The Patrolmen’s Revolt: Chicago Police and the Labor and Urban Crises of the Late Twentieth Century By Megan Marie Adams A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Robin Einhorn, Chair Professor Richard Candida-Smith Professor Kim Voss Fall 2012 1 Abstract The Patrolmen’s Revolt: Chicago Police and the Labor and Urban Crises of the Late Twentieth Century by Megan Marie Adams Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Robin Einhorn, Chair My dissertation uncovers a history of labor insurgency and civil rights activism organized by the lowest-ranking members of the Chicago police. From 1950 to 1984, dissenting police throughout the city reinvented themselves as protesters, workers, and politicians. Part of an emerging police labor movement, Chicago’s police embodied a larger story where, in an era of “law and order” politics, cities and police departments lost control of their police officers. My research shows how the collective action and political agendas of the Chicago police undermined the city’s Democratic machine and unionized an unlikely group of workers during labor’s steep decline. On the other hand, they both perpetuated and protested against racial inequalities in the city. To reconstruct the political realities and working lives of the Chicago police, the dissertation draws extensively from new and unprocessed archival sources, including aldermanic papers, records of the Afro-American Patrolman’s League, and previously unused collections documenting police rituals and subcultures. Archives across the city have also yielded internal police department documents including memos, minutes, training materials, and anti-police union literature as well as decades of correspondence and periodicals generated by Chicago’s rank and file police organizations. The dissertation follows a rough chronology over the course of three decades. It examines the key results of institutional changes that divided the police rank and file from the rest of the department hierarchy, creating new spaces for dissent by both white and black police. Organized black police launched a civil rights campaign to reform the department from within. Majority- white police organizations challenged longstanding loyalties within Chicago’s Democratic machine. The wives of Chicago’s police also played important roles. They acted as their husbands’ advocates and proxies in disputes with the department and, in what they saw as their own interests, vigorously opposed efforts to establish gender equality on the police force. Police sued the city, picketed the department, called strikes, and eventually unionized in 1980. Having recast themselves as workers with labor rights, police turned their attention to Chicago politics, participating in hotly-contested city elections as voters, campaigners, and candidates. i Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………….ii Acknowledgments…………………...………………………………………………………x Chapter 1…………………………………………………………………………………….1 More Soldier than Civilian: The Reform and Rebellion of the Chicago Police, 1952-1968 Chapter 2……………………………………………………………………………………23 Black Power through the Law: The Afro-American Patrolmen’s League and the Chicago Police Department, 1968-1976 Chapter 3……………………………………………………………………………………49 If Miranda had been a Police Officer: The Chicago Police, Discipline, and the Bill of Rights, 1966-1981 Chapter 4……………………………………………………………………………………71 “The Feminine Arm of the Law”: Police Wives, Policewomen, and Gender Politics in the Chicago Police Department, 1950-1984 Chapter 5……………………………………………………………………………………94 From Public Servants to Public Employees: Organized Labor and the Chicago Police in the Late Twentieth Century Chapter 6……………………………………………………………………………………112 Representing the Police: Chicago’s Patrolmen in Campaigns and Elections, 1980-1984 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..133 ii Introduction For anyone who has been keeping track of the crimes committed by the Chicago police over the past century—including the shooting of striking workers and their families during the Memorial Day Massacre of 1931, the violence against protesters during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the 1969 killing of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, and more recently, the trial and conviction of John Burge, a former Chicago police commander who tortured and abused over one hundred African-American criminal suspects during the 1970s and 1980s—it is easy to see the history of the Chicago police department as one driven principally by violence and racism. 1 Other, more systemic, crimes perpetrated by members of the Chicago police over the past decades have also involved routine theft, extortion schemes, and thousands upon thousands of acts of police brutality. Yet amidst this violence and criminal activity, the Chicago police also engaged in a drastic, but relatively peaceful transformation in the late twentieth century. During these years the lowest-ranking members of the Chicago police department changed from a force that cracked down on labor uprisings into a group of workers that organized collective action. Police who beat demonstrators in the streets also staged their own public protests over political and workplace issues. The same police who violated the civil rights of Chicago citizens became advocates for protecting their own constitutional rights. Police served as frequent witnesses in court, but by the 1970s they had become the plaintiffs in lawsuits filed against the city and police department. The police who had long acted as the armed guardians of Chicago’s political order became, by the 1980s, active participants in the city’s elections as voters, campaigners, and candidates. Though the Chicago police have been historically, and in many ways accurately, cast as the violent perpetrators of urban America, they also continued to remake themselves as workers, activists, and politicians well into the twenty-first century. This is not a story that redeems the Chicago police, but one that investigates how the new civic identity and labor agendas of Chicago’s lowest-ranking police can reframe narratives of the post-war urban crisis, the dominance of Chicago’s Democratic machine, and labor’s decline in the late twentieth century. Historians have explored the operations of public and financial institutions like the Home Owners Loan Corporation or the Chicago Housing authority to investigate the roots of the post-war urban segregation, poverty, and failed public housing. 2 But 1 Richard Lindberg’s To Serve and Collect: Chicago Politics and Police Corruption from the Lager Beer Riot to the Summerdale Scandal, 1855-1960 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998) offers a comprehensive account of police scandals from the late nineteenth century through the Summerdale Scandal of 1960. For a play-by- play account of police decision-making and conduct during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, see David Farber, Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1988). For in-depth coverage of the Burge case, especially for the trial and other developments of the past decade, see John Conroy, “Police Torture in Chicago: An archive of articles by John Conroy on police torture, John Burge, and related issues,” Chicago Reader, October 8, 2009, www.chicagoreader.com. 2 Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2004); D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). iii there has been less focus on how the internal workings of police departments or the politics of police themselves perpetuated some of the key components of urban inequality, including disparities in police service and the increased threat of police violence in minority neighborhoods. The development of police politics in Chicago illuminates not only the ways that specific department policies and attitudes among police enabled unequal police protection and persistent brutality against citizens, but also that many of the conflicts of the postwar urban crisis unfolded differently inside the police department than they did in the city at large. Understanding the police as historical actors complicates narratives about their role as antagonists in the urban crisis, and in the case of Chicago, upends their depiction as the henchmen of the Chicago Democratic machine. 3 While police committed regular violent attacks on black citizens in Chicago, a major organization of black police called the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL) mobilized a campaign against police brutality and advocated for victims of police violence. Challenging the department from within, members of the AAPL filed thousands of complaints against their own colleagues while the department and city scrambled to defend police from brutality accusations. Police forces are often characterized as insular, clannish groups, and though the majority of the Chicago police were demographically homogenous, significant divides between and among different racial and ethnic groups in the department make it difficult to characterize the Chicago police rank and file as though they were a