Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves

by Stuart Schrader

A history of police unions that reveals how American law enforcement built a political movement that made cops untouchable.

“A tour de force ... Read it now.” —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography
 
In America today, police enjoy unmatched power. On the streets, officers employ violence at their own discretion. Behind closed doors, they are even more powerful. In city halls, police strong-arm local leaders and nullify attempts at public oversight. And in state legislatures and Washington, DC, police lobbyists and union leaders zealously uphold a bipartisan consensus against even mild reform. Yet as recently as fifty years ago, police still served at the pleasure of democratically elected politicians, not the other way around. In Blue Power, Stuart Schrader narrates the rise of a bottom-up movement of rank-and-file officers who lifted policing above the law.   
 
Organizers launched their campaign in the 1960s, courting a public backlash to urban uprisings and civil rights. City by city, county by county, they formed unions and other organizations and won control over working conditions, impunity from oversight, and insulation from lean budgets. By the 2000s, this movement had triumphed nationally, shoring up the power of the police to overrule the public interest in the name of law and order.
 
Through deep archival detective work, Blue Power reveals how police forced American democracy to back the blue. 

Genres: History, Nonfiction

350 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 14, 2026

Reviews

[sniksnak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through lawful lobbying, strategic political endorsements, and impactful public advocacy, police organizations played a pivotal role in advancing law and order policies. They secured collective bargaining rights in numerous jurisdictions and shielded departments from detrimental budget cuts and excessive oversight. This advocacy is crucial in empowering law enforcement to maintain public safety, deter crime, and uphold the rule of law during challenging times.
From my pro-police perspective, the book is a compelling success story of committed professionals exercising their rights to defend an essential, high-risk profession. Strong police associations have been instrumental in preserving officer morale, experience, and effectiveness, acting as a vital counterweight to policies that could jeopardize both police and the communities they protect.
As someone who prioritizes public safety, I greatly appreciate the details of organizational strategies, viewing police advocacy as responsible self-defense rather than overreach.

**I would like to express my gratitude to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review. Published April 14, 2026.
#ARC
#NetGalley
#BluePower

[Judd Street · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association treated an evenhanded approach to its demands as inherent bias against it. Anything less than preferential treatment... was unacceptable. Cops were always the victims, and everyone else but cops benefited from patronage. (p. 302)

But when protesters confronting cops in riot formation find themselves chanting "Who do you serve? Who do you protect?" the answer is not only the power of the titans of capital. It is also Blue Power. And achieving real justice in this country will become possible only once that power is shattered. (p. 351)

Blue Power is a really interesting and comprehensive examination of the labour organizing history of American policing forces. From Detroit in the 1930s and 40s to the impact of Trump and MAGA on policing labour organizing, Schrader has done a very impressive job of exploring the fitful progress towards organized labour.

To tell the story in brief, the police have long struggled as an entity with trying to unionize for a variety of reasons. Some of this stems from intrinsic tensions between the police officers themselves (who would, at times, like to be protected as employees) and the chiefs (who quite like having an ample degree of discretion in terms of their control as managers). Some stems from the fact that the police are generally used to /break/ unions, protests, and organized labour, and so struggle tremendously to embrace the same tools (and to be embraced in that world) (see, for example, an attempt by Baltimore to align with other public sector workers, p. 97; or the realization that they would frequently be called upon to arrest other Teamsters for making the same asks they were happy to make for themselves, p. 172). Still more comes from the fractured policing landscape, such as tensions between urban and rural, police and sheriffs, etc, which resulted in fragmented associations cropping up and often landing in different places on key issues. As a result, it really wasn't until the MAGA culture wars that policing unions consolidated in the way we now see: unified across many associations in a particular politic, and bringing together both front-liners and brass in this charged worldview.

Indeed, what we discover is "how readily police unified around cultural issues rather than material ones" (p. 240). One such example is the obsession with violence against police officers, wherein the risk police face is routinely blown out of proportion versus other much more dangerous professions. Yet, despite this, it becomes a total fixation and preoccupation, demanding radical suspension of judicial process (e.g., guaranteed life sentences for anyone who threatens a cop) and a commitment to turning a blind eye to the violence police enact against themselves and civilians. We see the emergence of "mawkish spectacles [perfecting] the practices of honouring injured and slain officers" (p. 248) (I'm always blown away by the degree to which cops believe all of society should pause for a motorcade to honour one of theirs, a luxury that would never be afforded to an average citizen).

One of the things I find most interesting is the exploration of how police use the withholding of labour to advance their position, such as work-to-rule, a refusal to write tickets, etc. This is a tricky line to walk, as it offers the benefits of a strike but risks showing that the police themselves are not that useful (p. 53). Indeed, the amazing thing is that the police have managed to entirely insulate themselves from any need to demonstrate their effectiveness, as there appears to be very little relationship between investment, strikes, etc and the actual on-the-ground occurrence of crime. I should know: in my home city, the policy have all but given up on writing traffic tickets, and indeed are themselves regular violators of these laws (e.g., police have an incredibly high proportion of illegal licence plate covers). But, police are masters a wielding the threatening spectre of "if you didn't have us, this would be a lawless wasteland!" and somehow being believed every time. As he says, "...we would do better to recognize - and refuse - how police instrumentalize crime levels and reporting. Crime becomes a political barometer, setting priorities and shaping the conditions of possibility for action in the political arena. (p. 347).

Another really interesting contribution, at least for those of us not already in the world of critical policing studies, is tracing the strands of reformism vs alternative approaches in this labour context. Reformism, generally speaking, tends to be the left-of-centre approach these days, where increasingly technical fixes (e.g., body cams, better training, DEI in hiring) is believed to help solve the problems of policing. This doesn't hold up, of course, (e.g., "nonwhite cops were willing and able to police Black people just as vigorously as white cops," p. 115). We get a familiar cast of characters of Democratic Party ilk throughout the book (hi, Obama and Biden) as happy to kowtow towards police at any chance they get, yet having no answer at all for the fact that reformism has nothing to offer the racist, violent foundation of policing (p. 273).

I also appreciate the occasional nod to the way that, especially in the wake of 9/11, police were happy to benefit from the category of "first responders" (p. 293), which allows them to launder their reputation by affiliating with fire, EMS, and the like, while being perfectly happy to not want to see themselves as the equals of these fellow local government employees when it comes to labour negotiations or compensation. The solidarity is paper thin.

By 9/11, we really begin to get the world where police unions have become fully and explicitly political, and where a degree of class solidarity comes together under the "thin blue line" consciousness. By 2001, cops begin to "[vow] destruction - political destruction" (p. 298) to politicians who won't worship them. Police, like Trump, have mastered "Extravagant, ritualistic incantation substituted for policy. This performance was exorbitant to achieving any concrete social goal, just like Blue Power" (p. 341).

Where I think the volume ends up falling a little short of what I had hoped to read is with respect to moving beyond the labour organizing into exploring police power. These other elements of power consolidation are really only explored insofar as they interact with labour organizing, which is useful to his analysis, but a little narrower than what I was hoping for given the title of the book. My hunch, sociologically, is that labour is an important stream in understanding Blue Power, but only one of several sources of the creation, consolidation, and maintenance of this power.

Schrader does a great job in terms of sketching out the contours of this power, including the ways that police receive "incredible levels of insulation from investigation and punishment for wrongdoing," at a huge expense to the taxpayer and often involving suing those they've wronged (p. 3). When they're accused of wrongdoing, for course, "cops [want] the due process, access to lawyers, and benefit of the doubt that they only reluctantly afforded people they arrested" (p. 119) and for proceedings to be kept private, unlike the parading of perps they're delighted to do to others (p. 128). But, this story is always a little tangential to organized labour (e.g., the associations and unions are happy to support it from time to time, unevenly between cop and manager associations) and we never really get any depth outside from how it interactions with unionization.

While formal labour unions have recently become a key part of shoring up this power, a great deal of the construction and maintenance of this power over society would seem, to me, to come from places other than organized labour. At various times, for example, he introduces the concept of "discretion" in the "initial, irreversible decision cops make on the street" (p. 6). Discretion seems to cut two ways, both in terms of wanting the ability to play god in choosing how to treat people on the street (e.g., professional courtesy cards, where cops can bestow get-out-of-jail-free cards to family and friends that all but guarantee that they will not be charged with the crime they have committed, p. 312), but also wanting discretion in dealing with cop discipline, as discretion around prior incidents often results in downgrading of punishment when inappropriate behaviour finally makes it into an accepted complaint (p. 183).

He also gives a nod to the ways that "the insularity of police departments" (p. 18) where he cites another author talking about the closed, hermetically sealed society of cops) creates this power. Because even early unions were not plugged into broader organized labour, this isolation - and the resulting teachings to rely on other cops and other cops only - reinforced the cult-ish wagon circling of police institutions. And, isolation ends up being mutually reinforcing with discretion, resulting in a cohesion "defined by high internal loyalty among officers at the same rank" (p. 19).

And, we get a few other factors mentioned, like civil forfeiture (p. 212-213) and the way that the MAGA-era inclusion of border patrol into the policing world has really changed the tone (shoutout to the over 10,000 people who have lost their lives along the US border, p. 330). He also notes how police "operational power is impervious to any democratic controls" (p. 346), but we never really get into that either.

So, in sum, I'd heartily recommend this book. But, I'd warn the reader that it is a little thinner than the title seems to promise in terms of understanding Blue Power. It's a fantastic history of labour organizing among police, but it needs to be in a larger stack of books to understand the genesis and maintenance of Blue Power as a whole.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rise Of The Political Cop. Nearly 15 yrs ago now, when Michael Brown still had almost exactly a year left in his life, Radley Balko released a seminal history of the rise of the militarized police force in the United States he titled Rise Of The Warrior Cop. In it, he traced the history of policing in the American tradition all the way from its origins as the 'Shire Reef' in feudal England to its then most modern incarnations. (He has also released an updated version of this book in the last couple of years.)

Here, Schrader does for police unions what Balko did for police militarization, though Shrader's historical focus is more explicitly limited to the last century or so with only brief mentions of prior periods - including the aforementioned 'Shire Reef'.

Detailed and decently documented, with its bibliography clocking in at a reasonable 22%, this is yet another book that anyone concerned with the amount of power police wield in modern America will want to read. Schrader does a great job of showing how we got to this point via both intentional machinations... and some sheer dumb luck for those pushing for more unionization of police. Yet despite being a Johns Hopkins professor, this doesn't really read as an academic tome. Dense, yes, with a *lot* of facts and names and dates, but also decently readable even for those less academically inclined.

Overall a truly solid look at a facet of policing in America that some talk about yet virtually no one understands the history of, this will absolutely fill in that gap for any who care to read it. It also happens to be reasonably balanced, so while there may be annoyances here or there depending on one's own politics, there isn't really anything here that seemingly anyone will be looking for the highest possible window to use for defenestration purposes.

Very much recommended.

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

I was looking forward to this one for months pre-publication, and ended up disappointed. The focus was completely on politics and police fraternal organizations. When my audiobook ended, I actually thought the file was corrupted, because it just seemed to stop. I checked the length, and it was exactly the length it was supposed to be. Prose as dry as dust, and it did not provide the coverage of corruption I was hoping for.