Hope and Struggle in the Policed Inner-City: Black Criminalization and Racial Capitalism in Philadelphia, 1914-1978

Abstract

During the Great Migration (1916-1970) of African Americans to the North, Philadelphia’s police department, journalists, and city officials used news media to disseminate crime narratives laced with statistics and racial stereotypes of “black invasions,” “urban neighborhood jungles,” “roving black gangs,” and the “culture of poverty” to convince the white middle-class to resist desegregation and support tough on crime policing in the inner city from 1958 to the present-day. However, African Americans experienced double victimization from the proliferation of these crime narratives. Police and journalists used crime narratives to justify the racially-biased policing tactics of hyper-surveillance, daily patrols, excessive force, and incarceration against black and poor residents. Over time, city officials developed a system of racial capitalism in which City Council financially divested from social welfare programs, invested in the police department, and promoted a tough on crime policing program that generated wealth for Philadelphia’s tax base and attempted to halt white flight from the city. My evidence consists of newspapers, archived news reel, municipal court dockets, census records, oral histories, interviews, police investigation reports, housing project pamphlets, and maps to demonstrate that a consequence of tough on crime policing was hyper-surveillance, the use of excessive force, and neglect by officers in the most disadvantaged areas of the city: poor, segregated, and black-inhabited housing projects and neighborhoods. Nevertheless, by looking through the lens of Philadelphia specifically, I emphasize that the budgetary strategy of a city government spending more money on policing and corrections than social welfare programs is ineffective and a form of racial capitalism which relies on criminal scapegoating, continues the cycle of poverty-induced crime, inflates rates of incarceration and police brutality, and marginalizes poor people of color.