheaval: Every decade, the LAPD has expanded its force, weapons arsenal, and operations, all in a bid to protect white people’s property.

Those who believe that over the years the LAPD has improved its way of policing black and brown communities, Felker-Kantor says, have not taken a look around them. In fact, the LAPD has in many ways increased its power and control over minorities. (What law-and-order conservatives call “better policing.”) It’s quite simple: Because two decades of liberal governance under Mayor Tom Bradley seemed to have made the LAPD more progressive, city officials began to ignore the lived experiences of people of color and the poor. But when we look at the on-the-ground reality, minorities and the poor are still suffering, because real change requires granting communities more control over and lessening the power of the LAPD. Felker-Kantor quotes political activist and scholar Mike Davis, who argues that after the 1992 Rodney King riots, which serve as the other bookend of Felker-Kantor’s argument, the appointment of a black police of chief was merely administrative. In making it seem like substantive change had taken place, “the commissioners have substituted a superficial administrative overhaul … for substantive institutional change.”

Antipolice abuse activists have for a long, long time pressed the LAPD to reform its practices, but have received far, far less in return. The LAPD’s monopoly on violence means that it has the power to determine what reforms it does and does not implement. And the LAPD has not failed to implement the most superficial reforms possible. Los Angeles’ Charter Amendment F in 1992 tried to produce substantive changes in the LAPD’s structure, and the amendment “gained support from blacks, Latinos/as, and white liberals.” The amendment was mostly procedural, implementing term limits and giving the city the power to remove the Chief, and the LAPD ensured that this was to be the case, yet some sort of change in the department had to be made after the riots, even if it was non-structural. The Urban League, in my opinion, falsely “believed that it represented a ‘new climate’” and sent out “the message to officers on the street that says, “Hey, this is a new day, you can’t brutalize people anymore.’’

Charter Amendment F was limited in changing the LAPD’s behavior, but Felker-Kantor argues that it was a hard-fought and much-vaunted win by antipolice abuse activists. All of the preceding decades (from the 60s to the 70s to the 80s) were punctuated by even weaker attempts by the department to reform itself, and even those had to be fought for tooth and nail. The Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) was able to shut down the LAPD’s criminally invasive Public Disorder Intelligence Program (PDID), and the Labor/Community Strategy Coalition (LCSC), the Barrio Defense Committee, and the ACLU also fought for concessions from the LAPD. This demonstrated the power of biracial grassroots activists to force the LAPD’s hand without the use of conventional politics. Without the work of these groups, the LAPD wouldn’t have had the brakes put on its increasingly authoritarian path. These two groups specifically fought for LA’s black and brown residents, and if they hadn’t worked tirelessly, there would certainly be a lot more dead young black and brown men. We must honor their work, of course, but as Felker-Kantor points out, structural change has not yet occured.

Mariame Kaba, one of the foremost intellectual defenders of police abolition, writes that “violence is endemic to U.S. policing itself. There are some nice individual people who work in police departments … This is not a problem of individually terrible officers rather it is a problem of a corrupt and oppressive policing system built on controlling & managing the marginalized while protecting property.” Felker-Kantor points out that when we approach policing as a problem that can be solved by individualized, not institutional change, we fail to recognize the need for a change in policing itself. He tracks the path of LAPD militarization and expansion over a thirty-year period, and the resistance by activists to these new encroachments by the LAPD, and shows the consequences. CAPA, for example, got the city to ban the use of the LAPD’s lethal chokehold, which they then replaced with other methods of brutality. As Felker-Kantor writes: “In response, the LAPD resorted to aluminum batons, chemical irritants, and TASERs, and injuries to suspects during arrests increased.”

Ironically, the LAPD’s “attempt” at reform shows that one of the left’s central concerns about reform — that superficial changes in policing still places power in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, rather than having policing controlled by communities — has been confirmed repeatedly over the past thirty years. As Felker-Kantor writes, “the reforms brought by the Board of Police Commissioners regarding the use of force, while a clear departure from the past, left the department,” not LA’s minority and poor residents, “[with] the authority to discipline officers and investigate claims of misconduct.” Instead of community members deciding which officers will be fired, and which policies will be instituted, the decisions are made by Chiefs of Police like Daryl Gates, who nobody ever voted for.

Felker-Kantor guides us on a tour of the LAPD’s relationship with the minorities and the poor of Los Angeles, showing the various ways in which the LAPD has become increasingly powerful and unaccountable while thousands of people continue to be buffeted about by the twin cudgels of police brutality and poverty. He shows how the LAPD has infiltrated South Central’s communities, from its use of the PDID in dismantling civil rights organizations and antipolice groups to the mass arrests of Operation Hammer that, in the words of an LAPD spokesman, relied on the strategy of “pick ’em up for anything and everything.”

Felker-Kantor also shows how race, class, and the LAPD cannot be easily disentangled. We have to be willing to acknowledge that the police disproportionately abuse the poor, who are mostly white and that minorities are harassed and abused disproportionately by the police. (An African American teen living in Watts will encounter the police far more often than myself. William Parker admitted openly as such when he was Chief of Police, saying that soon, “45 percent of … Los Angeles will be Negro … Now how you are going to live with that without law enforcement?” But policing minority and poor communities more frequently will always reinforce the notion that minorities and poor people are natural-born criminals, thereby justifying further harassment and brutality.)

The most depressing portion of Policing Los Angeles is its chapter on the present day. As Felker-Kantor writes, one of the central hopes of the Rodney King riots was that they would force the LAPD to make structural changes, such as instituting community policing or a civilian oversight board. But the lives of many of South Central’s residents are still brutalized on the daily by the LAPD. Felker-Kantor, who argues that the LAPD is not as bad as it used to be, still can’t help but admit that things are very much the same: “The police continue to operate with impunity, especially in neighborhoods of color. By responding to fear of crime and urban uprisings with calls for more efficient policing … city officials had created a program of police reform that enabled aggressive enforcement of the law … and the intensified, military-style policing continued to define Los Angeles as a carceral city.”

If we are to talk meaningfully about police reform, then, we have to talk about the consequences of not granting community control of the police to the community. They aren’t free to live their lives without worrying about abuse by the LAPD in the way that LA’s non-poor white residents, like me are able to. And they aren’t free from from the brutality of the LAPD’s increasing authoritarianism and the suffering this has caused. If reform is making things look prettier without addressing structural or systemic inequalities, then reform is highly insufficient. The LAPD enacts reforms in ways that turn minority and poor communities into occupied warzones.

Fortunately, Felker-Kantor does not end on a hopeless note. His epilogue also discusses the ways that antipolice abuse activism can check the LAPD’s increasing concentration of power. He shows that reform is not inherently “useless,” and sketches a path that values community control over the police and questions what their role in society should be rather than recommending spineless bureaucratic fixes.

Max Felker-Kantor is an excellent historical writer who writes clearly and traces the LAPD’s rise to power and antipolice activists’ resistance compellingly. Policing Los Angeles is a useful book for introducing liberals to historical examples of how policing reform has failed, and it provides ample evidence to avoid leaving readers unsatisfied. The book collects lots of fascinating quotes and sources, even though Felker-Kantor wasn’t able to access official LAPD records, and he engages with the work of grassroots activists, persuasively presenting their arguments against liberal reform. Policing Los Angeles helps us understand not only how the police exist to terrorize minorities and poor people, but how we might design a system of policing in which people have more control overall of their communities and lives. In other words: how we could transform policing entirely.

Policing Los Angeles is available from University of North Carolina Press.