The Office of Public Safety, the LEAA, and US Police

In September of 1967, Otto Kerner brought an important witness to testify to the presidential commission he chaired, the US National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. The witness was Byron Engle, then director of the Office of Public Safety, a federal agency established in the early 1960s to provide allied foreign nations with training for their police. "Mr. Engle," Kerner explained to his colleagues, "will talk about the lessons learned from civil disorders in both this country and abroad, and the fundamental basic principles which apply internationally." Kerner and his commission were charged with understanding the causes of the terrible urban disturbances of the mid-1960s, and preventing their recurrence. Crucial to their conceptualization of both the problem and the solution was, as Kerner signaled, a convergence of foreign and domestic spheres, with the hinge provided by a border-breaching body of police.

There is a great deal worth drawing out from this snapshot of a US national policy discussion around violence work. There is the glimpse of global conditions mattering to domestic policymaking. There is the notice of a federal agency that sent US police across international borders, flouting a fairly widespread sense that US police are local in the scope of their activity. Behind it, there is the racist state-market violence that provoked the riots the Kerner Commission was organized to consider, and ahead, the policies that emerged from this process, which precipitated the stunning expansion of the US criminal justice system that people today invoke with the shorthand "mass incarceration." Most importantly, there is the suggestion of the equivalence of domestic and foreign conflict and police response, which Kerner clearly found important. Engle didn't come up with this idea, but he and the agency he directed were active in its amplification.

In calling the work of the Office of Public Safety (OPS) to the attention of the influential Kerner Commission, Engle reveals a key facet of the legacy of that agency, which this chapter will shortly introduce in full. This important aspect ofOPS's impact is underexplored. OPS has had its historians, both critical and laudatory, but they have focused on the agency's work abroad. Even OPS's most vehement critics have thus accepted the parameters of the autobiography its protagonists would write for it and for themselves. None have placed it in domestic context, much less in the fully transnational landscapes of police and state activity in which it emerged, operated, ended, and was reborn in various forms.

This chapter opens by telling the OPS story as an account of global and local currents swirling together, with OPS and its agents among the instruments doing the stirring. Thus reframed, the OPS story elucidates phenomena of far greater importance than the details of a minor federal government body. Moving along multiple levels of scale from the broadest ideological contours of the day to institutional formation to the microlevel of the individual, it shows the transnational history of the federal legislative acts of the late 1960s that poured federal dollars into policing, prisons, and other aspects of the US criminal justice system, primarily the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, or LEAA, that dominant player in US criminal justice policy throughout the 1970s. To see the LEAA and its policy contemporaries as part of the legacy of OPS is a radical revision of both the histories of domestic policy and of foreign police assistance. Telling the story in this way reveals the geographic, public-private, and civilian-military border crossing involved in the expansion of violence work and its rising lethality in the period in which it was deployed to suppress domestic dissent in US antiwar and racial justice movements.

DEVELOPMENT, COUNTERINSURGENCY, AND THE OFFICE OF PUBLIC SAFETY

The grounds on which violence work in the United States and abroad would shift and grow in the 1970s depended on the ascent of the notion of economic development. As salve for global inequality, development theorists in the United States and Western Europe prescribed a regimen of modernization and economic growth. They claimed a progressive mantle of cultural relativism by rejecting colonial conceptualizations of the world as divided into civilized and barbaric peoples, though their views preserved much of the hierarchies of earlier generations. Against the political and economic claims of the anti-imperialist formation coming to call itself the "Third World," development discourse defined "Third World" spatially and specified it economically as "poor." By the 1950s, the notion that the Third World required "development" in order to progress was powerful common sense, with Walt W. Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth (1960) articulating widespread consensus.

With "development" as the cornerstone of hopes for victory over communism, policing moved to a privileged position in US foreign policy. Extending the logic of the postwar Marshall Plan for Europe to the rest of the globe, American officials crafted foreign aid to promote development and therefore faith in capitalism and in the United States. In this framing, assistance to foreign police had a number of attractions. It would (its champions thought) help maintain the order required for economic increase, and the ostensibly gentler approach of police seemed more promising than brute force in the famed Cold War struggle for "hearts and minds." Police assistance could be portrayed as technical and civilian; using it to replace military aid was more politic in a world in which military matériel was subject to critique as neo-imperial or interventionist. Finally, police were closer to the people, and therefore better poised for the gathering of intelligence.

This developmentalist, police- and order-focused, intelligence-centered approach comprised counterinsurgency, the series of fighting techniques developed to respond to guerrilla tactics and implemented by US military and police together as early as the Greek civil war of 1944–49. While the term reached a general public sphere only in the early 1960s (still new enough in 1962 for the Washington Post to call it "the latest gobbledygook for finding and killing guerillas"), it had already emerged as the United States' premier military priority globally at that point, its theoretical precepts elaborated in a "sprawling" literature by the early 1960s.

Counterinsurgency entered diplomatic policy under Eisenhower, who inaugurated a police assistance program in 1954. Building on the US police role in occupied Japan and postwar hotspots including Korea, Greece (figure 1.1), and Iran (figure...