Max Felker-Kantor
Biographic Data
| ID | 1264357 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Max Felker-Kantor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Max |
| FAMILY NAME | Felker-Kantor |
| SIGNATURE | FELKER-KANTOR M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ball State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3514-7275 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Rethinking Special Order 40
Recent decisions by the Trump administration to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents to American cities have raised significant questions about the role of local law enforcement agencies in immigration enforcement. The partnership between immigration enforcement and local police, such as the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), has a long and contested history. Beginning in 1979, LAPD’s Special Order 40 ostensi…
Shannon King. The Politics of Safety
To Protect and to Serve
The history of policing in the United States has garnered renewed attention over the past two decades. Historians have rethought the operation and function of police in American society. This body of scholarship, which can be characterized as a critical history of policing, has demonstrated the ways the police became powerful, independent political forces in cities and the role of law enforcement in shaping American life beyond crime prevention o…
Arresting the Demand for Drugs
The DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program simultaneously changed both the police and schools through the development of what this article calls a school–police nexus, a framing that explains the reciprocal relationship between the police and schools. By enabling officers to assert expertise in the realm of drug education, DARE not only made the police a regular presence in schools but aimed to transform the image of the police officer fr…
Dare to Say No
In the fall of 1983, the Los Angeles Police Department sent police officers into elementary schools to teach the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) Program. Within a decade DARE had become the nation's preeminent antidrug education program. Yet the DARE program accomplished much more than teaching kids to resist drugs. DARE shifted the responsibility of preventing drug use from social and public-health policy to local, police-led, educative p…
S tuart S chrader . Badges without Borders
In 1963, the United States Office of Public Safety (OPS) produced First Line of Defense, a film to train police officers from around the world attending the OPS academy in Washington, DC. Filmed in the Panama Canal Zone, First Line of Defense depicted the unrest that would accompany communist insurgency bent on destabilizing newly independent nations across the globe. But, as the attendees learned, well-trained professional police forces could pr…
The Ecology of Homicide
To understand homicide in the postwar American city requires paying attention to the intersection of racism, segregation, and violence. Or, as the late Eric C. Schneider argues in the posthumously published The Ecology of Homicide, it means grappling “with the ecology of violence ... the spacing and interdependence of people and institutions” (p. xxi). Because Schneider's manuscript was unfinished, Howard Gillette Jr. prepared the six completed c…
Presumed Criminal
Book Review| October 01 2021 Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York. By Carl Suddler. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 256pp. List of illustrations, notes, index. $45 (cloth); $19.95 (paper); $15 (e-book). Max Felker-Kantor Max Felker-Kantor Ball State University Max Felker-Kantor is Assistant Professor of History at Ball State U…
Politicizing Youth
Liberal Law-and-Order
After his election in 1973, Los Angeles’s first African American mayor, Tom Bradley, worked to implement reforms that would increase civilian oversight and accountability of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Ensuring procedural fairness that treated all residents equally, Bradley and other liberals believed, would lead to reductions in police harassment, abuse, and shootings. Placing their faith in the power of government to effectively m…
Politicizing Youth
Policing Los Angeles
"Max Felker-Kantor narrates the dynamic history of policing, antipolice abuse movements, race, and politics in Los Angeles from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Using the explosion of two large-scale uprisings in Los Angeles as bookends, Felker-Kantor highlights the racism at the heart of the city's expansive police power through a range of previously unused and rare archival sources. His book is a ... timely account of …
Kid Thugs Are Spreading Terror Through the Streets”
Over the course of the 1970s, liberal and conservative officials in Los Angeles worked to reform a juvenile justice system they believed to be too lenient on children and teenagers who committed crimes. They intended for diversion programs, vocational training, and rehabilitation measures to complement punitive approaches of surveillance, arrest, and incarceration. By posing rehabilitation as complementary to imprisonment, liberal officials contr…
A Pledge Is Not Self-Enforcing”
This article explores African American and Mexican American struggles for equal employment in Los Angeles after 1965. It argues that activists and workers used the mechanisms set up by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to attack the barriers that restricted blacks and Mexican Americans to poor job prospects. It shows that implementation of fair employment law was part of a dialectic between policymakers and regulatory officials, on one hand,…
Liberal Law-and-Order
After his election in 1973, Los Angeles’s first African American mayor, Tom Bradley, worked to implement reforms that would increase civilian oversight and accountability of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Ensuring procedural fairness that treated all residents equally, Bradley and other liberals believed, would lead to reductions in police harassment, abuse, and shootings. Placing their faith in the power of government to effectively m…
Kid Thugs Are Spreading Terror Through the Streets”
Over the course of the 1970s, liberal and conservative officials in Los Angeles worked to reform a juvenile justice system they believed to be too lenient on children and teenagers who committed crimes. They intended for diversion programs, vocational training, and rehabilitation measures to complement punitive approaches of surveillance, arrest, and incarceration. By posing rehabilitation as complementary to imprisonment, liberal officials contr…
Arresting the Demand for Drugs
The DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program simultaneously changed both the police and schools through the development of what this article calls a school–police nexus, a framing that explains the reciprocal relationship between the police and schools. By enabling officers to assert expertise in the realm of drug education, DARE not only made the police a regular presence in schools but aimed to transform the image of the police officer fr…
A Pledge Is Not Self-Enforcing”
This article explores African American and Mexican American struggles for equal employment in Los Angeles after 1965. It argues that activists and workers used the mechanisms set up by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to attack the barriers that restricted blacks and Mexican Americans to poor job prospects. It shows that implementation of fair employment law was part of a dialectic between policymakers and regulatory officials, on one hand,…
A Pledge Is Not Self-Enforcing”
This article explores African American and Mexican American struggles for equal employment in Los Angeles after 1965. It argues that activists and workers used the mechanisms set up by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to attack the barriers that restricted blacks and Mexican Americans to poor job prospects. It shows that implementation of fair employment law was part of a dialectic between policymakers and regulatory officials, on one hand,…
Policing Los Angeles
"Max Felker-Kantor narrates the dynamic history of policing, antipolice abuse movements, race, and politics in Los Angeles from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Using the explosion of two large-scale uprisings in Los Angeles as bookends, Felker-Kantor highlights the racism at the heart of the city's expansive police power through a range of previously unused and rare archival sources. His book is a ... timely account of …
Kid Thugs Are Spreading Terror Through the Streets”
Over the course of the 1970s, liberal and conservative officials in Los Angeles worked to reform a juvenile justice system they believed to be too lenient on children and teenagers who committed crimes. They intended for diversion programs, vocational training, and rehabilitation measures to complement punitive approaches of surveillance, arrest, and incarceration. By posing rehabilitation as complementary to imprisonment, liberal officials contr…
Politicizing Youth
Liberal Law-and-Order
After his election in 1973, Los Angeles’s first African American mayor, Tom Bradley, worked to implement reforms that would increase civilian oversight and accountability of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Ensuring procedural fairness that treated all residents equally, Bradley and other liberals believed, would lead to reductions in police harassment, abuse, and shootings. Placing their faith in the power of government to effectively m…
Presumed Criminal
Book Review| October 01 2021 Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York. By Carl Suddler. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 256pp. List of illustrations, notes, index. $45 (cloth); $19.95 (paper); $15 (e-book). Max Felker-Kantor Max Felker-Kantor Ball State University Max Felker-Kantor is Assistant Professor of History at Ball State U…
Politicizing Youth
Dare to Say No
In the fall of 1983, the Los Angeles Police Department sent police officers into elementary schools to teach the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) Program. Within a decade DARE had become the nation's preeminent antidrug education program. Yet the DARE program accomplished much more than teaching kids to resist drugs. DARE shifted the responsibility of preventing drug use from social and public-health policy to local, police-led, educative p…
S tuart S chrader . Badges without Borders
In 1963, the United States Office of Public Safety (OPS) produced First Line of Defense, a film to train police officers from around the world attending the OPS academy in Washington, DC. Filmed in the Panama Canal Zone, First Line of Defense depicted the unrest that would accompany communist insurgency bent on destabilizing newly independent nations across the globe. But, as the attendees learned, well-trained professional police forces could pr…
The Ecology of Homicide
To understand homicide in the postwar American city requires paying attention to the intersection of racism, segregation, and violence. Or, as the late Eric C. Schneider argues in the posthumously published The Ecology of Homicide, it means grappling “with the ecology of violence ... the spacing and interdependence of people and institutions” (p. xxi). Because Schneider's manuscript was unfinished, Howard Gillette Jr. prepared the six completed c…
Arresting the Demand for Drugs
The DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program simultaneously changed both the police and schools through the development of what this article calls a school–police nexus, a framing that explains the reciprocal relationship between the police and schools. By enabling officers to assert expertise in the realm of drug education, DARE not only made the police a regular presence in schools but aimed to transform the image of the police officer fr…
To Protect and to Serve
The history of policing in the United States has garnered renewed attention over the past two decades. Historians have rethought the operation and function of police in American society. This body of scholarship, which can be characterized as a critical history of policing, has demonstrated the ways the police became powerful, independent political forces in cities and the role of law enforcement in shaping American life beyond crime prevention o…
Shannon King. The Politics of Safety
Rethinking Special Order 40
Recent decisions by the Trump administration to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents to American cities have raised significant questions about the role of local law enforcement agencies in immigration enforcement. The partnership between immigration enforcement and local police, such as the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), has a long and contested history. Beginning in 1979, LAPD’s Special Order 40 ostensi…
Sociology (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Criminology (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Race, History, and American Society (7 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (6 works) · Policing Practices and Perceptions (4 works) · Psychology (4 works)