Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves is about how internal conflicts within the profession of policing have shaped the external influence police exert on politics more broadly in the United States. It shows how police have shaped and altered politics at the municipal, state, and national levels. To write this book, which I published in April, I relied heavily on police-produced sources to pry open what is usually a black box. The book reveals the fractures and factions within police departments, and the organizations and institutions that have developed to represent different interests within the profession, including police unions.
Although some journalists and legal and labor experts have managed to explain these hidden forces and their outward consequences, for the most part, until recently, historians have not explored police unions and their impact on American politics. Police unions do not generally leave behind easily accessible archival records. Yet almost all big police unions have produced newsletters or magazines for their members. I was able to access this type of source in a few cities, enabling me to examine how leaders talk to other police as members of politically engaged organizations, including how they exhort each other to action. I quote these political exhortations liberally in the book.
But Blue Power is critical. Like most historians of policing, I wanted to find some way to balance the police voice. One reason was simply to avoid monotony, jargon, and the clotted circumlocution that characterizes police prose. Aside from how the text would read, it was also a twofold question of politics: what were the effects of police political mobilizations and how did other actors assess political activities of police?
Thus, I also tried to trace some responses to political mobilizations by police, including those that explicitly named police unions as a foe. These criticisms came from organizations on the Left, particularly Maoist, Trotskyist, Black nationalist, and Third Worldist groups in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The radical and underground press offered a tonic; no less vociferous than the police publications I used but from a diametrically opposed perspective.
Still, the radical press, particularly sectarian newspapers, can get a little predictable. For every insightful analysis of the political machinations of a police benevolent association, there were three denunciations of the role of the police in preserving capitalist class power at a moment of economic crisis. True enough, but not my object of study. I thus turned to another type of source I knew well: music.
The book is not a cultural history, meant to examine music as such. But I tried to use music, particularly both songs about cops and songs written by cops, as a source to explain both the context and the content of the movement I call Blue Power. In the process of putting together the book, I reflected on what type of evidence music could provide and how it could enliven, sharpen, and expand my analysis.
Below is a brief annotated playlist of sorts, including both songs mentioned in the book and others that didn’t quite make the cut.
Red Simpson, “Sidewalk Patrol”
Blue Power illustrates the laborious efforts that police leaders have made over the decades to unify the profession. These have not always succeeded, and when unity emerges, it tends to be fleeting. Beyond the division between command and rank and file officers, which the book emphasizes, there are also many different types of police agencies in the country, often with differing responsibilities and jurisdictions that cover varying geographies. The rural sheriff, whose operations can cover hundreds of miles of lonesome road, may not see much benefit in funding from Washington for intensive “community policing” in dense cities. Getting all these different constituencies on board with legislative initiatives has been a repeated challenge that the book examines.
One of the most perceptive overviews of the variegated landscape of policing that I have encountered appears on a country album: Red Simpson’s 1966 “The Man Behind the Badge.” Simpson exemplified the sound that came to be known as Bakersfield country, a more spare and hardscrabble approach, appropriate for the dusty, working-class crossroads of Bakersfield, California, in contrast to the more lush and well-produced Nashville sound at the time. Simpson wrote a good number of tracks about trucking, but any trucker would be familiar with the highway patrol, which Simpson mentioned in at least a quarter of the tracks on “The Man Behind the Badge.” The album, however, goes beyond the highway patrol and the sheriff to include songs like “The City Police” and “Sidewalk Patrol.” The listener starts to get a comprehensive view of the different types of police agencies.
Though generally admiring, Simpson did not offer unalloyed praise of police, and he tried to illustrate the realities of life behind the badge. My favorite track on the record is “Sidewalk Patrol,” from the perspective of a relatively fresh recruit who is “jumpy” while “looking out for prowlers on the midnight scene.” He pulls his gun on his own reflection! Released in 1966, this album came out at the dawn of both law-and-order politics and the Blue Power movement that would translate those politics into bounty for police.
The Left, “Youngster on the Force”
Almost two decades later, a hardcore punk band from Hagerstown, Maryland, called The Left also described the overcompensating and tough posturing of a rookie cop in “Youngster on the Force.” This acerbic song was one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of songs about police that emerged from the U.S. hardcore punk movement between 1980 and 1984. Young miscreants in this anti-establishment scene often experienced police harassment and abuse, which they recounted in their lyrics. The Left offered a crisp, unique sound, amid a genre full of copycats. The track is instantly memorable. I previously wrote in The Abusable Past about how the punk movement in general was one of the cultural outlets for left-wing and oppositional political energy that was blocked by state repression, the collapse of the labor movement, and neoliberalization. A band called The Left encapsulates this argument almost too perfectly.
Really Red, “Teaching You the Fear”
In Blue Power, I took note of hardcore punk band art and lyrics because punks and cops were in a constant scrum. The most pointed example was the police union lawsuit filed against the Houston band AK-47 for their song “The Badge Means You Suck,” which lampooned a new slogan of the city’s police department. But AK-47 was not the only Houston band to catalog incidents by this notoriously brutal and racist police force. Really Red did so as well, in its track “Teaching You the Fear.” The name Really Red, like The Left, evokes the more culturally oriented pathway that radical politics was taking by the 1980s (though band members would disagree on what the name actually meant). The band was prolific and hard-working. “Teaching You the Fear” was the title track of the band’s first album (the second album was posthumous). Writer and collector Ryan Richardson declared, “I don’t know of a more original, enduring U.S. punk full-length.” The track is a creepy, nervy tune about how Black, Chicano, and queer people in Houston had been victimized by the police. It argues that incidents of abuse served as a perverse form of pedagogy, teaching Houstonians not to step out of line, not to be different. In this way, the track registers how police killings ripple across society, affecting many more people than the victims and their loved ones.
Hot Pursuit, “DARE Song”
Of course, cops offered their own rejoinder to criticisms, including on the terrain of popular culture. Going back to the 1970s, police started to put together pop- and rock-oriented bands, rather than the more traditional bagpipe or marching bands that grew out of earlier ethnic associations and military influences. Most of these “cop rock” bands were primarily live acts, but a few did release records. Often with cheeky names, many of these bands were funded by their departments or adjacent charity groups like Police-Athletic Leagues, with concerts played while on duty and in uniform. These bands were part of a broader revolution in public relations that police departments undertook in the period (which deserves a historical monograph of its own). A 1978 article in Police Magazine, which was funded by the Police Foundation (itself backed by the Ford Foundation), focused on a St. Louis band called The Grand Fuzz but also enumerated other cop bands like Denver’s Squad Four and Detroit’s Blue Pigs (also called Les Cochons Bleus). The few records released by cop bands are mostly forgettable, though one LP of cover tunes by Cops Ltd. from Yakima, Washington, has become a sought-after collectors’ item because it’s got an outsider, almost accidentally psychedelic vibe. (Jello Biafra, sarcastic singer of punk band Dead Kennedys, whom I also discuss in the book, has praised that LP as “horrendous.”)
I mention Hot Pursuit, a police band from Columbus, Ohio, in Blue Power. Emerging a bit later than these other bands, Hot Pursuit took advantage of the tough-on-crime surge around the country at the end of the 80s and into the ‘90s, even securing a gig at the White House. Their album “Communicate” is utterly forgettable boogie pop, but they cashed in on the “drug abuse resistance education” craze, better known as DARE, to release a well-produced music video for an edgy new track about the narcotics scourge. It was distributed on VHS tape, funded by the Borden snack company. This tune and the video, in contrast to the album, are undoubtedly memorable. One of the comments on the video on YouTube reads: “This song is still stuck in my head from 5th grade. Unfortunately, all it did was make me WANT to do drugs…” The terrain of culture, cops would learn, was a terrain of struggle, and listeners decoded musical messages according to their own, often oppositional, frameworks.
Toddy Tee, “Batter Ram”
Other than hardcore punk, the most robust musical critique of police in the United States appears in rap. It’s likely there are even more songs across the hip-hop landscape about police encounters than in punk (reggae, largely from Jamaica and the United Kingdom, is also replete with tracks about police). The most famous is “Fuck tha Police” by NWA, but it was far from the first track from Los Angeles to reproach police tactics. The sheer pervasiveness of these critiques of police practices in rap lyrics suggests a pattern of racist police abuse that exceeds what social-scientific data could demonstrate. Especially in Los Angeles, which would turn out to be a powderkeg, rappers grew specific, providing a form of visceral archival evidence. Some songs named particular police tactics and operations. Not only commentary, this was grassroots, guerrilla reportage.
For instance, around four years before the release of NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” LP, Toddy Tee released the track “Batter Ram,” about a new tank-like vehicle in the LAPD’s arsenal that had battering ram extending from the turret instead of a cannon. The track originally circulated on a cassette single, with a sleeve that reproduced an image of the vehicle, which the police department was using to break down doors of alleged drug houses. The song is also notable as an illustration of the transition that hip-hop was experiencing in the mid-1980s, from the playful and boastful rhyming lyrics of the early generation to the more realistic, in media res social commentary that would emerge in the second half of the decade. The song’s electronic rhythm bears affinities with earlier rap tracks, predating the sample-heavy sound that would soon come to dominate. Yet what makes the track really stand out is its revelation of what was happening on the ground in “race-class subjugated communities” across Los Angeles. Only a couple scholars of policing have attended to the arrival of this particular weapon. Decades earlier, Toddy Tee was sounding the alarm about how bad things were getting with the LAPD.
Le Tigre, “Bang! Bang!”
My first book, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing,concluded in the mid-1970s, a few years before I was born. One aspect of the research for Blue Power that I enjoyed, by contrast, was revisiting episodes I recalled from my own life, now from the perspective of a historian, with access to a range of publications and archival records I never saw at the time. Yet, beyond getting the details right and cross-checking facts, I also wanted to recall the feeling, the atmosphere of particular moments, like the 1999 fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo by members of the “Street Crime Unit” of the NYPD, who fired 41 shots at the unarmed Guinean immigrant. This killing palpably changed everyday life in the city. For instance, after Diallo was killed while pulling out his wallet, many Black and Brown New Yorkers started wearing wallets on lanyards around their necks. This was both symbolic and practical: the idea was that, if a cop stopped you, you didn’t have to reach into your pocket for your ID. The killing also intensified ongoing social protest that I discuss in the book. Music, for many people, brings their own past experiences to the front of their mind. One sonic madeleine of that moment is Le Tigre’s “Bang! Bang!” This pounding, intense song explicitly references Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and police killings in New York City, including Diallo’s shooting. It concludes with a moving, indelible chant, a gang chorus counting to 41.
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Beyond sharing some songs I love that intersected with the research for Blue Power, I hope to encourage historians to consider heterodox sources. Many have grown accustomed to searching for unusual material on eBay (that is where I learned about the Hot Pursuit VHS tape). The problem with using eBay, beyond the cost of obtaining material, is that the site is ephemeral. Although some other sites archive past eBay auctions, these are not always reliable or complete. When it comes to music, we are now blessed with having huge amounts of material at our fingertips, including on YouTube or streaming services. Again, this is not always reliable, and links rot or content disappears (which could happen to songs I’ve included here). And even though the ease of access can itself be misleading for making sense of dissemination of music in the past, streaming services do not contain everything, especially more obscure bands. With what they do include, moreover, the music is decontextualized. There is no comparison between an LP with its sleeve and a digital track in an app with a tiny picture of an album cover.
Although some university and public libraries unfortunately have deaccessioned a lot of music over the years, others are turning back to it. For example, the Brooklyn Public Library will now allow patrons to borrow LPs from its burgeoning collection (it’s very well curated!). And the Center or Popular Music, an archive at Middle Tennessee State University, has recently acquired the famous Maximum Rocknroll record collection, the largest agglomeration of punk records in the world.
I encourage all radical historians to use music to supplement or complement more traditional types of sources. Not only can it evoke a moment or even an era, but music has long been a tool and a site of sociopolitical contestation. To cultural historians, this is no revelation, but political historians ignore culture at their own peril. Besides, even if your scholarship has no room for music, isn’t your day improved by singing along at the top of your lungs in your office while you’re “doing research”?
AUTHOR BIO
Stuart Schrader published his first punk fanzine, titled Disturbing the Peace, in 1994. He published his first scholarly monograph, titled Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, twenty-five years later, in 2019. His new book, Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, was published in April 2026 by Basic Books.