After education, public safety is the most expensive service provided by local government in the United States. Much of the growth in the size and political power of American police agencies since the Second World War has been fueled by public anxiety about major social and demographic changes. The migration of African Americans from the rural South to northern cities, the explosion of teenage culture in the 1960s, the mainstream use of illegal drugs and the sharp increase in violent crime perpetrated by young offenders have all been raised as justifications for expanding the size and power of local police agencies.

In response to public demands for action President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which made the federal government a factor in local crime control for the first time. The Act expanded the ability of lawenforcement officials at all levels to detect criminal behavior by broadening the legal use of wiretaps and by funding special units for the enforcement of drug laws. The new Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) in the United States Department of Justice provided funds for equipment and personnel in police departments in nearly every jurisdiction in the country). The establishment of SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) squads in even the smallest, rural police departments was often funded by the LEAA.

At the same time, federal and local officials became concerned about the image of the police. As an adjunct of the political machines that dominated city and state governments earlier in the century (and continued to dominate Chicago, IL, Newark, NJ and Albany NY, into the 1970s), the police were viewed by many citizens as either “town clowns” in smaller jurisdictions or corrupt enforcers of the status quo in larger cities. Most of the race riots of the 1960s were reactions to encounters between white police officers and African American residents. The recruitment, training and demographic composition of police departments became a major issue in the planning and budgeting for law enforcement.

The idea of police professionalism runs through the modern history of American policing. In order to improve the image of the police and justify the rapid increase in public-safety budgets, states reviewed and updated training curricula. The Federal Bureau of Investigation Academy also began training local police officers, and a number of departments introduced educational requirements, not only for new officers, but for promotion as well.

The idea that a college education was either necessary or desirable for the cop on the beat was hotly debated as the police infiltrated public consciousness through the media.

Long a staple of news, police dramas have become the mainstay of prime-time television programming (see crime, television). Beginning with Dragnet (NBC, 1952–9; 1967–70), a celebration of the new, business-like orientation to policing taken by the Los Angeles Police Department, the depiction of attractive, articulate law-enforcement figures became popular with the public, although it was inevitably satirized in the later Police Academy movies (1984–9). But Steven Bochco’s television productions from the late 1970s to the 1990s conveyed growing ambivalence about a powerful public agency with increasingly little contact with the public. Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–7) explored an urban environment saturated with crime confronted by a group of quirky fallible police officers who were often thrown off balance by the chaos on the street. The more benign Barney Miller (ABC, 1975–82), a comedy set in New York’s Greenwich Village, told much the same story: the police as the last line of defense in a society slipping out of control.

During the same period that the entertainment industry was exploring the quandary of modern policing, prosecutors around the country were building a body of law on the limits of police conduct under federal civil-rights guarantees and state statutes. Police brutality was increasingly challenged in minority communities where it had always been present as well as in gay communities in several cities. The 1969 Stonewall Riot was touched off by a routine raid by the New York City Police on a gay bar on Christopher Street in Manhattan.

Suits by federal prosecutors against local police departments in several cities, in particular Philadelphia, PA and Houston, Texas, lead to a study by the United States Civil Rights Commission entitled Who is Guarding the Guardians? (1981). The recommendations of the commission summarized the conflict over police professionalization, finding that even in departments with high levels of education and intensive training, a separate, defensive police culture had evolved that saw citizens and particularly citizens from groups not well represented in the department as the enemy.

Elizabeth Reuss-Ianni found that patrol officers in the New York Police Department were caught between what they considered a hostile and dangerous external environment and a professionalized, but remote administrative culture in the upper-ranks of the department. The “two cultures of policing” cut street cops loose to do whatever was necessary to keep order: a strategy that further alienated the public in many jurisdictions, but which insulated the top brass from legal responsibility when inevitable misconduct suits were filed.

The Knapp Commission investigations into corruption in the New York Police Department in the 1970s reinforced the reform impulse built by public attention to brutality and police handling of civil disorder, and led to a series of experiments in the structure and function of American policing in the 1980s and 1990s. Team policing and walking beats, patrol strategies that had been jettisoned during professionalization, were revived by reform commissioners like Patrick Murphy in New York City. Films like Serpico (1973) and Prince of the City (1981) followed in the wake of corruption revelations in New York and elsewhere.

The acquittal by a suburban jury of the Los Angeles police officers involved in the taped and televised beating of motorist Rodney King touched off riots in Los Angeles, CA that caused another round of self-examination among police administrators and scholars. Reforms in the 1990s centered around “community policing,” an attempt to reconnect the police and the public through the broader involvement of police officers— sometimes called community patrol officers—in a variety of neighborhood activities.