Evil Empire 63Political scientist Naomi Murakawa has shown, however, that
by framing the problem as arbitrary and as growing out of lawless-
ness, the committee effectively ruled out the systematic and legally
enshrined character of racial abuse. What made it predictable, rather
than arbitrary, was its consistent object: racially subjugated peoples. By
diminishing the structural aspects of the abuse of minorities, liberal
law enforcement reformers opened the door to a wider misunder-
standing of what needed to be reformed. The response the committee
endorsed—to enact procedural reforms and modernize law enforcement
in the United States—rode the high tide of police professionalization
initiatives that would crest in the following decades, and which called
for a well-endowed, federally sanctioned anticrime apparatus. As
historian Elizabeth Hinton and Murakawa have argued, this effort
to reform law enforcement and codify its procedures actually made
it more institutionally robust and less forgiving, contributing to the
country’s march toward mass incarceration.
What is less understood, however, is the fundamental mismatch
between what reformers and police chiefs imagined reform to look
like. For liberal reformers, injustice looked like a lynch mob. For many
police experts, steeped in Cold War ideology and trained in counter-
intelligence, it looked like the Soviet secret police. Mob rule had to
be avoided, but so too did centralized authority over police objectives.
Underlying reasons for what police did daily, and to whom, was not the
concern of either party.
Command-level cops across the United States, after all, were
quick to absorb the lessons and perspectives of public safety officers.
In policing’s professional literatures, CIA officials published articles
on topics such as policing in the Soviet Union, which emphasized
the centralized governing hierarchy. The fact that Soviet police at
the lowest level enacted the tyranny ordered at the top resonated