Stuart Schrader’s BLUE POWER with Philip V. McHarris

Word Up welcomes historian Stuart Schrader to discuss his new book  Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves (out April 14, 2026), a history of police unions that reveals how American law enforcement built a political movement that made cops untouchable. In conversation with Schrader will be Philip V. McHarris, author of Beyond Policing. 

“Stuart Schrader’s sweeping history of the political mobilization of the police makes clear just how historically distinctive the role of the police in our society is today. Blue Power chronicles the rise of the police as a political force, and the lobbying strategies, rhetorical campaigns, and legal gambits police unions and associations have deployed to protect the power and autonomy of their members. This has indelibly shaped not only American cities and criminal justice policies, but our society and politics as a whole. The book is a remarkable achievement.”—Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all time.

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Despite nation-wide protests following the murder of George Floyd, killings by police have increased every year since 2020, a chilling reminder that they continue to hold unmitigated power over the people. American police receive benefits not available to other unionized government employees—expungement of disciplinary findings, higher wages, access to attorneys, etc.—but all these protections are less than 50 years old, the result of a decades-long battle for political power that started in the 1960s. In BLUE POWER, historian Stuart Schrader provides a biography of the police as a political force. Through lobbying, campaign donations, political rallies, media blitzes, and—in some cases—bullying, deception, blackmail, and intimidation, the American police have become more lethal, better compensated, and less effective at crime control.

Recognizing the police as a political force helps us understand our country’s dramatic political transformation over the past few decades: nearly every part of our government has undergone some level of fiscal austerity and privatization, a movement police supported so long as they were exempt from cuts. Today, the police are major contributors to Trump’s coalition and endorse his authoritarianism. Schrader exposes the massive (though often disorganized) effort by police to assemble themselves into an aggregate force in American politics, with deleterious effects to liberalism and public safety. BLUE POWER warns us that the police will always be able to stop or weaken movements for democracy, racial equality, and freedom unless or until there is a meaningful check on the police’s political power.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Stuart Schrader is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, where he directs the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism. He is also the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. He lives in Brooklyn.

Philip V. McHarris is an assistant professor in the Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. McHarris was a presidential postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University in the Department of African American Studies and the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. He earned his PhD in sociology and African American studies at Yale University. He was named one of the Root 100s Most Influential African Americans in 2020. McHarris has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and PBS and in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and more.

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