How Cops Consolidated So Much Power Over Local Governments

Even before his historic election as New York City’s mayor in November 2025, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani had https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/nyregion/mamdani-nypd.html">reportedly begun searching for “common ground” with the city’s rank-and-file police officers.

He publicly apologized for prior statements describing the department as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” and for an earlier endorsement of defunding the police.

He also signaled his “openness” to keeping Eric Adams’s NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch—a plan which he has since honored—despite her https://thebaffler.com/latest/ceding-ground-winston">reputation as a law-and-order booster for “quality of life” policing, an opponent of bail reform, and a fierce defender of the city’s Strategic Response Group, a police unit known for its violent repression of protests since its creation in 2015, among other disreputable credentials.

While Mamdani’s campaign featured a proposal to create a new Department of Community Safety, which would expand the city’s use of non-police “violence interrupters” and mental health professionals for nonviolent calls for intervention, he https://theintercept.com/2025/11/05/zohran-mamdani-mayor-police-reform-nypd/">tactically avoided making police reform, and especially https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2025/07/opinion-mamdanis-test-policing/407018/">police accountability, a central flank of his campaign. 

Mamdani’s reticence is not merely reflective of electoral calculation.

It’s also the product of what historian Stuart Schrader, in his commanding new book https://bookshop.org/p/books/blue-power-how-police-organized-to-protect-and-serve-themselves-stuart-schrader/19ef20a515ab81ab">Blue Power, defines as the phrase he uses for his title: the massive, impenetrable edifice of political might that cops wield through their unions and professional organizations.

Through adopting and perverting methods of agitation honed by labor unions, such as collective bargaining, work slowdowns, strikes, and campaign organizing, police muscled their way to gain control over local and federal governments, “exerting,” as Schrader writes, “a veto power over democracy.”

It’s now relatively understood that the institution of policing, with roots in both Southern slave patrols and in Northern efforts to discipline Black and immigrant labor, is a purveyor of racialized state violence.

But cops do not passively enforce orders, serving as dangerous but agentless foot soldiers for the monied elite.

Rather, Schrader shows how rank-and-file cops pursued an “explicit, specific, [and] self-interested” political project that decisively augmented the police’s power and institutionalized their outsized influence over municipal politics.

Blue power explains how police became so distinctly insulated from democratic controls, and why their distended budgets remain relatively untouchable.

It demystifies how police repeatedly repel efforts to check and dismantle their power, even when public consciousness about policing’s functionally racist, extortionary, and excessively violent operation reaches a fever pitch.

As Schrader writes, “atop steady-state racism and economic exploitation that shape every aspect of our political system, police have become experts in bending that system further to their will.”