The Invention of the Police

Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.
By Jill Lepore July 13, 2020 THE NEW YORKER

The Chinatown Squad, a notoriously harsh police unit in San Francisco, in 1905.

Photograph courtesy Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
To police is to maintain law and order, but the word derives from polis—the Greek for “city,” or “polity”—by way of politia, the Latin for “citizenship,” and it entered English from the Middle French police, which meant not constables but government. “The police,” as a civil force charged with deterring crime, came to the United States from England and is generally associated with monarchy—“keeping the king’s peace”—which makes it surprising that, in the antimonarchical United States, it got so big, so fast. The reason is, mainly, slavery.

“Abolish the police,” as a rallying cry, dates to 1988 (the year that N.W.A. recorded “Fuck tha Police”), but, long before anyone called for its abolition, someone had to invent the police: the ancient Greek polis had to become the modern police. “To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Human Condition.” In the polis, men argued and debated, as equals, under a rule of law. Outside the polis, in households, men dominated women, children, servants, and slaves, under a rule of force. This division of government sailed down the river of time like a raft, getting battered, but also bigger, collecting sticks and mud. Kings asserted a rule of force over their subjects on the idea that their kingdom was their household. In 1769, William Blackstone, in his “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” argued that the king, as “pater-familias of the nation,” directs “the public police,” exercising the means by which “the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood, and good manners; and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations.” The police are the king’s men.

History begins with etymology, but it doesn’t end there. The polis is not the police. The American Revolution toppled the power of the king over his people—in America, “the law is king,” Thomas Paine wrote—but not the power of a man over his family. The power of the police has its origins in that kind of power. Under the rule of law, people are equals; under the rule of police, as the legal theorist Markus Dubber has written, we are not. We are more like the women, children, servants, and slaves in a household in ancient Greece, the people who were not allowed to be a part of the polis. But for centuries, through struggles for independence, emancipation, enfranchisement, and equal rights, we’ve been fighting to enter the polis. One way to think about “Abolish the police,” then, is as an argument that, now that all of us have finally clawed our way into the polis, the police are obsolete.

But are they? The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development. Police have a lot in common with firefighters, E.M.T.s, and paramedics: they’re there to help, often at great sacrifice, and by placing themselves in harm’s way. To say that this doesn’t always work out, however, does not begin to cover the size of the problem. The killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, cannot be wished away as an outlier. In each of the past five years, police in the United States have killed roughly a thousand people. (During each of those same years, about a hundred police officers were killed in the line of duty.) One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles. Urban police forces are nearly always whiter than the communities they patrol. The victims of police brutality are disproportionately Black teen-age boys: children. To say that many good and admirable people are police officers, dedicated and brave public servants, which is, of course, true, is to fail to address both the nature and the scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice. The best people, with the best of intentions, doing their utmost, cannot fix this system from within.

There are nearly seven hundred thousand police officers in the United States, about two for every thousand people, a rate that is lower than the European average. The difference is guns. Police in Finland fired six bullets in all of 2013; in an encounter on a single day in the year 2015, in Pasco, Washington, three policemen fired seventeen bullets when they shot and killed an unarmed thirty-five-year-old orchard worker from Mexico. Five years ago, when the Guardian counted police killings, it reported that, “in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.” American police are armed to the teeth, with more than seven billion dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment off-loaded by the Pentagon to eight thousand law-enforcement agencies since 1997. At the same time, they face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world: one in three Americans owns a gun, typically more than one. Gun violence undermines civilian life and debases everyone. A study found that, given the ravages of stress, white male police officers in Buffalo have a life expectancy twenty-two years shorter than that of the average American male. The debate about policing also has to do with all the money that’s spent paying heavily armed agents of the state to do things that they aren’t trained to do and that other institutions would do better. History haunts this debate like a bullet-riddled ghost.


That history begins in England, in the thirteenth century, when maintaining the king’s peace became the duty of an officer of the court called a constable, aided by his watchmen: every male adult could be called on to take a turn walking a ward at night and, if trouble came, to raise a hue and cry. This practice lasted for centuries. (A version endures: George Zimmerman, when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, in 2012, was serving on his neighborhood watch.) The watch didn’t work especially well in England—“The average constable is an ignoramus who knows little or nothing of the law,” Blackstone wrote—and it didn’t work especially well in England’s colonies. Rich men paid poor men to take their turns on the watch, which meant that most watchmen were either very elderly or very poor, and very exhausted from working all day. Boston established a watch in 1631. New York tried paying watchmen in 1658. In Philadelphia, in 1705, the governor expressed the view that the militia could make the city safer than the watch, but militias weren’t supposed to police the king’s subjects; they were supposed to serve the common defense—waging wars against the French, fighting Native peoples who were trying to hold on to their lands, or suppressing slave rebellions.

The government of slavery was not a rule of law. It was a rule of police. In 1661, the English colony of Barbados passed its first slave law; revised in 1688, it decreed that “Negroes and other Slaves” were “wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws . . . of our Nations,” and devised, instead, a special set of rules “for the good Regulating and Ordering of them.” Virginia adopted similar measures, known as slave codes, in 1680:
It shall not be lawfull for any negroe or other slave to carry or arme himselfe with any club, staffe, gunn, sword or any other weapon of defence or offence, nor to goe or depart from of his masters ground without a certificate from his master, mistris or overseer, and such permission not to be granted but upon perticuler and necessary occasions; and every negroe or slave soe offending not haveing a certificate as aforesaid shalbe sent to the next constable, who is hereby enjoyned and required to give the said negroe twenty lashes on his bare back well layd on, and soe sent home to his said master, mistris or overseer . . . that if any negroe or other slave shall absent himself from his masters service and lye hid and lurking in obscure places, comitting injuries to the inhabitants, and shall resist any person or persons that shalby any lawfull authority be imployed to apprehend and take the said negroe, that then in case of such resistance, it shalbe lawfull for such person or persons to kill the said negroe or slave soe lying out and resisting.

In eighteenth-century New York, a person held as a slave could not gather in a group of more than three; could not ride a horse; could not hold a funeral at night; could not be out an hour after sunset without a lantern; and could not sell “Indian corn, peaches, or any other fruit” in any street or market in the city. Stop and frisk, stop and whip, shoot to kill.

Then there were the slave patrols. Armed Spanish bands called hermandades had hunted runaways in Cuba beginning in the fifteen-thirties, a practice that was adopted by the English in Barbados a century later. It had a lot in common with England’s posse comitatus, a band of stout men that a county sheriff could summon to chase down an escaped criminal. South Carolina, founded by slaveowners from Barbados, authorized its first slave patrol in 1702; Virginia followed in 1726, North Carolina in 1753. Slave patrols married the watch to the militia: serving on patrol was required of all able-bodied men (often, the patrol was mustered from the militia), and patrollers used the hue and cry to call for anyone within hearing distance to join the chase. Neither the watch nor the militia nor the patrols were “police,” who were French, and considered despotic. In North America, the French city of New Orleans was distinctive in having la police: armed City Guards, who wore military-style uniforms and received wages, an urban slave patrol.

In 1779, Thomas Jefferson created a chair in “law and police” at the College of William & Mary. The meaning of the word began to change. In 1789, Jeremy Bentham, noting that “police” had recently entered the English language, in something like its modern sense, made this distinction: police keep the peace; justice punishes disorder. (“No justice, no peace!” Black Lives Matter protesters cry in the streets.) Then, in 1797, a London magistrate named Patrick Colquhoun published “A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis.” He, too, distinguished peace kept in the streets from justice administered by the courts: police were responsible for the regulation and correction of behavior and “the prevention and detection of crimes.”

It is often said that Britain created the police, and the United States copied it. One could argue that the reverse is true. Colquhoun spent his teens and early twenties in Colonial Virginia, had served as an agent for British cotton manufacturers, and owned shares in sugar plantations in Jamaica. He knew all about slave codes and slave patrols. But nothing came of Colquhoun’s ideas about policing until 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel—in the wake of a great deal of labor unrest, and after years of suppressing Catholic rebellions in Ireland, in his capacity as Irish Secretary—persuaded Parliament to establish the Metropolitan Police, a force of some three thousand men, headed by two civilian justices (later called “commissioners”), and organized like an army, with each superintendent overseeing four inspectors, sixteen sergeants, and a hundred and sixty-five constables, who wore coats and pants of blue with black top hats, each assigned a numbered badge and a baton. Londoners came to call these men “bobbies,” for Bobby Peel.

It is also often said that modern American urban policing began in 1838, when the Massachusetts legislature authorized the hiring of police officers in Boston. This, too, ignores the role of slavery in the history of the police. In 1829, a Black abolitionist in Boston named David Walker published “An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World,” calling for violent rebellion: “One good black man can put to death six white men.” Walker was found dead within the year, and Boston thereafter had a series of mob attacks against abolitionists, including an attempt to lynch William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of The Liberator, in 1835. Walker’s words terrified Southern slaveowners. The governor of North Carolina wrote to his state’s senators, “I beg you will lay this matter before the police of your town and invite their prompt attention to the necessity of arresting the circulation of the book.” By “police,” he meant slave patrols: in response to Walker’s “Appeal,” North Carolina formed a statewide “patrol committee.”

New York established a police department in 1844; New Orleans and Cincinnati followed in 1852, then, later in the eighteen-fifties, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore. Population growth, the widening inequality brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and the rise in such crimes as prostitution and burglary all contributed to the emergence of urban policing. So did immigration, especially from Ireland and Germany, and the hostility to immigration: a new party, the Know-Nothings, sought to prevent immigrants from voting, holding office, and becoming citizens. In 1854, Boston disbanded its ancient watch and formally established a police department; that year, Know-Nothings swept the city’s elections.

American police differed from their English counterparts: in the U.S., police commissioners, as political appointees, fell under local control, with limited supervision; and law enforcement was decentralized, resulting in a jurisdictional thicket. In 1857, in the Great Police Riot, the New York Municipal Police, run by the mayor’s office, fought on the steps of city hall with the New York Metropolitan Police, run by the state. The Metropolitans were known as the New York Mets. That year, an amateur baseball team of the same name was founded.

Also, unlike their British counterparts, American police carried guns, initially their own. In the eighteen-sixties, the Colt Firearms Company began manufacturing a compact revolver called a Pocket Police Model, long before the New York Metropolitan Police began issuing service weapons. American police carried guns because Americans carried guns, including Americans who lived in parts of the country where they hunted for food and defended their livestock from wild animals, Americans who lived in parts of the country that had no police, and Americans who lived in parts of North America that were not in the United States. Outside big cities, law-enforcement officers were scarce. In territories that weren’t yet states, there were U.S. marshals and their deputies, officers of the federal courts who could act as de-facto police, but only to enforce federal laws. If a territory became a state, its counties would elect sheriffs. Meanwhile, Americans became vigilantes, especially likely to kill indigenous peoples, and to lynch people of color. Between 1840 and the nineteen-twenties, mobs, vigilantes, and law officers, including the Texas Rangers, lynched some five hundred Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and killed thousands more, not only in Texas but also in territories that became the states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. A San Francisco vigilance committee established in 1851 arrested, tried, and hanged people; it boasted a membership in the thousands. An L.A. vigilance committee targeted and lynched Chinese immigrants.

The U.S. Army operated as a police force, too. After the Civil War, the militia was organized into seven new departments of permanent standing armies: the Department of Dakota, the Department of the Platte, the Department of the Missouri, the Department of Texas, the Department of Arizona, the Department of California, and the Department of the Columbian. In the eighteen-seventies and eighties, the U.S. Army engaged in more than a thousand combat operations against Native peoples. In 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, following an attempt to disarm a Lakota settlement, a regiment of cavalrymen massacred hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children. Nearly a century later, in 1973, F.B.I. agents, swat teams, and federal troops and state marshals laid siege to Wounded Knee during a protest over police brutality and the failure to properly punish the torture and murder of an Oglala Sioux man named Raymond Yellow Thunder. They fired more than half a million rounds of ammunition and arrested more than a thousand people. Today, according to the C.D.C., Native Americans are more likely to be killed by the police than any other racial or ethnic group.

Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He’d served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. “For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks,” he later explained. “After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society.” Who were those enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.

To domestic policing, Vollmer and his peers adapted the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been deployed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as the sociologist Julian Go has demonstrated. Vollmer instituted a training model imitated all over the country, by police departments that were often led and staffed by other veterans of the United States wars of conquest and occupation. A “police captain or lieutenant should occupy exactly the same position in the public mind as that of a captain or lieutenant in the United States army,” Detroit’s commissioner of police said. (Today’s police officers are disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police, found that officers who are veterans are more likely than their non-veteran counterparts to be involved in fatal shootings. In general, they are more likely to use force, and more likely to fire their guns.)

Vollmer-era police enforced a new kind of slave code: Jim Crow laws, which had been passed in the South beginning in the late eighteen-seventies and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1896. William G. Austin became Savannah’s chief of police in 1907. Earlier, he had earned a Medal of Honor for his service in the U.S. Cavalry at Wounded Knee; he had also fought in the Spanish-American War. By 1916, African-American churches in the city were complaining to Savannah newspapers about the “whole scale arrests of negroes because they are negroes—arrests that would not be made if they were white under similar circumstances.” African-Americans also confronted Jim Crow policing in the Northern cities to which they increasingly fled. James Robinson, Philadelphia’s chief of police beginning in 1912, had served in the Infantry during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. He based his force’s training on manuals used by the U.S. Army at Leavenworth. Go reports that, in 1911, about eleven per cent of people arrested were African-American; under Robinson, that number rose to 14.6 per cent in 1917. By the nineteen-twenties, a quarter of those arrested were African-Americans, who, at the time, represented just 7.4 per cent of the population.

Progressive Era, Vollmer-style policing criminalized Blackness, as the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad argued in his 2010 book, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.” Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.

More recently, between the New Jim Crow and the criminalization of immigration and the imprisonment of immigrants in detention centers, this reality has only grown worse. “By population, by per capita incarceration rates, and by expenditures, the United States exceeds all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants are under some form of criminal justice supervision,” Muhammad writes in a new preface to his book. “The number of African American and Latinx people in American jails and prisons today exceeds the entire populations of some African, Eastern European, and Caribbean countries.”

Policing grew harsher in the Progressive Era, and, with the emergence of state-police forces, the number of police grew, too. With the rise of the automobile, some, like California’s, began as “highway patrols.” Others, including the state police in Nevada, Colorado, and Oregon, began as the private paramilitaries of industrialists which employed the newest American immigrants: Hungarians, Italians, and Jews. Industrialists in Pennsylvania established the Iron and Coal Police to end strikes and bust unions, including the United Mine Workers; in 1905, three years after an anthracite-coal strike, the Pennsylvania State Police started operations. “One State Policeman should be able to handle one hundred foreigners,” its new chief said.

ANTI ITALIAN HYSTERIA ABOUT ANARCHISTS ARREST OF SACCO AND VANZETTI

The U.S. Border Patrol began in 1924, the year that Congress restricted immigration from southern Europe. At the insistence of Southern and Western agriculturalists, Congress exempted Mexicans from its new immigration quotas in order to allow migrant workers to enter the United States. The Border Patrol began as a relatively small outfit responsible for enforcing federal immigration law, and stopping smugglers, at all of the nation’s borders. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, it grew to a national quasi-military focussed on policing the southern border in campaigns of mass arrest and forced deportation of Mexican immigrants, aided by local police like the notoriously brutal L.A.P.D., as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has chronicled. What became the Chicano movement began in Southern California, with Mexican immigrants’ protests of the L.A.P.D. during the first half of the twentieth century, even as a growing film industry cranked out features about Klansmen hunting Black people, cowboys killing Indians, and police chasing Mexicans. More recently, you can find an updated version of this story in L.A. Noire, a video game set in 1947 and played from the perspective of a well-armed L.A.P.D. officer, who, driving along Sunset Boulevard, passes the crumbling, abandoned sets from D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film “Intolerance,” imagined relics of an unforgiving age.

Two kinds of police appeared on mid-century American television. The good guys solved crime on prime-time police procedurals like “Dragnet,” starting in 1951, and “Adam-12,” beginning in 1968 (both featured the L.A.P.D.). The bad guys shocked America’s conscience on the nightly news: Arkansas state troopers barring Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School, in 1957; Birmingham police clubbing and arresting some seven hundred Black children protesting segregation, in 1963; and Alabama state troopers beating voting-rights marchers at Selma, in 1965. These two faces of policing help explain how, in the nineteen-sixties, the more people protested police brutality, the more money governments gave to police departments.

“You get the wine.”
Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on crime,” and asked Congress to pass the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, under which the federal government would supply local police with military-grade weapons, weapons that were being used in the war in Vietnam. During riots in Watts that summer, law enforcement killed thirty-one people and arrested more than four thousand; fighting the protesters, the head of the L.A.P.D. said, was “very much like fighting the Viet Cong.” Preparing for a Senate vote just days after the uprising ended, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, “For some time, it has been my feeling that the task of law enforcement agencies is really not much different from military forces; namely, to deter crime before it occurs, just as our military objective is deterrence of aggression.”

As Elizabeth Hinton reported in “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America,” the “frontline soldiers” in Johnson’s war on crime—Vollmer-era policing all over again—spent a disproportionate amount of time patrolling Black neighborhoods and arresting Black people. Policymakers concluded from those differential arrest rates that Black people were prone to criminality, with the result that police spent even more of their time patrolling Black neighborhoods, which led to a still higher arrest rate. “If we wish to rid this country of crime, if we wish to stop hacking at its branches only, we must cut its roots and drain its swampy breeding ground, the slum,” Johnson told an audience of police policymakers in 1966. The next year, riots broke out in Newark and Detroit. “We ain’t rioting agains’ all you whites,” one Newark man told a reporter not long before being shot dead by police. “We’re riotin’ agains’ police brutality.” In Detroit, police arrested more than seven thousand people.

Johnson’s Great Society essentially ended when he asked Congress to pass the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which had the effect of diverting money from social programs to policing. This magazine called it “a piece of demagoguery devised out of malevolence and enacted in hysteria.” James Baldwin attributed its “irresponsible ferocity” to “some pale, compelling nightmare—an overwhelming collection of private nightmares.” The truth was darker, as the sociologist Stuart Schrader chronicled in his 2019 book, “Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.” During the Cold War, the Office of Public Safety at the U.S.A.I.D. provided assistance to the police in at least fifty-two countries, and training to officers from nearly eighty, for the purpose of counter-insurgency—the suppression of an anticipated revolution, that collection of private nightmares; as the O.P.S. reported, it contributed “the international dimension to the Administration’s War on Crime.” Counter-insurgency boomeranged, and came back to the United States, as policing.

In 1968, Johnson’s new crime bill established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, within the Department of Justice, which, in the next decade and a half, disbursed federal funds to more than eighty thousand crime-control projects. Even funds intended for social projects—youth employment, for instance, along with other health, education, housing, and welfare programs—were distributed to police operations. With Richard Nixon, any elements of the Great Society that had survived the disastrous end of Johnson’s Presidency were drastically cut, with an increased emphasis on policing, and prison-building. More Americans went to prison between 1965 and 1982 than between 1865 and 1964, Hinton reports. Under Ronald Reagan, still more social services were closed, or starved of funding until they died: mental hospitals, health centers, jobs programs, early-childhood education. By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on prisons than on colleges and universities. Activists who today call for defunding the police argue that, for decades, Americans have been defunding not only social services but, in many states, public education itself. The more frayed the social fabric, the more police have been deployed to trim the dangling threads.

The blueprint for law enforcement from Nixon to Reagan came from the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson between 1968, in his book “Varieties of Police Behavior,” and 1982, in an essay in The Atlantic titled “Broken Windows.” On the one hand, Wilson believed that the police should shift from enforcing the law to maintaining order, by patrolling on foot, and doing what came to be called “community policing.” (Some of his recommendations were ignored: Wilson called for other professionals to handle what he termed the “service functions” of the police—“first aid, rescuing cats, helping ladies, and the like”—which is a reform people are asking for today.) On the other hand, Wilson called for police to arrest people for petty crimes, on the theory that they contributed to more serious crimes. Wilson’s work informed programs like Detroit’s stress (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), begun in 1971, in which Detroit police patrolled the city undercover, in disguises that included everything from a taxi-driver to a “radical college professor,” and killed so many young Black men that an organization of Black police officers demanded that the unit be disbanded. The campaign to end stress arguably marked the very beginnings of police abolitionism. stress defended its methods. “We just don’t walk up and shoot somebody,” one commander said. “We ask him to stop. If he doesn’t, we shoot.”

For decades, the war on crime was bipartisan, and had substantial support from the Congressional Black Caucus. “Crime is a national-defense problem,” Joe Biden said in the Senate, in 1982. “You’re in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile.” Biden and other Democrats in the Senate introduced legislation that resulted in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. A decade later, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden helped draft the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, whose provisions included mandatory sentencing. In May, 1991, two months after the Rodney King beating, Biden introduced the Police Officers’ Bill of Rights, which provided protections for police under investigation. The N.R.A. first endorsed a Presidential candidate, Reagan, in 1980; the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, first endorsed a Presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush, in 1988. In 1996, it endorsed Bill Clinton.

Partly because of Biden’s record of championing law enforcement, the National Association of Police Organizations endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2008 and 2012. In 2014, after police in Ferguson, Missouri, shot Michael Brown, the Obama Administration established a task force on policing in the twenty-first century. Its report argued that police had become warriors when what they really should be is guardians. Most of its recommendations were never implemented.

In 2016, the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Donald Trump, saying that “our members believe he will make America safe again.” Police unions are lining up behind Trump again this year. “We will never abolish our police or our great Second Amendment,” Trump said at Mt. Rushmore, on the occasion of the Fourth of July. “We will not be intimidated by bad, evil people.”

Trump is not the king; the law is king. The police are not the king’s men; they are public servants. And, no matter how desperately Trump would like to make it so, policing really isn’t a partisan issue. Out of the stillness of the shutdown, the voices of protest have roared like summer thunder. An overwhelming majority of Americans, of both parties, support major reforms in American policing. And a whole lot of police, defying their unions, also support those reforms.

Those changes won’t address plenty of bigger crises, not least because the problem of policing can’t be solved without addressing the problem of guns. But this much is clear: the polis has changed, and the police will have to change, too.


Published in the print edition of the July 20, 2020, issue, with the headline “The Long Blue Line.”

Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard and the host of the podcast “The Last Archive.” Her fourteenth book, “If Then,” will be published in September

A summer of protest, unemployment and presidential politics – welcome to 1932

July 1, 2020 8.27am EDT

An election looms. An unpopular president wrestles with historic unemployment rates. Demonstrations erupt in hundreds of locations. The president deploys Army units to suppress peaceful protests in the nation’s capital. And most of all he worries about an affable Democratic candidate who is running against him without saying much about a platform or plans.

Welcome to 1932.

I am a historian and director of the Mapping American Social Movements Project, which explores the history of social movements and their interaction with American electoral politics.

The parallels between the summer of 1932 and what is happening in the U.S. currently are striking. While the pandemic and much else is different, the political dynamics are similar enough that they are useful for anyone trying to understand where the U.S. is and where it is going.
Tanks and mounted troops advance to break up a Bonus Marchers’ camp of veterans protesting lost wages, Washington D.C., July 28, 1932. PhotoQuest/Getty Images
Multiracial street protest movement

In 1932, as in 2020, the nation experienced an explosion of civil unrest on the eve of a presidential election.

The Great Depression had deepened through three years by 1932. With 24% of the work force unemployed and the federal government refusing to provide funds to support the jobless and homeless as local governments ran out of money, men and women across the country joined demonstrations demanding relief.

Our mapping project has recorded 389 hunger marches, eviction fights and other protests in 138 cities during 1932.

Although less than the thousands of Black Lives Matter protests, there are similarities.

African Americans participated in these movements, and many of the protests attracted police violence. Indeed, the unemployed people’s movement of the early 1930s was the first important multiracial street protest movement of the 20th century, and police violence was especially vicious against black activists.

Atlanta authorities announced in June 1932 that 23,000 families would be cut from the list of those eligible for the meager county relief payments of 60 cents per week per person allocated to whites (less for Blacks). A mixed crowd of nearly 1,000 gathered in front of the Fulton County Courthouse for a peaceful demonstration demanding US$4 per week per family and denouncing racial discrimination.

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The biracial protest was unprecedented in Atlanta and yielded two results. The eligibility cuts were canceled, and police promptly hunted down one of the organizers, a 19-year-old Black communist named Angelo Herndon. He was charged with “inciting to insurrection,” a charge that carried the death penalty. Lawyers spent the next five years winning his freedom.
Protests over unemployment

Five hundred unemployed ‘Hunger Marchers’ protest on Boston Common on their way to the State House, demanding unemployment insurance and other relief measures, May 2, 1932. Bettman/Getty

But race was not the key issue of the 1932 protest wave. It was government’s failure to rescue the millions in economic distress.

Organizations representing the unemployed – many led by communists or socialists – had been active since 1930, and now in the summer of 1932 protests surged in every state. Here are examples from the Mapping American Social Movement Project timeline from one week in June:

• June 14

Hundreds of Chicago police mobilize to keep unemployed demonstrators at bay at the start of the Republican Party nominating convention.

• June 17

A so-called “hunger march” of 3,000 jobless in Minneapolis ends peacefully, but in Bloomington, Indiana, police use tear gas on 1,000 demonstrators demanding relief, while in Pittsburgh unemployed supporters crowd a courthouse to cheer the not-guilty verdict in an “inciting to riot” case.

• June 20

Police break up a march by 200 unemployed in Argo, Illinois, and a much larger protest by jobless in Rochester, New York. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, 500 protesters successfully demanded an end to evictions of unemployed mill workers; in Pittsburgh, protesters block the eviction of an unemployed widow. The same day in Kansas City, a mostly Black crowd of 2,000 pleads unsuccessfully with the mayor to restore a recently suspended relief program.
Farmers’ uprising

The unemployed protests in urban areas of 1932 seem similar to today’s protest culture, but that was not true in the farm belt.

Dealing with collapsing prices and escalating farm evictions, farmers in many regions staged near-uprisings. Black farmers in the cotton belt braved vigilante violence when, by the thousands, they joined the Alabama Sharecroppers Union, which advocated debt relief and the right of tenant farmers to market their own crops.

Newspaper headlines focused on the white farmers mobilizing in Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Minnesota and the Dakotas in the summer of 1932. The Farmer’s Holiday Association formed that year pledging to strike (“holiday”) to raise farm prices. The strike that began on August 15 involved sometimes heavily armed white farmers blocking roads to stop the shipment of corn, wheat, milk and other products. The strike withered after a few weeks, but farmers had sent a message, and some state legislatures quickly enacted moratoriums on farm foreclosures.

Counties that today are marked as Trump territory distinguished themselves in 1932 as centers of what became known as the “Cornbelt Rebellion.”
Farmers set up a roadblock near Sioux City, Iowa, during Farmer’s Holiday Strike, August 1932. State Historical Society of Iowa

Unrest helped FDR defeat Hoover

Periods of grassroots protest and civil unrest interact in unpredictable ways with presidential elections. In 1932, unrest helped Franklin Roosevelt defeat incumbent Herbert Hoover. Again, there are similarities between that summer and this one.

Democratic presidential candidate Roosevelt, like today’s Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, enjoyed the luxury of running on platitudes instead of programs. Roosevelt used the phrase “new deal” in his nomination acceptance speech, but details were few and it was not until he took office that the phrase acquired real meaning.

Roosevelt could avoid commitments because the political dynamics of 1932 forced the incumbent to play defense, much like today.

Herbert Hoover was no Trump, almost the opposite. Cautious, principled, quiet, a moderate Republican, he had made major errors in the first years of the Depression, and his reputation never recovered. Democrats accused him of inaction (which was not true), while the unemployed movements fixed the label “Hoovervilles” on the homeless encampments and shacktowns that sprang up in cities across the country.

Hoover’s credibility was further damaged in the summer of 1932 when more than 15,000 World War I veterans converged on Washington, D.C. under the banner of the Bonus Expeditionary Force, commonly called the Bonus Army. They demanded that Congress immediately pay them the bonuses they were due to get in 1945.

When the Senate rejected the proposal, the Bonus Army settled into a massive encampment across the Anacostia River from Capitol Hill.
Shacks burned by the U.S. Army in the shantytown constructed by protesters called the ‘Bonus Army’ after they were forced out by the military. Bettmann/Getty

A month later, Hoover called in U.S. Army troops. During a night of violence, the army burned thousands of tents and shacks and sent the Bonus Army marchers fleeing.

For Hoover, the deployment of U.S. Army units played out much as it did for Trump this May, when he had Lafayette Park violently cleared of protesters. Hoover’s action deepened his image problems and strengthened the sense that he lacked compassion for those in need, including those who had fought for their country only 14 years earlier.

Hoover tried to mobilize a backlash against the summer of protests, claiming that Communists were behind all of the unrest, including the Bonus Army, which in fact had banned all Communists. It didn’t work: Roosevelt won in a landslide.
The poor handling of the unrest and economic crisis by President Hoover, right, led to his election loss to Roosevelt, left. Roosevelt: Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Hoover: General Photographic Agency/Getty




In the end, the protests helped Democrats in the election of 1932. In Congress, Democrats gained 97 House seats and 12 in the Senate, taking control of Congress for the first time since 1918. And equally significant, they helped propel the agenda of the New Dealers, as the new administration prepared to take power and launch the ambitious legislation of the first 100 days.

Three years of grassroots action had forced even reluctant politicians to recognize the urgency of reform. The early New Deal would race to provide debt relief for farmers and homeowners, jobs for the unemployed, and public works projects – part of what demonstrators had been demanding for years.

Author

James N. Gregory
Professor of History, University of Washington

What We’ve Learned from 101 Years of American Unrest

For more than a century, cities have been erupting in anger over police violence against Black Americans—and then issuing reports with thoughtful, deep approaches to the solution. Are we finally learning the lessons of 1919?

Chicago Commission on Race Relations/Wikimedia Commons

POLITICO Magazine HISTORY DEPT.

By DAVID GREENBERG

07/12/2020 07:00 AM ED

David Greenberg, a professor of history and journalism and media studies at Rutgers, is a contributing editor at Politico Magazine. He is the author of several works of political history including, most recently, Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency.

When New York Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed a slate of criminal justice reforms this spring, he reminded his audience that George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis policeman was just the latest in a line of Black victims of police brutality whose deaths had given rise to protests and outcry. “We suffered in this city through Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell and Eric Garner,” Cuomo fulminated. “How many times have we seen the same situation?”

Cuomo’s recital of these names echoed the “Say Their Names” campaign honoring the memories of African Americans killed in recent years by police violence or negligence, and whose deaths inspired protests, of various kinds: Michael Brown (2014), Tamir Rice (2014), Freddie Gray (2015), Walter Scott (2015), Sandra Bland (2015), Alton Sterling (2016), Philando Castile (2016), Botham Jean (2018), Breonna Taylor (2020), David McAtee (2020), Rayshawn Brooks (2020) and others.

When people talk about the modern wave of protests against police brutality right now, they tend to reach back to the Rodney King riots in 1992, when anger over the acquittal of four cops who viciously beat a defenseless Black driver led to five days of mayhem in Los Angeles. The King riots were on Cuomo’s mind, for example: “Rodney King was 30 years ago,” he said, with exasperation, at his news conference last month.

But the pattern actually goes back further than that—much further. The entire 20th century, from at least the Chicago riot of 1919, was racked by waves of protests triggered, or worsened, by incidents that would seem depressingly familiar today. Whenever riots broke out in Black neighborhoods, the spark was almost always a case of police brutality or abuse of power, or, sometimes, a failure to hold the cops to account.

Another constant is with us as well. Since the early 1900s, and many times in the decades afterward, state and local governments have formed commissions and written reports identifying the roots of the problem and the remedies to fix it. Although the specifics and some of the language have changed, some of these documents are remarkable previews of the policy conversation Americans are having again today—looking beyond local violence to identify and root out deeper structural injustices, from housing to policing to schools.

As the country’s largely white political leadership once again scrambles frantically to address police violence against African Americans—with revamped city and state budgets, sudden policies to bar chokeholds and other abusive tactics, and constraints on the power of police unions—the need for such substantial change shouldn’t come as a revelation. Nor should the need for more sweeping measures to make housing, schooling, health care and job opportunities for Black Americans truly equal to those for whites. The lesson isn’t so much what should be done—we have a century of blueprints, one echoing the next—as what happens to the political will to do it.

Probably the most well-known episode of urban racial violence in the early 20th century was the Chicago riot of 1919. In July of that year, on a sultry afternoon, Eugene Williams, a Black teenager, rode a homemade raft out onto Lake Michigan. The beachfront was informally segregated, and the waters carried Williams into the area designated as white. Seeing a Black boy in the “wrong” stretch of the lake, white beachgoers clamored. One hurled stones at Williams, knocking him off his raft—and causing him to drown.

The police officer who arrived on the scene, Daniel Callahan, declined to arrest the purported culprit. Instead, Callahan took a Black onlooker into custody. Already, during the previous decade, when Chicago’s African-American population had more than doubled, Black people had faced continual mistreatment at the hands of the police. Callahan’s refusal to pursue justice for Eugene Williams was one more case of a racist policing. Unfair treatment by the law, in turn, was simply one manifestation of the discrimination and inequality that Chicago’s Black residents were suffering.

Fighting quickly broke out at the beachfront and spread across the city. Armed combat between Black and white residents lasted for four days and claimed 38 lives, 23 Black and 15 white. “The hospitals are crowded with the wounded,” the New York Times reported, “the majority of whom are negroes.” Some police officers turned a blind eye to assaults on Black Chicagoans or joined in. (Callahan was later suspended.)

Afterward, Illinois Governor Frank Lowden, a conservative Republican, did what would also become another standard part of the pattern: He formed a committee to explore the riot’s causes and come up with remedies. Called the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, his panel included local eminences of both races, including Julius Rosenwald, the chairman of Sears, Roebuck, known for his philanthropy in the Black South, and Robert Abbott, publisher of the Chicago Defender, the famous Black newspaper.

The committee’s findings, published under the title “The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot,” resembled a dissertation in urban sociology. Offering more than a chronicle of summer unrest, the report delved into the history of Black people in Chicago, the demographic and economic issues shaping their lives, the discrimination they faced in housing, crime, and employment, and a study of public opinion. At the end, it prescribed sensible recommendations that resonate today: stringent new gun-control measures, better schools and social services in Black neighborhoods, efforts across civil society to “dispel the false notions of each race about the other and promote mutual tolerance and friendliness between them.” The police, too, were instructed to guarantee “adequate and equal protection by all agencies of law enforcement” to Black neighborhoods.

Despite these worthy goals, in Black areas of Chicago and other cities, gross inequalities, including in policing, endured. Distrust of law enforcement in African American communities stayed high. It all boiled over again on March 19, 1935, in Harlem. That day, Lino Rivera, a Black Puerto Rican teenager, was caught shoplifting a penknife. A store employee threatened to rough him up, kicking off various rumors, and an angry crowd massed outside on 125th Street. One rumor said the boy had been murdered; in fact, he admitted to the theft and was released. Others alleged that cops had broken the arms of a Black woman (which seems to have been untrue). Rioting broke out that night, leaving scores injured, scores arrested and three dead.

New York Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia did what Lowden had done for Chicago. He appointed a blue ribbon commission, this one headed by the renowned sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. Its report, “The Negro in Harlem: A Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of March 19, 1935,” like its predecessor, went beyond the bare facts of the incident to explore root causes of inner-city dysfunction. It cited the hardships of the Depression, job discrimination, dilapidated housing, poor health care, bad schools and, not least, the police. The force’s aggressive posture toward the community strained relations, and when the city deployed extra officers to defend shops from looting, it “signified that property will be protected at any cost; but it offers no assurance that the legitimate demands of the citizen of the community for work and decent living conditions will be heeded,” the report concluded. LaGuardia introduced programs to improve social services in Harlem, and demanded new training for the police. But progress came slowly.

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In the following decades, this same pattern played out again and again. Police violence didn’t trigger the June 1943 race riots in Detroit, but it did make them worse. That conflict began when brawls broke out on Belle Isle, situated in the middle of the Detroit River, between white and Black gangs. The chaos spilled into the city proper. Mobs attacked each other and trashed the others’ neighborhoods. Over three days, the white police force often exacerbated, rather than quelled, the uproar: Of the 25 African Americans who died in Detroit, the police were responsible for 17 deaths. (None of the nine white deaths came at the hands of the cops.) Only federal troops, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt finally sent in at the governor’s invitation, calmed the city.

Again came a report. This time, police officials and the state attorney general held sway on the governor’s commission and laid blame with the Black community for not trusting law enforcement. But a separate NAACP investigation, run by Thurgood Marshall, found that police had beaten and arrested Black people in the riots while ignoring whites who were just as destructive. About 85 percent of those arrested were African American. Marshall said the police were the problem. “This weak-kneed policy of the police commissioner coupled with the anti-Negro attitude of many members of the force helped to make a riot inevitable,” Marshall said. His report had a less sociological-sounding title than its predecessors: “The Gestapo in Detroit.”

Next, Los Angeles. On August 11, 1965, in Watts, police stopped Marquette Frye as he drove down Avalon Street, near his house. Frye balked at his arrest, a crowd gathered and more cops hurried to the scene. As the situation escalated, the officers manhandled onlookers, including Frye’s mother. The conflict spun out of control, leading to four days of carnage: more than 1,000 injuries, $40 million in property damage and 34 deaths. This time, former CIA chief John McCone headed the commission. His report called for reimagining the relationship between the police and the community, along with new literacy and preschool programs, more housing and job training, better health care and public transportation, and much more in the same vei








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Finally, two years later, it was Detroit’s turn again. A police raid on a Black gambling club in the Motor City escalated into a bloody clash with residents, triggering five days of rioting, looting, arson and murder. Along with riots in Newark and more than 150 other cities in what was called “the long, hot summer,” the devastation in Detroit spurred President Lyndon B. Johnson to create the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, for its chair, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois. People remember the report—a best-seller—for its line that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white—separate and unequal.” Less often cited is the chapter urging police reform, which described “deep hostility between police and ghetto communities as a primary cause of the disorders,” and prescribed better police-community relations instead of more weaponry.

Despite the fanfare that greeted the Kerner report, there was also a sense of foreboding, or at least of déjà vu—a nagging worry that all the hoopla wouldn’t bring real change. Testifying before the Kerner Commission in 1967, the celebrated psychologist Kenneth Clark remarked on decades of failure to act on the social science research that past riots had let to. He told the commission he had just read a report written after the 1919 Chicago riot. “It is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’35, the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’43, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot,” he said. “I must again in candor say to you members of this commission, it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland, with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.”

In subsequent decades, uprisings continued sporadically, but, curiously, even some of the deadly ones have mostly slipped from popular memory. Few people today remember, for example, that in Miami in 1980, the acquittal of four policemen in the slaughter of Arthur McDuffie, a Black businessman, set off nights of unrest, with 18 fatalities. Nor is it widely known that in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1996, the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Tyron Lewis by a policeman—as Lewis begged, “Please don’t shoot, please don’t shoot”—uncorked a day of mayhem. Also more or less forgotten is the rioting in Cincinnati in 2001, after a policeman shot and killed Timothy Thomas, an unarmed Black man. These incident produced headlines but not reform.

It seems that after the Kerner Commission a certain fatalism set in. The high ambitions of the Progressive Era, which brightly hoped that research and social science could solve obdurate social issues, steadily diminished after the 1960s. Meanwhile, rising standards of living and job opportunities for Black Americans and surveys in the 1990s showing people of all races more positively disposed toward one another conspired to make racism and racial inequality seem less pressing than it had been in earlier decades. The sharp drop in urban crime put police reform on the back burner and made riots seem anomalous, not part of a cruel pattern.









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The Black Lives Matter movement that arose in 2014, the worsening economic situation for African Americans after the 2008 financial crash and Donald Trump’s election, combined together, have made police reform an urgent concern once again in 2020. No one expects President Trump or William Barr, his attorney general, to convene a blue ribbon commission about police brutality against African Americans. But that abdication reflects their party and their ideology, not the mood of the country.

The energy for reform that followed from Chicago 1919 or Detroit 1967 proved hard to sustain, especially in the face of political backlash. This time, however, though the social obstacles to change remain entrenched, the political obstacles seem to be falling. The scale and duration of this spring’s protests—and the discussions that are already happening in city councils and state legislatures around police reform—suggest that this time it might finally be different.

So perhaps it’s just as well if Trump doesn’t convene a new Kerner Commission. Sober-minded experts have been writing reports for a century now. As Kenneth Clark pointed out, the blueprints are already there. The question is whether we’ll finally use them.

Trump's campaign to open schools provokes mounting backlash even from GOP

TRUMP WANTS PARENTS BACK WORKING AT SHIT PAYING JOBS

An overwhelming alignment of local, state and even Republican-aligned organizations oppose the rush to reopen schools and colleges.

ANOTHER LISTENING SESSION

 WHERE TRUMP DOES NOT LISTEN

President Donald Trump speaks during an event with students, teachers and administrators about how to safely re-open schools amid the coronavirus Tuesday. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images


By MICHAEL STRATFORD, NICOLE GAUDIANO and JUAN PEREZ JR.
07/10/2020 


President Donald Trump has been on a rampage against public schools and colleges all week, threatening to use the power of the federal government to strong-arm officials into reopening classrooms.

But his effort is now creating a backlash: An overwhelming alignment of state and even Republican-aligned organizations oppose the rush to reopen schools. The nation’s leading pediatricians, Republican state school chiefs, Christian colleges and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have all challenged parts of Trump’s pressure campaign.

“Threats are not helpful,” Joy Hofmeister, the Republican state superintendent of public instruction in Oklahoma, told POLITICO on Friday. “We do not need to be schooled on why it’s important to reopen.”

Both Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have issued federal funding threats to schools that don’t fully reopen. On Friday, Trump went a step further in blasting online learning — which many school districts and colleges are planning to use this fall as an alternative or supplement to in-person instruction.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, whose prominent study on the importance of reopening schools was repeatedly touted by administration officials this week, criticized Trump’s threats to withhold money from schools as a “misguided approach” in a new statement on Friday.

The pediatricians, in a statement with teachers unions and school superintendents, also pushed back on Trump’s focus on schools providing in-person instruction, seemingly without any regard to the intensity of the pandemic in a community. Schools in areas with high levels of Covid-19 community spread, they wrote, “should not be compelled to reopen” against local experts’ judgment.


Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. | AP Photo

State school chiefs like Hofmeister are wary as well.

“Educating our kids shouldn’t be about politics — it’s about focusing on what’s needed,” she said, adding that schools are in need of federal support to help purchase things like safety supplies and internet hot spots to make sure vulnerable students have access to digital learning.

“We're encouraging our schools to get past some of their concerns about, for example, wearing a mask or not wearing a mask,” she said. “Just wear a mask. That's going to help us stay open.”

In Indiana, the home state of Vice President Mike Pence, the Republican state schools chief also responded to threats to cut funding to schools amid the pandemic in a tweet on Friday. “Students deserve an unprecedented federal investment in resources not cuts or diversion of funds,” said Jennifer McCormick.

Other school leaders have been similarly critical. “The bullish position of 'open your doors or don’t get money’ is ill timed, misinformed and doesn’t reflect the nuanced work that goes into the decisions state and local leaders have to weigh,” said Noelle Ellerson Ng, of AASA, The School Superintendents Association.

But Trump’s drive to reopen schools has found support, certainly among congressional Republicans, and some state leaders.

Elsie Arntzen, the Republican superintendent of public instruction in Montana, said in an interview on Friday that she supported the Trump administration’s approach. She said that she didn’t view Trump’s comments about school funding as a threat to take away money.

“For a president to say that schools are connected to the economy, I embrace that,” she said. “I believe that we need to have our state open and it needs to be done very safely.”

Arntzen said she believes in local control of schools and would support a local superintendent's decision to either close or reopen classrooms. But she praised the Trump administration’s focus on reopening physical school buildings as a way to return to normalcy.

Not dangerous: DeVos defends schools reopening according to CDC guidelines

“Having schools come back to a more traditional model, a sense of normalcy, is going to reduce the panic and allow Montanans to function and allow Montana families to be able to supply an income for our children and for our children's future,” she said. “I’m all in.”

White House officials defended the Trump administration’s threats to school funding. "If Disney World can be open so can our schools," spokesperson Judd Deere said, referring to Disney's upcoming phased opening.

As the administration continues to push its viewpoint, DeVos will be deployed for interviews Sunday on "Fox News Sunday" and CNN's "State of the Union."

And the Trump administration is planning to continue its reopening offensive into next week. Pence plans to travel to Louisiana State University on Tuesday to discuss “fall reopening plans and university sports programs” with education leaders and Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, his office said.

Schools that provide “a full school year of learning” and that are “fully operational” aren’t at risk of losing funding, said Education Department spokesperson Liz Hill in a statement. "But should a school choose to neglect its responsibility to educate students, they should not receive taxpayer money for a job that’s not being done.”

Congressional Democrats say the administration doesn’t have the authority to yank schools’ funding. And the Education Department has not given any public indication that it’s actually planning to make good on Trump’s threat with a plan to withholding existing funding.

But Trump’s criticism of schools went beyond a funding threat this week. He also targeted the online learning that many schools and colleges are planning to rely on this fall.

In Oklahoma, Hofmeister said “it’s perplexing” why the Trump administration would be so critical of virtual learning as an option — especially since much of the emergency relief funding passed earlier this spring was about helping schools transition to virtual instruction.

Indeed, as DeVos distributed the money, she recommended that school leaders use the funding for things like technology and training “that will help all students continue to learn through some form of remote learning.”

Hofmeister said that she had twice spoken to DeVos during the pandemic and had discussed the state’s investment in online tools to develop individualized learning. “That was applauded,” she said of her conversation with DeVos.

Higher education also has also been roiled over the past week by the Trump administration’s effort to oust international students from U.S. campuses unless colleges agree to physically hold classes this fall.

The proposed policy — which a top official said is meant to prod campuses to reopen — marks an abrupt reversal for the Trump administration, which set out different standards just a few months ago during the pandemic’s springtime peak.

Acting DHS Deputy Secretary Kenneth Cuccinelli told CNN the new rules for international students would encourage schools to reopen.

“Anything short of 100 percent online is the direction that we’re headed,” Cuccinelli said. “This is now setting the rules for one semester, which we'll finalize later this month that will, again, encourage schools to reopen."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce blasted the plan as “ill-conceived” and harmful to businesses. On Friday, a coalition of Christian groups, including the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the National Association of Evangelicals and Bethany Christian Services, said that international students shouldn’t be expelled from U.S. campuses during the pandemic.

“We believe the proposed temporary student visa rule violates tenets of our faith to ‘not mistreat the foreigner’ (Lev. 19:33) but to love these neighbors as ourselves (Lev. 19:34, Matt. 22:39),” the group led by the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship wrote in a letter to the Department of Homeland Security.

Harvard and MIT sued this week to halt the policy from taking effect, and a federal judge could determine if that occurs as early as Tuesday. Johns Hopkins University and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra have filed separate suits.

Taking one more punch at higher education, Trump tweeted Friday that he instructed the Treasury Department to review the tax-exempt status of U.S. schools, colleges and universities.

"Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education," Trump tweeted.

"Therefore, I am telling the Treasury Department to re-examine their Tax-Exempt Status...... and/or Funding, which will be taken away if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues. Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!"

The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.

The administration says returning to school is in the best interest of kids’ social and emotional development but also economic revival, considered essential to Trump’s reelection prospects in November.

Trump needs support from women and suburban voters in his reelection bid against Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee. Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, spoke on Fox News Friday about the bind that parents are in as they try to balance work and kids at home.

“You talk to a single working mom, she's got to send her kid to school, the kids at home, she can't go to work, she may not be able to afford help,” he said. “It's also true with working folks who are two-person families and I think that's an important part of this.”

But teachers unions, parents and other education leaders have said they need more funding to reopen safely and that Trump’s political priorities will put children and educators in harm’s way. “Public health agencies must make recommendations based on evidence, not politics," said Friday's statement from the pediatricians, teachers unions and superintendents.

Pediatricians split with Trump on school reopening threats

"If Disney World can be open, so can our schools," an administration spokesperson said.


Teachers unions, parents and other education leaders have said they need more funding to reopen safely and that Trump’s political priorities will put children and educators in harm’s way. | Getty Images


By NICOLE GAUDIANO

07/10/2020

The American Academy of Pediatrics is joining teachers unions and school superintendents in blasting Trump administration threats to withhold federal funds from schools that do not fully reopen, splitting with the president even as he tweeted again on Friday that schools "must be open in the Fall."

The alignment of the children's doctors with unions and superintendents is significant, following a week in which the Trump administration widely touted an earlier report from pediatricians that "strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school."

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The doctors said Friday that a “one-size-fits-all approach is not appropriate” for decision making.

“Withholding funding from schools that do not open in person fulltime would be a misguided approach, putting already financially strapped schools in an impossible position that would threaten the health of students and teachers,” the pediatricians wrote in a statement with the American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association and AASA, The School Superintendents Association.

While the statement does not specifically refer to President Donald Trump, it follows a week in which Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have issued federal funding threats as part of an administration-wide push to get schools to reopen for in-person classes, which is widely seen as critical to jump-starting the economy ahead of the presidential election.

On Friday, Trump tweeted, “Now that we have witnessed it on a large scale basis, and firsthand, Virtual Learning has proven to be TERRIBLE compared to In School, or On Campus, Learning. Not even close! Schools must be open in the Fall. If not open, why would the Federal Government give Funding? It won’t!!!”

White House spokesperson Judd Deere, responding to the groups' statement, said, "If unions and misguided local leaders are going to hold schools hostage, putting our children’s mental and social development in jeopardy, President Trump is not going to waste taxpayer dollars."

Highlighting Disney World's phased reopening, beginning Saturday, amid the coronavirus surge in Florida, his statement continued, "If Disney World can be open so can our schools and this Administration will work in partnership to provide the resources and guidance needed for higher education institutions as well as local school districts to do that."

The administration agrees "the science is clear" that it's "better and healthier" for kids to return to school this fall, Education Department spokesperson Liz Hill said in a statement.

"Schools that are willing to provide a full school year of learning and be fully operational have no risk of losing funding," she said. "But should a school choose to neglect its responsibility to educate students, they should not receive taxpayer money for a job that’s not being done. Schools can and must reopen safely, and the federal government will provide the resources, flexibilities and guidance needed for local leaders to make that happen."

Teachers unions, parents and other education leaders have said they need more funding to reopen safely and that Trump’s political priorities will put children and educators in harm’s way.

The Friday statement, led by the academy, says reopening schools in a way that maximizes safety, learning and the well-being of students and teachers “will clearly require substantial new investments in our schools and campuses.”

The groups called on Congress and the administration to provide the federal resources to ensure that “inadequate funding does not stand in the way of safely educating and caring for children in our schools.”

The groups stressed the importance of learning in a classroom, but said reopening should be pursued in a safe way and with public health experts, education leaders and parents at the center of decisions. Schools in areas with high levels of Covid-19 community spread, for example, “should not be compelled to reopen” against local experts’ judgment.

“Public health agencies must make recommendations based on evidence, not politics,” they said. “We should leave it to health experts to tell us when the time is best to open up school buildings, and listen to educators and administrators to shape how we do it.”

Michael Stratford contributed to this report.