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Max Felker-Kantor, Shannon King. The Politics of Safety: The Black Struggle for Police Accountability in La Guardia’s New York., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 511–513, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae516
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Extract
What constitutes safety and who gets to define it? This question is at the heart of Shannon King’s pathbreaking book The Politics of Safety: The Black Struggle for Police Accountability in La Guardia’s New York, which traces the Black struggle for safety from both crime and excessive policing in the 1930s and 1940s. In taking crime seriously as an analytical category, The Politics of Safety historicizes debates about the politics of law and order and Black support for punitive policies during the age of mass incarceration. It shows how Black New Yorkers long defined safety as equal protection under the law and an end to racist police violence, a conception of civil rights which “derived from their own daily encounters with police misconduct and violence” (36). Using the framework of safety, King presents a nuanced exploration of the relationship between African Americans, crime, and the police. In doing so, he makes an invaluable contribution to the history of the Black freedom struggle and the carceral state.