1964: President Johnson’s “War on Crime”

In 1964, as President Johnson prepared to sign the Voting Rights Act into law, he also signed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act.

This Act represented a part of Johnson’s new “war on crime,” which sought to clean up urban violence and stem the tide of what some saw as a downward trend towards increased societal disintegration. The Act was significant because it “offered a response to the threat of future disorder by establishing a direct role for the federal government in local police operations, court systems, and state prisons for the first time in American history” (Hinton, 2016, p. 2). 

The Law Enforcement Assistance Act and its sister the Safe Streets Act of 1968 authorized Federal engagement in local policing as well as increased funding.

This influx of of Federal attention and funding led to “the modernization of law enforcement” (Hinton, 2016, p. 2). Combined with existing views within criminology that Black people were predisposed towards violence, this expansion of America’s “carceral state” (prison system) meant that the law enforcement prejudice against Black people was now better funded and organized at the federal level.

As noted by Echebiri, this carceral state had a long history emerging from “slave patrolling and was designed to criminalize and incapacitate Black people rather than to provide justice” (2019, par. 2).

Historian Elizabeth Hinton (2016) wrote that “[i]t is one of the essential ironies of American history that this punitive campaign [the war on crime] began during an era of liberal reform and at the height of the civil rights revolution, a moment when the nation seemed ready to embrace policies that would fully realize its egalitarian founding values” (p. 1).

In reality, Johnson’s “war on crime” tapped into and empowered the systemic racism already prevalent in America’s criminal justice system. As civil right protests and protests against the Vietnam War erupted across the United States, the Johnson Administration blamed African American men (p. 13). Hinton (2016) noted

This group [Black men] quickly emerged as the foremost target of federal policymakers. It seemed that antipoverty programs had failed to reach the ‘hard-core’ black urban youth who appeared particularly susceptible to collective violence, and by extension, crime. Without evoking race explicitly, the White House and Congress then built a set of punitive policies that focused on controlling this group by expanding the field of surveillance and patrol around them. (p. 13)  

The “war on crime” thus became a justification for law enforcement to go after civil rights protestors and to keep African American men under surveillance.

Given the deeply ingrained racist view that perceived Black men as naturally violent and aggressive, more prone to commit crime and more resistant to government, it is not surprising that most law enforcement officials continued arresting Black men in much larger quantities than white men.