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Sam Collings-Wells

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JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.48,Issue4,P.

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Abstract During the 1960s, the Ford Foundation was one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the United States. This article examines the shifting strategies which Ford deployed in an attempt to tackle urban disorder in U.S. cities between 1965 and 1982. From 1966 to 1969, Ford engaged in a series of experimental projects which sought to dampen unrest through “community action” and grassroots mobilization, many of which required working with Black Power organizations. Yet, after this generated considerable political controversy, the foundation shifted toward funding liberal police reform, establishing the Police Foundation in 1970, a Washington-based organization whose research provided the intellectual underpinning for “Broken Windows” policing. Studying the Ford Foundation’s programming during this period can illuminate the understudied contribution of liberal philanthropy to the rise of the carceral state, as well as the connections between the grassroots antipoverty efforts of the 1960s and the punitive turn of the 1970s. On July 21, 1970, Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy sent a telegram to a number of top civil rights leaders. This had become something of a regular occurrence. Since assuming the presidency of Ford in 1966, Bundy had shifted the philanthropic organization’s resources toward assisting the U.S. black freedom struggle. As a result, the recipients of Bundy’s telegram— including Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Whitney Young of the Urban League—had each already benefited from a continuous stream of Ford funding. Controversially, so had other more radical “Black Power” organizations, most notably the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).1 Bundy’s July telegram informed these leaders that Ford was about to announce “one of its most significant grant undertakings of the year”: the establishment of a “Police Development Fund.” Later known as the Police Foundation, this was an independent organization endowed with $30 million of Ford funding to make grants “to strengthen and modernize the exercise of the police function.” An enormous sum even for the Ford Foundation, Bundy assured the civil rights leaders that his new organization would seek to reform law-enforcement “along lines set forth in the best parts of the President’s Crime Commission report of 1968.” This meant improvements in police training, procedural reforms, “community policing,” and, most importantly, repairing the relationship between police and communities of color.2 Yet it was not just civil rights leaders who received advanced notice of Ford’s program. Bundy also sent cordial letters to Senators James Eastland and John McClellan, two staunch opponents of the civil rights movement, and among the sharpest advocates in Congress for tougher “law-and-order.”3 In these letters, Bundy used quite different language than in his note to civil rights leaders. He stressed how Ford’s new initiative was designed to address Eastland and McClellan’s “long-standing concern for the problems of crime and law and order.”4 Clearly, the establishment of the Police Foundation was about more than civil rights reform. Indeed, as this article will show, the shift of Ford dollars into police reform was part of an effort to adapt liberal philanthropy to the backlash politics of the late-1960s. By 1969, the Ford Foundation had come under sharp attack for its “radical” grant-making to assist the civil rights movement. Not only had Ford funded Black Power organizations such as CORE, but Bundy had also involved it in a highly controversial experiment to decentralize New York City’s public schools. For program officers at Ford, these projects were themselves a form of “root-cause” crime-control; an attempt to channel the potentially violent impulses of Black Power into a crime-busting process of community organization.5 For the Foundation’s critics, however, they were the actions of a “shadow government,” an unelected pillar of the liberal establishment encouraging lawlessness in the streets. An intense backlash against liberal philanthropy ensued, culminating in a 1969 Congressional investigation by the House Ways and Means Committee.6 For the Ford Foundation’s cautious Board of Trustees—on which sat the cream of corporate America—the political pressures represented by this investigation were acute. Transitioning into police reform offered them a way out of the quagmire. The Police Foundation was designed as a catalyst for liberal police reform nationwide, pioneering measures to repair the relationship between the police and the community. Liberal law-and-order appeared to offer Ford the best of both worlds; a way for the philanthropic organization to continue its work on civil rights, but in a way which appeared “tough on crime.” By retrofitting its social-scientific methodology to the problem of law-enforcement, Ford hoped to improve police–community relations, reduce crime, and mollify Congressional anger by “doing something for the cops.”7 In time, this shift of Ford dollars into police reform would prove enormously consequential—yet in ways which ultimately increased police power, rather than accountability. Just over a decade later, in 1982, two enterprising Police Foundation officials published an article in The Atlantic Monthly. Titled “Broken Windows,” it represented the summation of a decade of Police Foundation experiments. One of the authors, George L. Kelling, was chief researcher on these experiments, while the other, James Q. Wilson, sat on the Police Foundation’s board of directors. The article’s argument—that police should aggressively crack down minor infractions to prevent more serious crime—was directly lifted from a recent Police Foundation evaluation in Newark.8 Originally offered as a variant of community policing, “broken windows” was rapidly co-opted by police departments across the United States, who used the concept to legitimate demands for beefed up patrol strength and increased street-level discretion.9 As a number of historians have shown, broken windows policing became central to the “criminalization of urban space,” the racist targeting of communities, and the rise of mass incarceration. Far from repairing the relationship between the police and minority communities, it worked to weave law-enforcement more closely into poor neighborhoods, leading to greater levels of surveillance, arrest, and incarceration.10 While the devastating impact of broken windows is well documented, the golden threads of liberal philanthropy which lay behind its emergence have been almost entirely ignored.11 This article will trace those threads. In doing so, it will reveal how the Ford Foundation provides an institutional bridge between liberal responses to the urban uprisings of the 1960s and the punitive responses of the 1980s. By transitioning into police reform, Ford helped generate a private “police research industry,” with the Police Foundation at its heart.12 These institutions worked from above to transform law-enforcement throughout the United States, giving shape to the more diffuse grassroots demands for “law and order.” By examining the Ford Foundation’s urban programming between 1966 and 1982, this article draws on the pioneering work of Noliwe Rooks and Karen Ferguson. These scholars have shown how the Ford Foundation engaged with Black Power after McGeorge Bundy’s arrival in 1966: building on Ford’s earlier efforts shaping the “maximum feasible participation” clause of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, Bundy attempted to channel the Black Power movement’s aims into avenues conducive to postwar racial liberalism, most notably by gearing its infrastructure toward assisting a consensual process of “community development.”13 Yet, despite this scholarship on Ford’s contribution to the urban liberalism of the 1960s, significantly less work has been done examining the Ford Foundation’s later transition into criminal justice reform. Following Ford’s programming into the 1970s can reveal how its engagement with Black Power was displaced by an enhanced emphasis on liberal police reform. Doing so can add a new dimension to the burgeoning scholarship exploring the role of liberal actors shaping the punitive turn.14 Key works from Naomi Murakawa and Elizabeth Hinton have located the origins of the carceral state in demands for liberal reform to law-enforcement during the 1960s.15 They have shown how police reform moved to the heart of the liberal response to the urban crisis during the 1960s, with Lyndon Johnson establishing the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) to channel federal funding and expertise to local police departments.16 With Ford’s establishment of the Police Foundation in 1970, private actors also began to play a key role in this network of Washington-based police reform organizations.17 Ford designed the Police Foundation to act as a national “catalyst” for liberal police reform, sending funds and expertize directly to urban police departments across the United States. By establishing the Police Foundation, Ford had hoped to elevate police reform into the realm of social-scientific expertise. The Police Foundation stressed an empirical approach to change, rooting its recommendations in carefully controlled experiments. Despite this emphasis, however, they were soon forced to confront a newly politicized police rank-and-file. For many rank-and-file cops, still reeling from the criticism of their role precipitating the uprisings of the 1960s, the new Washington-based reform organizations were immediately suspect—particularly one funded by the “bleeding heart liberals” over at the Ford Foundation. The Police Foundation soon found that their ability to reform the police depended on their ability to garner the support from this newly assertive, and increasingly politicized, world of law-enforcement. The Police Foundation responded by narrowing their reform agenda, focusing on technical questions such as police patrol strategy. While this allowed them to overcome the suspicions of law-enforcement, the result was that the Police Foundation’s research was increasingly co-opted by these powerful police bureaucracies, who used it to enhance their capacities, discretion, and repertoires. It was this dynamic which eventually caused the Police Foundation’s experiments in “community policing” to metastasize into an aggressive form of “broken-windows” law-enforcement. Crime Control through Black Power, 1966-1969 McGeorge Bundy arrived at the Ford Foundation at a critical moment for urban America. By 1966, a series of uprisings had ripped through U.S. cities, fueled by anger over segregation, inadequate housing, and racist police violence.18 Transformations were also occurring within black freedom movement, its gravitational center shifting from the South to the urban North, and demands for integration competing with long-standing calls for black self-determination.19 After Stokely Carmichael uttered the phrase in June 1966, “Black Power” had begun to garner widespread national attention.20 While many commentators connected Black Power to the recent urban uprisings, the new Ford Foundation president disagreed; with characteristic self-confidence, Bundy believed he could use the organization’s considerable resources to channel this new black “insurgency” into the liberal mainstream, guiding it from above in a way which would both achieve racial justice and restore peace to America’s urban cores.21 As one program officer wrote to Bundy shortly after he arrived, the primary goal of Ford should be “to advance this [civil rights] revolution as swiftly as possible and without violence.”22 Ford had already been working at the interface of race and urban affairs before Bundy’s arrival. Its Gray Areas program, formally launched in 1961, had pioneered the “community action” approach to combatting urban poverty. By providing grants to social agencies in a number of pilot cities, this had sought to democratize antipoverty efforts by engaging poor residents in the planning and provision of social services.23 The project went on to form the template for the “maximum feasible participation” clause of Lyndon Johnson’s Economic Opportunity Act, a key yet contentious aspect of his War on Poverty.24 For officials at Ford, the community action approach was not simply a way to tackle poverty and racial inequality. Rooted in social-scientific theories connecting urban crime to black community “disorganization” and pathology, these early projects had sought to achieve a “coordinated attack” on delinquency, engineered through an integrated process of social service provision, remedial education, and community organization.25 By the time of Bundy’s arrival in 1966, the escalating situation in U.S. cities threatened to render this approach obsolete. One of Bundy’s first acts was to establish a committee to study the Black Power movement and evaluate the prospects of Ford’s engagement with it. The responses he received from Ford’s program officers were remarkably sanguine. “The panicky reaction of whites to the assertion by Negroes of the need for ‘Black Power’ is excellent evidence of that need,” wrote Thomas Cooney Jr., a white program officer. The push for black self-determination was best understood not as a separatist movement, Cooney argued, but instead as “a conventional kind of American power realignment,” whereby the African American community sought to organize themselves into a “distinct ethnic group” powerful enough to compete for a fair share of local and federal resources. Crucially, Cooney thought this process of organization would play a key role in stabilizing the situation in U.S. cities; once black communities were able to compete more effectively for their share of resources, it would restore their faith in conventional political channels, reducing their need to seek redress in the streets.26 Bundy responded by grafting a deeper engagement with the black freedom struggle onto Ford’s earlier community action programs. Between 1966 and 1969, Ford worked closely with various Black Power organizations on a range of projects, funding everything from black arts and culture to voter-registration drives.27 As was the case during its Gray Areas program, the focus of this activity remained combating the interlinked problems of poverty and crime through a process of community organization. The difference was that Ford now sought to utilize the grassroots infrastructure of the Black Power movement to assist this process of community building. Channeling black power into community organizing could serve both as a mechanism for achieving racial justice and a strategy of urban pacification; building strong communities also meant building safe ones.28 As Bundy himself put it, “Picketing is better than rioting.”29 This emphasis on preventing disorder was clear in Ford’s decision in 1967 to fund the Cleveland chapter of CORE. The previous summer had seen unrest explode in the Hough neighborhood, a predominantly African American district in Cleveland’s east side. Fears of a fresh wave of violence the following summer led Bundy to dispatch three Ford staffers to the city.30 After surveying the situation on the ground, they recommended that CORE was the best organization to undertake the process of community organizing. The program officers acknowledged that there were “risks” in making such a grant; now under the control of Floyd McKissick, CORE had recently amended its constitution to delete the word “multiracial” from its agenda.31 Yet, they stressed, working with CORE was the only way Ford could reach the “most militant and despairing” elements of the black community, and be able to channel their “felt needs for participation and change into productive and responsible social action.”32 The bulk of Ford funding went toward CORE’s “Target Cities” project, the key component of which was a door-to-door registration project of African American voters. This proved enormously successful; throughout the summer of 1967, more than 25,000 new voters were registered, of which nearly 75 percent were African American.33 When Carl Stokes was elected as America’s first black mayor that November in Cleveland, many news outlets pointed to the Ford-funded voter-registration project as the chief reason. Bundy asserted that Ford’s intervention had been essential to keeping the peace in Cleveland. Yet others pointed with alarm to what they saw as the Ford Foundation’s growing political influence.34 A Boston Globe editorial asked, “If one foundation can help elect a good mayor, why cannot another elect a bad one?”36 Ford’s activities in Cleveland also attracted the critical attention of Congress, as well as newly elected President Richard Nixon, one of whose aides soon began to investigate the “activities of left-wing organizations which are operating under tax exempt funds.”35 This political pressure on Ford was compounded by its simultaneous involvement in New York City’s controversial experiment to decentralize its public school system. Like many cities across America, New York’s Board of Education had dragged its feet on desegregating its schools. In response, by the mid-1960s many black and Puerto Rican parents had shifted the focus of their activism, away from integration and toward calls for “community control.”37 Recognizing an opportunity to reform the sclerotic city schools’ bureaucracy, in 1966 the liberal Republican mayor, John Lindsay, established a task force to draw up a plan to decentralize the school system. Headed by McGeorge Bundy, it recommended breaking the system into independent school boards—partly selected by parents—each of which would have some degree of control over budgets, personnel, and curriculum.38 To get the ball rolling, in the summer of 1967, Ford also helped set up three demonstration districts to test the decentralization concept. Experimental school boards were established in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, I.S. 201, and Two Bridges, with Ford providing both funding and consultant expertise. Ford’s commitment to the schools project was animated by a cluster of assumptions which Karen Ferguson has labeled “developmental separatism.”39 At its core was a belief that the initial “weakness” of the black community left it unable to negotiate from a position of strength with educational authorities. A temporary period of separate social development, driven by the process of community control, was necessary before full integration into the “mainstream” could occur. Bundy’s key advisor on the schools issue, Mario Fantini, described this process: when Negroes achieve quality education by their own effort—through control of their own institutions, leading to a sense of potency and racial solidarity—then they will be prepared for the stage of connection (integration) with the white society on a foundation of parity instead of deficiency.40 In a similar manner to its CORE project, then, Ford was seeking to channel the desires for black self-determination into local organizing efforts—this time around the issue of education. This would allow African American and Puerto Rican communities to bargain with city authorities from a position of strength. Assisting this process was not simply a way to combat educational deprivation. It was also a mechanism to dampen civil disorder, channeling potentially violent desires for self-determination into mainstream avenues. As Fantini put it: “their very act of meaningful participation—a sense of greater control over a decisive institution that influences the fate of their children—contributes to parents’ sense of potency and self-worth.” This ensured that educational decentralization had “positive effects on the participants as well the system,” he continued, “as parents in East Harlem became more engaged in the education process, ‘quality education’ and ‘Give a Damn’ replaced ‘black power’ as the slogan.”41 The problem was that the parents themselves did not share Ford’s liberal, assimilative understanding of Black Power. They wanted structural change; a fundamental alteration in the balance of power between their communities and the lily-white Board of Education.42 Above all, this meant the right to set their own curriculum and make personnel decisions. As one leaflet from the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board put it, Don’t let anyone tell you that decentralization is worth a damn, unless you get the following powers: the right to hire and fire all principals and teachers, the total control of our money, the right to buy our own textbooks and supplies.43 In May 1968, the local board in Ocean Hill-Brownsville unilaterally exercised this power by firing nineteen teachers hostile to the experiment. Because the dismissed teachers were members of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT)—the city’s main teachers union—the decision triggered a mass walkout. The result was a series of increasingly acrimonious strikes, which pitted black and Puerto Rican community groups—tenuously allied with Mayor Lindsay and the Ford Foundation—against the majority white UFT.44 The 1968-1969 teachers strike in New York City was an extraordinarily bitter affair. Dubbed by one scholar as “the strike that changed New York,” it contributed to the unraveling of the Democratic coalition in that city. The strike dominated both local and even national headlines. Most immediately, it ensured that the Ford Foundation found itself at the center of an intense backlash around the overly “political” role of liberal philanthropy. Alongside its grants to CORE, the resulting pressures led to a year of internal turmoil and reevaluation at Ford. In response, the Ford Foundation would re-tool its response to the urban crisis, attempting to broaden the constituency and restore its position in the center ground. Crisis and Reform, 1969-1970 The New York City schools crisis heaped pressure on the Ford Foundation. Coming at the same time as Ford’s grants to CORE, many conservative lawmakers and media outlets began to decry its incendiary pattern of grant-making.45 Writing in the pages of the conservative National Review, Jeffrey Hart noted “the role of foundations as a kind of shadow government, disposing of vast social and political power, and using that power, in fact, in highly questionable ways.”46 This backlash against private foundations congealed within a broader revolt against the so-called “liberal establishment.” In this narrative, a coterie of East-coast “limousine liberals”—aptly represented by Ford’s own patrician president, McGeorge Bundy—were allying with black “militants” against the interests of white blue-collar workers and the middle-class.47 In 1969, a series of Congressional hearings were called by the House Ways and Means Committee to examine the “social engineering” activities of private foundations.48 Led by the Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills, chair of the committee, they formed part of a broader effort to close tax loopholes for the wealthy.49 Yet Ford’s activism over the previous three years ensured that the focus of the hearings became the “radical” political activities of tax-exempt nonprofits. Indeed, many conservative lawmakers saw the hearings as an opportunity to cut off a major source of funding for the civil rights movement.50 The intention of these hearings was to facilitate the passage of the Revenue Act, which threatened to place a range of restrictions on philanthropic organizations such as Ford. The financial threat posed to the Foundation by the Mills Committee was considerable. Explaining the situation in a memo to the Ford’s overseas representatives, David Bell noted that the Revenue Act could lead the organization to have to pay an additional $10-12 million a year in taxes.51 And it wasn’t just the Mills Committee. As program officer Thomas Cooney explained in a widely circulated memorandum sent in May 1969, Ford’s car dealers had begun complaining of boycotts around the country in response to the philanthropic organization’s more controversial activities. Cooney noted how there were ominous signs that the company was trying “to press the Foundation away from such programs.” The Ford Motor Company no longer had this kind of influence over the Foundation, the latter having divested itself from Ford Motor’s stock throughout the 1960s. Yet Cooney’s memo pointed to ways in which the cumulative pressures of a Congressional investigation, negative press, and corporate disapproval were slowly pushing the Foundation’s Board of Trustees toward a more cautious approach.52 Publicly, McGeorge Bundy remained defiant: “A foundation should not shrink from the important issues even if they become controversial,” he affirmed to the New York Times.54 Behind-the-scenes, however, several members of Ford’s Board of Trustees were indeed growing nervous. They began echoing public criticism that Bundy had identified Ford too closely with the poor, with “minorities” and radical social change movements. They argued that Ford was consequently neglecting “middle America” and “blue-collar” workers, and recommended that its programming should come to reflect the concerns of this constituency as well.53 The trustees’ recommendations received the support of Mitchell Sviridoff, Ford’s new vice-president. A former union organizer from New Haven, Sviridoff was a veteran of the fraught experiments in “maximum feasible participation” of the 1960s. After running one of Ford Foundation’s “Gray Areas” community action agencies in New Haven, Sviridoff had gone on to help draft Lyndon Johnson’s Economic Opportunity Act (1964).55 Yet by the time he arrived back at Ford in 1967 Sviridoff had developed a rather jaundiced view of these earlier reform efforts: “The sixties started with high hopes and idealism,” he reflected in Ford’s 1969 Annual Report: “They ended in deep discontent,” the nation fractured by Vietnam, racism, and “crime in the streets.” For Sviridoff, the “activist experimentation” of the 1960s—in which he had been a key player—had gone “too far, too fast.”56 And the maximum feasible participation clause he had helped draft had generated too much conflict, funding attacks on city government rather than the concrete processes of urban revitalization.57 In the year before he arrived at Ford, Sviridoff had served in Mayor John Lindsay’s administration, where he was involved in Bundy’s ill-fated school decentralization experiment. The experience had left him chastened, converting him to the idea that the Foundation had too narrowly focused on black communities. He believed this was indicative liberalism’s failures more broadly during the 1960s: “the polarization that today puts American society under strain stems in large part from the dissatisfaction of whites in the near-poor, lower-middle, and middle-classes—those left out of much recent public programming.” For Sviridoff, the essential aim for the 1970s was for Ford to “recast” their response to the urban crisis, operating in a way “that will reduce polarization” and “yet still meet pressing needs for social reform.”58 What program areas could play this unifying role? Sviridoff pointed to reducing urban street crime as one possible option: “Once the simplistic slogans (‘support your police’ or ‘police brutality’) are laid aside,” he argued in the 1969 report, “and people are asked what they need most, blacks and whites alike mention safety.”59 He pushed this view at a series of meetings of the Board of Trustees throughout 1969, when the pressures of the Congressional investigation loomed large on Foundation thinking. The idea was accordingly adopted with alacrity. As a result, Ford’s trustees specifically instructed its staff to “develop major program initiatives addressing addressing the problems of crime and drug usage in America.”60 The implications of this response to the shifting political context of the late 1960s were stark: just as the Ford Foundation had attempted to co-opt the Black Power movement over the past three years, now Ford were attempting to channel the grassroots white “backlash” from above, shaping its configuration by transitioning into the realm of liberal police reform. Following the instruction of the Board of Trustees, Ford’s staff commissioned Jon Newman, a D.C. district attorney, to prepare a paper surveying the field of policing in the United States. Completed in September 1969, Newman argued that police departments “are not an especially imaginative group.” This meant that “there is a need for a vehicle that will generate the necessary innovation.” He recommended that a “Police Department Fund” be established under the control of an “expert council of police and university leaders” which “can play a leadership role in reshaping the performance of the police function.”61 Newman’s paper was presented to the trustees at their December board meeting. On the basis of his recommendations, they appropriated $30 million to fund a five-year “Police Development Fund.”62 Not everyone at Ford was convinced by this shift into police reform. In May 1970, program officer Roger Wilkins penned an extraordinarily critical memorandum to Mitchell Sviridoff. One of the few black program officers at Ford, Wilkins headed the Social Development program within Sviridoff’s National Affairs division, which dealt with manpower training, economic development, and urban education.63 In his memo, Wilkins began observing that the money earmarked for Sviridoff’s new Police Development Fund was being taken directly out of the his own Social Development budget. The heart of Social Development program was devoted to supporting “the extension of the thrust for equal justice for minorities,” Wilkins argued. By reducing funding for that program, Sviridoff was compounding a crisis caused by the withdrawal of Federal funds in this area.64 Putting it toward police training represented a “shuddering change of direction and pace,” Wilkins argued, one which was not simply “misguided” but, “in the context of American in 1970, absurd.”65 Wilkins then called out Sviridoff and Bundy’s claim that the new police training project was an extension of Ford’s earlier civil rights efforts. Recalling conversations with other Ford officers, Wilkins noted how he had heard the Police Foundation “characterized over and over in this building as part of our blue collar thrust.” It was therefore “dishonest to argue that the Police Development Fund is now part of our drive to assist minorities.” Indeed, Wilkins stressed how improvements in policing capacities offered “no substitute for the struggle against pain and indignity going on in the black ghettoes.” The Ford Foundation’s change of direction defied “both rational analysis and institutional integrity,” Wilkins continued, and was one to which he “could not possibly acquiesce.”66 Wilkins blistering dissent was ignored. In July 1970, McGeorge Bundy announced the formation of the Police Development Fund at a press conference in New York.67 Later renamed the Police Foundation, it would be the largest private organization devoted to law-enforcement reform in the country. While Bundy attempted to portray the Police Foundation as a continuation of Ford’s work at the interface of crime-control and community development, the Police Foundation undoubtedly represented change of direction for the Ford Foundation—as Roger Wilkins’s memo foregrounded particularly forcefully. After 1970, the Ford Foundation, which only a year before was funding CORE, was now geared up to send millions of dollars to police departments across the United States. Bundy’s announcement accordingly raised a few eyebrows within the police community itself. Indeed, it was not just Wilkins who picked up on the apparent disjuncture in Ford’s programming. As the head of a Support Your Local Police organization in Iowa warned: “When an organization having a history of financing Black Powerites now sets up an agency to ‘develop more modern police forces’ . . . the police had better watch out.”68 Many rank-and-file cops were intensely suspicious of the Ford Foundation’s transition into police reform, suspecting that it was part of a liberal conspiracy to weaken the police. The Ford Foundation was cognizant of its PR problem in this regard. Ford wanted to work with the police in the quest for reform, which it could hardly do if local police refused to work with them. As one Ford report noted, “the extent of the foundation’s impact upon police practice will depend upon the effectiveness of its efforts to reach and influence the police community.”69 Ford therefore worked hard to integrate the Police Foundation into the world of law-enforcement. In this respect, its decision to establish a separate organization makes more sense; by contracting out the job of police reform to the Police Foundation, Ford signaled its willingness to leave the job of reform to law-enforcement experts. Ford also staffed the Police Foundation’s top positions with senior police officers, as well as a sprinkling of academics and lawyers who went out of their way to stress their pro-police credentials. This included its first president, Charles Rogovin, a former public defender and head of the LEAA. Rogovin’s New York Times profile ran with the simple leader: “He Loves Cops.” “Charlie’s basically all cop in a way,” one of his friends was quoted as saying.70 The Board of Directors included Quinn Tamm, executive director of the International Association of Police Chiefs (IACP), Michael Canlis, the former head of the National Sheriffs Association, as well as the conservative political scientist James Q. Wilson.71 These early organizational decisions reflect a paradox at the heart of the Police Foundation’s mission. On one hand, it claimed to be committed to applying objective social-scientific expertise to the problem of police reform. According to Ford program officers, this is what distinguished the Police Foundation from federal government’s LEAA, which was seen as spawning a host of dubious ventures “without scientific controls and rigorous evaluation.”72 On the other hand, the Police Foundation recognized that the impact of its research depended on the willingness of police and local politicians to adopt its ideas. This became clear during the Police Foundation’s first major experiment in Dallas, where its attempt at reform quickly ran up against a newly politicized police rank-and-file. Trouble in Texas, 1970-1973 The early years of the Police Foundation were fraught with internal division. This principally concerned the question of how best to deploy its resources. Some officials wanted to take a “Major Cities” approach, concentrating Police Foundation funding on a single department and working with a reform-minded chief to implement a comprehensive process of reform. Others, recognizing the resistance that such an approach was likely to engender, wanted to take a more incremental route to reform, financing a number of narrow technical innovations within departments across the country. Initially, proponents of the “Major Cities” approach won out; in 1971, the Police Foundation agreed to work on a major overhaul of the Dallas Police Department (DPD). Yet this strategy would soon unleash a political firestorm, which led to the reversion toward the more conservative approach.73 The Police Foundation selected Dallas as its first project because of the opportunity presented by the promotion of reforming chief Frank Dyson. Described as “a police renegade,” the young Dyson recognized the increasingly fraught nature of the relationship between the police and Dallas’s African American and Mexican American population.74 For Dyson, resolving this division required decentralizing police operations, bringing the police closer to the community they served. As Dyson argued in 1973, without these reforms the DPD “faces the specter of being seen as an occupying force.”75 In 1971, Dyson sent a reform proposal to the Police Foundation. It was “revolutionary,” a later Police Foundation assessment asserted, with Dyson calling for a “people-orientated police force.”76 Dyson proposed the radical decentralization of police functions, as well as sweeping reforms to recruitment, training, promotion, and retention.77 Recruitment would increasingly emphasize the need for college-level education. Dyson also sought to achieve at least 25 percent minority representation on the force—roughly the same as the population of the city.78 On top of these organizational reforms, there was to be a broader “de-emphasis of the rigid enforcement role” within the DPD, as officers were given greater discretion to exercise “alternative solutions to problems in addition to arrest power.”79 At the same time, the police had to be “prepared to operate in an organizational structure which is open to scrutiny and review.”80 The impressive nature of Dyson’s proposal strengthened the hand of proponents of the Major City approach within the Police Foundation. After a sparkling performance before its Board of Directors, Dyson received a planning grant in April 1971.81 The plans were drawn up and implemented by a newly created Office of Program Administration (OPA), established with Police Foundation funds and staffed its consultants, as well as with close confidantes of Dyson. In November 1971, the Police Foundation’s first program grant of $1 million was awarded to Dallas. While Dyson also received substantial federal grants from the LEAA, it was the Police Foundation’s consultants within the OPA who attracted the most attention. Described as “nasal-voiced Northern intellectuals with new ideas about how to fight crime” by one Texas newspaper, they immediately became the focal point of opposition to Dyson’s liberal reforms.82 Indeed, suspicion of both Dyson and the Police Foundation arose almost immediately. This came principally from within the DPD itself. Dyson’s proposal to decentralize police operations threatened the status of many of the force’s superior officers. His organizational reforms targeted mid-level managers such as supervisors and lieutenants, and it was around such figures that opposition to the reforms coalesced. They were joined by rank-and-file officers—represented by an increasingly assertive Dallas Police Association (DPA)—who resented Dyson’s attempts to hire more black and Mexican American officers.83 They accused the Dyson’s OPA of being staffed by outsiders, beholden to Police Foundation direction, and keeping their plans secret from the department—an impression which was hardly assuaged when the OPA moved their offices out of police headquarters. Pockets of resistance soon emerged around disgruntled detectives, which already dominated the DPA and used it to engage in pitched battles with Dyson. Internal resistance within the DPD was energized from the outside with the support of local businessmen. In alliance with the John Birch Society, they established the Dallas County Support Your Local Police Committee. This group conducted a telephone and letter campaign condemning Dyson for accepting “Ford Foundation” funds for his police department.84 In March 1973, they took out a full-page ad in the Dallas Morning News emblazoned with the headline: “PROVEN: Outside Control of the Dallas Police Department!” Once again, multiple allusions were made to the tight link between the Police Foundation and the “liberal” Ford Foundation. The advertisement warned of a shadowy takeover of the Dallas Department by the “eastern establishment,” with McGeorge Bundy and “Ford Foundation fellow” Nicholas Katzenbach picked out for particular censure. Its conclusion was stark: “TERMINATE OUTSIDE MONEY! TERMINATE OUTSIDE CONTROL!”85 A police shooting brought the conflict over Dyson’s reforms to boiling point. On July 24, 1973, a twelve-year-old Mexican American, Santos Rodriguez, was shot in the head by a police officer who was playing Russian roulette during an interrogation.86 Civil rights leaders organized a protest march on City Hall for a few days later. Dyson met with the civil rights leaders and city officials beforehand, and agreed to keep the police presence to a minimum to defuse the tension.87 However, the march soon turned violent. Dyson waited an hour before sending in reinforcements. While his response was praised as “restrained” by city officials and civil rights leaders, the reaction within his own police department was apoplectic. The DPA publicly accused Dyson of “not supporting his men.”88 That summer, the DPA represented their views to Dyson in a string of increasingly acrimonious meetings. By September, it was clear that Dyson had lost the support of his police department. He resigned the following month, noting bitterly that his departure “would probably boost department morale.”89 His replacement, Don A. Byrd, swiftly launched an audit of the DPD’s expenditure of Police Foundation grant money.90 He then fired thirteen new police recruits—nine of whom were minorities—who had been hired during the previous administration. Most of the reforms made by Dyson soon withered with neglect.91 The failure in Dallas made a deep impression on the Police Foundation. A number of post-mortems followed, ensuring that the lessons of the experiment’s failure were soon absorbed into its institutional memory. In response, there was a reappraisal of the Major City concept, which was said to have generated too much opposition among the police rank-and-file and middle managers.92 After Dallas, the Police Foundation narrowed its reform agenda, focusing on a number of technical issues such as police patrol. This shift in policy came as Patrick Murphy replaced Rogovin as Police Foundation president in 1973. “Because of the attempt at sweeping reform in Dallas seven years ago,” Murphy reflected in his preface to the final evaluation of the Texas project, “the Foundation learned to focus its energies on more sharply defined and productive strategies for working with police agencies in the effort to increase knowledge and to improve police service to communities.”93 The Ford Foundation also played a role in this narrowing of the Police Foundation’s reform agenda. In its first progress report on the Police Foundation, written in 1973, Ford noted that one of the major “obstacles” to its reforming efforts was that the “police rank and file, organized, are usually politically powerful and use their strength to oppose major changes in traditional police operations.”94 Alarmed at the rate which the Police Foundation had burned through its first grant in Texas, Ford reduced the police organization’s yearly expenses to $2 million to $3 million per year. This would help ensure that “the Police Foundation could shift its approach to more sharply defined, manageable activities”—a strategy which would not only save Ford money but also arouse less opposition from the police rank-and-file.95 Team Policing, 1973-1977 The Police Foundation’s major second project, in Cincinnati, offered a template for this narrower approach. Rather than the kind of comprehensive organizational reform attempted in Dallas, the Police Foundation’s Cincinnati program focused on evaluating the technical issue of police patrol. In February 1973, the Cincinnati Police Department began its Community Sector Policing (COMSEC) program, developed and implemented with Police Foundation funding.96 It sought to test a single concept—“team policing”—in one district within the city.97 While opposition once again arose among mid-level managers against the decentralization of authority, the level of hostility never reached the fever pitch seen during the Dallas experiment. Indeed, in many cases the concept was embraced by local law-enforcement. Team policing offered a way to sure up the legitimacy of the police, dampen calls for genuine “community control,” and expand street-level discretion.98 A variant of community policing, team policing sought to improve levels of police–community cooperation by permanently assigning a group of officers to a particular neighborhood. This “geographic stability of patrol” was designed to achieve the maximum possible level of rapport between the officers and the residents they served.99 Rather than driving into the area when a crime was reported, the team of cops were instructed to learn about the neighborhood, get to know its residents, and work collaboratively to help prevent crime.100 Alongside the experiment in Cincinnati, projects were also rolled out in New York City, Dayton, Detroit, Holyoke, and Los Angeles—all of which received funding and evaluations from the Police Foundation.101 In contrast to the far-reaching organizational reform attempted in Dallas, the Police Foundation’s team policing evaluations aroused considerably less controversy. Indeed, the initial impetus usually arose from within local departments themselves, with the Police Foundation offering funding and evaluative support.102 For the Police Foundation, the optics of this approach were easier to handle; there was no “army” of consultants descending on a local police department, as had had been the case in Dallas. And the reform itself was more in-line with the priorities of local law-enforcement. After the turmoil of the 1960s, winning back police legitimacy—yet without compromising police discretion—had become a central goal.103 Team policing appeared to offer an avenue for achieving this delicate balancing act. Indeed, part of the drive behind this adoption of team policing was the desire to improve police–community relations. Yet the primary aim of team policing was not increasing the accountability of the police to the community.104 Rather, it sought to reduce crime and increase clearance rates by capitalizing on police officer’s “familiarity with the life of the community.”105 The links between the community and the police were designed to ensure the flow of criminal information that could be useful for investigations. As one 1973 Police Foundation report explained, “citizen support [is] essential, since crimes are solved because citizens cooperate. . . . If the people accept the police as part of the community, they share information with them.” It was crucial, then, that the residents “view officers as part of the neighborhood.”106 The Police Foundation could point to a couple of instances when this level of police–community integration was achieved. The most well-publicized of these had occurred in Syracuse, where a new Crime Control Team (CCT) had been launched in July 1968. Established at the suggestion of the local General Electric Electronic Laboratory, the CCT was designed as the basic unit of a newly decentralization police force. Eight officers were assigned permanently to one of Syracuse’s twenty-three beats—Area 50—under the command of a team leader. According to the Police Foundation evaluation of the program, the team “won a measure of acceptance” within the neighborhood, and “the residents continued to supply the team with considerable information.” Crime rates were dramatically reduced and clearance rates rose to the highest in the city. General Electric ensured that the successful experiment in Area 50 received national coverage. By 1973, the project had been expanded to six other beats in Syracuse.107 Yet, despite these efforts to promote the Syracuse experiment as a paradigm for other cities, the success of the project in Area 50 was built on exceptional circumstances. The area was not only overwhelmingly white but was actually the same neighborhood in which many of the local cops had been raised. It was, therefore, “apt to be naturally pro-police,” a Police Foundation report acknowledged. Success was also achieved in the “affluent homogenous community”—95 percent white—of Venice in Los Angeles.108 Achieving this level of cooperation was considerably more difficult in communities of color. The attempt to expand the Syracuse project out of Area 50 foundered on the shoals of resident hostility; communication with the police, one Police Foundation report on the Syracuse experiment observed, “fell short in black and student areas.”109 The project in Dayton, Ohio, was also particularly disappointing in this regard. Established in response to consecutive summers of unrest, the team policing program was designed to repair historically poor relations between Dayton’s black community and the police. Yet a number of problems quickly arose. The original plan was for each member of the team to live with a local family, but it was reported that “few black families were willing to accept any of the team members as guests.” The idea was quietly dropped. Meanwhile, the two black officers who had been appointed to the team soon requested a transfer, citing mounting “racial tensions” within the department.110 Even more problematically, when the team policing concept was applied to communities of color, it not only failed to gain the trust of the community, but actually lead to more invasive forms of surveillance and more aggressive tactics at the street level. A core aspect of the team policing concept relied on increasing the amount of discretion in the hands of local officers and their team commanders. Designed as a way to allow officers to adapt their techniques to the “felt needs” of the local neighborhood, in many cases, it simply resulted “in giving many inexperienced commanders a new responsibility which exceeds their ability.”111 In New York, there was a worrying rise in the use of “stop and frisk” after the introduction of team policing.112 Moreover, rather than spreading themselves evenly across the entire neighborhood, team police squads tended to focus on particularly “suspect” segments of a community. Officers were encouraged to “identify potential offenders” by working closely with schools and other social services, as well pinpointing “potential problem spots”—bars, hotels, parks—to ensure they were “present in such areas on a regular basis before the trouble occurred.”113 Indeed, the discretion “team policing” offered was one of the reasons it was adopted with such alacrity by many police departments. This point was acknowledged in a report from the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice. Rather than improving police practices, the report observed how many local departments had simply “used team policing as a way to attract funds to expand their patrol strength.” The concept seemed to have become appropriated by the police to beef up patrol strength, increase the extent of officer discretion, and saturate various “problem” communities with police presence. It achieved this, moreover, while neutralizing the call for genuine community control and accountability. “While acknowledging community needs,” the Police Foundation report on the Cincinnati project noted approvingly, “it left the final decision in the hands of the police.”114 Ford had established the Police Foundation in 1970 to help repair the relationship between the police and communities of color. Yet in many cases, the social-scientific research generated by the Police Foundation was appropriated by law-enforcement in order to their boost their capacities in ways which increased the surveillance of those same communities. A Ford Foundation assessment in 1977 alluded to this problem: “What team policing proves to be in actual practice depends, in large part, upon the objectives of its sponsors,” it noted. While for some chiefs sought to deploy the concept to improve the relationship between law-enforcement and the community, “for others, it provides a better organizational environment for problem-solving aimed at increasing arrests and reducing crime.”115 Overall, however, the Ford Foundation concluded that the Police Foundation’s work had been a success. Most importantly, despite the dubious results of the team policing experiments, they had performed the valuable function of bolstering the Police Foundation’s legitimacy within the world of law-enforcement expertise. Throughout the 1970s, one 1981 Ford report concluded, the Police Foundation had done the leg-work of “making research acceptable to the law enforcement community.”116 This was point echoed by Police Foundation Board member James Q. Wilson. For Wilson, it was during its Team Policing experiments of the 1970s that the Police Foundation laid down its “strong roots” within the police community.117 During the 1980s, Wilson himself would build on these foundations to launch the Police Foundation into a realm of extraordinary influence. Toward Broken Windows, 1976-1982 James Q. Wilson emblematized the Police Foundation’s new approach to law-enforcement reform. His recommendations, while aimed at expanding police power and discretion, were presented as being devoid of politics, scrupulously grounded in social-scientific expertise and evidence-based research. As a key member of the Police Foundation’s Board of Directors, Wilson had lobbied hard to shift the organization’s strategy into this direction. In this endeavor, his bureaucratic brother-in-arms was Herbert Sturz, the first director of the Vera Institute of Justice, who sat on the Police Foundation Board with Wilson.118 Sturz’s action-orientated experiments reforming pre-trial detention in New York City—which had also been funded by the Ford Foundation during the early 1960s—had deeply influenced Wilson’s own approach to experimental criminology.119 As Lawrence Sherman, former director of research at the Police Foundation, recalls, “the small but rigorous testing of the Vera Institute offered a strategy that readily appealed to Jim’s own thinking about fighting urban problems.”120 Wilson’s commitment to evidence-based research led him to become a firm advocate for the work of Police Foundation researcher George L. Kelling. A former social worker, Kelling had grown disillusioned with the well-intentioned liberal urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s, which he felt had generated blight and disorder while neglecting the basic question of neighborhood safety.121 Kelling was hired by the Police Foundation as a consultant in 1972, where he acted as the principal researcher on a number of pioneering experiments into police patrol strategies. In a similar fashion to the team policing experiments, these would focus narrowly on how to improve the efficiency of policing. The first of these projects, the Kansas City Patrol Experiment, was initiated in October 1972 and ran for just under a year until September 1973. It sought to test whether there was any relationship between motorized police patrol and levels of crime. Since the tenure of O. W. Wilson, a veteran police officer of the Berkley Police Department during the 1940s, it had been an article of faith that preventive patrol acted as a deterrent for crime. By getting more police into patrol cars, they could cover more ground and hence act as a greater deterrent on crime.122 The Police Foundation’s experiment in Kansas City blew this assumption out of the water. By dividing the city’s South Patrol Division into three groups with varying levels of motorized patrol, the experiment revealed it had no material impact on the levels of crime, quality of police services, or fear of crime.123 As James Wilson explained, “these findings mean there is no compelling reason to tie up large numbers of uniformed officers in the monotonous and apparently unproductive task of driving through the streets waiting for something to happen.”124 As Wilson’s remarks suggest, by discrediting motorized patrol, the Kansas experiment opened up the question of what exactly police officers should be doing.125 One possibility, suggested by the Police Foundation’s team policing experiments, was that police should patrol the neighborhoods on foot. This would allow them to familiarize themselves with the neighborhood, playing a more proactive role in preventing crime. It would also be accompanied by a shift in police function, away from a narrow law-enforcement role and toward a more capacious notion of “order-maintenance.” Wilson explored these distinctions in his 1968 work, Varieties of Police Behavior. Drawing on the earlier work of sociologists Michael Banton and Egon Bittner, Wilson had observed that the patrolman’s primary role was defined more by “maintaining order” than enforcing the law. This meant dealing with noisy drunks, unruly teenagers, panhandlers, and even “persons wearing eccentric clothes and unusual hair styles loitering in public places.”126 Such a role, Wilson assumed, would be easier to perform on foot than in a patrol car. The opportunity to test the efficacy of foot-patrol more systematically arose in Newark during the mid-1970s, when the state of New Jersey announced its Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program. This sought to improve the quality of community life in a number of cities. A core component of this program involved police reform, with the state providing funds for local departments to experiment with increasing their levels of foot-patrol to stabilize urban neighborhoods.127 In 1976, Governor Brendan Byrne invited the Police Foundation to conduct an evaluation the foot-patrol program. Led by George Kelling, the Police Foundation began its work in December 1977, focusing primarily on the impact of the project on policing in Newark.128 The final report—The Newark Foot Patrol Experiment—was published in 1981. Its conclusions were not straightforward. On one hand, the level of foot-patrol had no impact on the crime rate. On the other hand, it did seem to lead to lower levels of fear of crime among residents. In contrast to both motorized patrol and team policing, residents appeared to be highly sensitive to levels of foot-patrol in their neighborhoods; they noticed when police officer began walking their beat, and felt safer because of it. In his conclusion to the report, Kelling speculated that this was because the officers patrolling on foot naturally began performing an “order-maintenance” role, tackling the low-level disorders—graffiti, aggressive panhandling, loitering groups—that generated the most fear among residents.129 James Wilson read the report enthusiastically. It seemed to provide the empirical proof justifying the shift toward order-maintenance policing he had long called for. Wilson swiftly phoned up Kelling to float the idea of the pair co-authoring an article. Kelling agreed, and over the next few months they worked together refining it.130 The patrol experiments of the Police Foundation formed the basis of the article’s recommendations on policing. Wilson then buttressed these argument with his formidable command of the latest social-scientific literature on crime. In particular, he deployed Stanford psychologist Phillip G. Zimbardo’s 1969 field projects in the South Bronx and Palo Alto. By leaving a car with its windows smashed in on the street, Zimbardo had apparently demonstrated a series of concrete links between low-level physical disorder, neighborhood decline, and more serious crime.131 In March 1982, the finished article appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Titled, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” Kelling and Wilson sketched a kind of criminological domino theory, arguing that low-level disorder led inexorably to more serious crime. The crucial link in this developmental sequence was fear—the anxiety induced by relatively minor disorders which led law-abiding residents to withdraw from the street: “In response to fear, people avoid one another, weakening controls.” Then, marshaling the finding of a decade of Police Foundation research, the pair posited a bold solution to this problem of neighborhood decline: the police should focus on those activities that make people scared—low-level incivilities such as drunkenness. For Kelling and Wilson, this meant a return to the traditional “order-maintenance” function of the police.132 The response to the article was nothing short of extraordinary. It formed the basis of the “zero tolerance” policing strategies in New York City during the early 1990s, before being exported to cities across the United States—and then the rest of the world.133 Police Strategy No .5, the document outlining Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s “quality-of-life” policing initiative, cited Wilson and Kelling’s Atlantic article explicitly. It also inspired a new anti-gang loitering ordinance passed in 1992 by the Chicago City Council, which would go on to be aggressively enforced by the Chicago Police Department (CPD).134 New York and Chicago’s experiments were harbingers of a new “order-maintenance” approach to policing and criminal justice, which flowered during the 1990s and stressed increased police–citizen contacts as the key to bringing order to the city. The Ford Foundation were thrilled. A year after the “Broken Windows” article, a Ford program evaluation concluded simply, “The establishment and support of the Police Foundation must be ranked as one of the Ford Foundation’s major domestic achievements of the 1970s.”135 In particular, Ford noted how the Police Foundation’s supporters ranged from conservatives such as Edwin Meese to liberals such as Donald Fraser. Throughout the 1980s, Ford staff considered making an endowment grant for the Police Foundation, allowing it to function independently of Ford’s yearly funding. This was agreed in 1987, when Ford staff recommended the contribution of $10 million to establishment of a permanent endowment. Conclusion The Ford Foundation’s urban programming between 1966 and 1990 was transformed by the shifting political context in which the organization operated. Ford began the period seeking to bolster urban communities by utilizing the infrastructure of the Black Power movement. The bonds of community would be strengthened through mobilizations around issues of education or voter registration. The key institutions involved in this process of mobilization were community organizations themselves—the Black Power infrastructure that Bundy hoped to harness to achieve the interlinked goals of controlling crime, reducing poverty, and achieving racial justice. After 1970, the Police Foundation would re-tool this concept of community action, removing it from the War on Poverty and placing it squarely within the arsenal of the War on Crime. They did so by setting out a more punitive vision of community organization—one that placed the police at the heart of the process. Previously, Ford had sought to leverage the grassroots infrastructure of the Black Power movement organize the urban poor around issues of health care, jobs training, and schooling. By contrast, the Police Foundation sought to use police officers to bolster “law-abiding” elements within the community, performing an “order-maintenance” role to fight against low-level crime and disorder. This enhanced role given to the police was a reflection of the institutional aims of the Police Foundation. As an organization devoted to police reform and staffed with law-enforcement professionals, it was hardly surprising that they would seek to place the police—rather than government-funded social welfare services—at the heart of America’s response to its urban crisis. The result was a shift in police function, which was a critical contributor to the rise of mass incarceration in the United States.136 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Heather Thompson and Andrew Preston for their guidance on the early stages of this paper, as well as Karen Ferguson, for her invaluable critique on the first submission draft. I would also like to thank Yasmin Dualeh and Mobeen Hussain, and everyone else who attended their Histories of Race Workshop, whose comments helped me shape the argument of this paper. Finally, my thanks go to the anonymous referee who provided useful feedback throughout the peer review process. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.