ABSTRACT
The police, Los Angeles civil rights lawyer Loren Miller explained after the 1965 Watts uprising, operated as an arm of the state that occupied Black neighborhoods and enforced a racially segregated and hierarchical social order. The police, Los Angeles civil rights lawyer Loren Miller explained after the 1965 Watts uprising, operated as an arm of the state that occupied Black neighborhoods and enforced a racially segregated and hierarchical social order. While this scholarship has broadened understandings of the relationship between the 1960s urban uprisings and the politics of law and order, most of these studies place the police as one among many factors and do contextualize the uprisings as anti-police protests that grew out of specific, daily grievances with the postwar deployment of the police power in cities. Police violence set the historical context for the urban uprisings of the 1960s. It emphasized the perpetuation of a racialized social order based on white control, containment of Black people and spaces.
