This is the fourth entry in our 10th Annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest, \u201cRevolution<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n By Heather N. Jahrling<\/p>\n White police in white helmets.\u00a0<\/p>\n Jimmy Breslin spotted them in Harlem in July 1964, as protests over the fatal police shooting of fifteen-year-old James Powell spiraled into six days of fiery disorder: \u201cThe cops were everywhere, four and five of them on a street corner,\u201d he wrote for the Herald Tribune<\/em>, \u201cwearing white steel helmets.\u201d<\/p>\n Breslin was hardly alone in noticing patrolmen under \u201csteel hat[s].\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> Inside a bar at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, a reporter for the New York Amsterdam News<\/em> found Harlemites confronted by \u201chelmeted Cossacks.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> The same domed helmets bobbed through David Henderson\u2019s 1967 poem \u201cKeep on Pushing<\/a>,\u201d as he framed the white occupation of the Black metropolis: \u201cPhalanxes of police \/ march up and down \/ They are dispatched and gathered helmet heads.\u201d3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n A few blocks away, in East Harlem, members of a Puerto Rican peace patrol feared these \u201chelmet heads\u201d would inflame tensions in their own community. As the patrol\u2019s founder put it to Gay Talese of the New York Times<\/em>, \u201cWhen we see helmets, we think of war.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n By the long, hot summer of 1964, Manhattan police had amassed hundreds of military-style helmets. In a July 25th memorandum to Police Commissioner Michael Murphy, precinct commanders reported their helmet inventories\u201490 in the 19th, 101 in the 22nd, 150 in the 26th, 144 in the 34th, and so on\u2014while the Operations Bureau tallied more than 1,500 across the borough, ready for domestic deployment.5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n As helmets recurred across photographs, inventories, and press coverage, I continued to circle the same core questions: Where did all these white steel helmets come from? Why did precincts across Manhattan stockpile them in the hundreds? And why did the helmets\u2019 insignias (take a close look at the photograph above) differ\u2014some marked with \u201cPD,\u201d others with a red-and-white-striped triangle inside a blue circle?<\/p>\n Unexpectedly, these loud helmets in Harlem led me to the source of a silent revolution in American law enforcement: Cold War civil defense. While most people know civil defense through the famous \u201cduck and cover\u201d drills and yellow fallout shelter signs, the program was far more expansive (see the nationwide civil defense campaign \u201cAlert America\u201d<\/a>). Civil defense promised to protect American \u201clife and property\u201d from atomic attack through coordinated federal, state, and local preparedness efforts.6<\/a><\/sup> Created by Congress in 1950, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) divided these ambitious efforts into ten major volunteer services: warden, police, fire, rescue, engineering, health, welfare, supply, transportation, and staff. At the local level, civil defense directors often structured their survival programs around police services, leaning on their preexisting personnel, command structures, and emergency infrastructure. For civil defense planning director Russell J. Hopley, police, then, were the lifeblood of the entire program: \u201cNot only will the direct police functions of protection and preservation of order be of prime importance in an emergency, but all the varied services of civil defense will be effectively performed only if the police successfully perform their tasks.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n In preparation for what federal officials publicly called an \u201call-out, smashing attack that struck a dozen of our cities at once,\u201d the FCDA tasked police services with controlling crowds, directing traffic, coordinating communications, and preventing panic (listen to CD Director Arthur Wallander interview<\/a> Police Commissioner Thomas F. Murphy).8<\/a><\/sup> In New York, police also supervised the air warden service and ground observers as part of their \u201cheavy extra duties.\u201d9<\/a><\/sup> While wardens formed a vast network of neighborhood volunteers trained to guide their communities to safety, ground observers scanned the skies for enemy aircraft to warn the public. Nowhere did these police tasks matter more than in urban areas like New York City, where dense concentrations of population and industry made them \u201cprime targets.\u201d10<\/a><\/sup> Imagining their cities as the nation\u2019s atomic bullseyes, anxious municipal leaders across the country demanded heavy extra equipment to match their heavy extra duties.<\/p>\n That equipment came from the largest surplus stockpile in American history. When World War II ended, the federal government was saddled with some forty billion dollars\u2019 worth of property\u2014aircraft, trucks, tanks, firearms, radios\u2014suddenly transformed from wartime necessities into \u201cdisposable\u201d peacetime surplus.11<\/a><\/sup> In 1956, under the threat of nuclear war, concerned lawmakers authorized surplus donations to civil defense agencies for national security purposes. That critical decision placed civil defense alongside only two other American sectors\u2014education and public health\u2014with priority access to free federal property. Civil defense agencies, and through them police services, could then accept motor vehicles, motorcycles, generators, weapons, and, of course, helmets: \u201cPD\u201d for police, a striped triangle for air wardens. In other words, the hundreds of white steel helmets in Harlem were meant to shield against debris after a detonation, not bricks and bottles thrown from rooftops.<\/p>\n Yet by the summer of 1964, these donated helmets were being used not to protect residents from atomic attack but to police Black communities during urban unrest. This was not the first time civil defense had turned to civil offense. In theory, federal restrictions limited the use of surplus property to three civil defense purposes: readiness, training, or reserve stockpiles. In practice, recipients often diverted equipment from these authorized uses. A 1962 audit by the General Accounting Office found that civil defense personnel, particularly police services, consistently used surplus property for \u201cnormal needs.\u201d One department converted a \u201c38-foot picket-boat into a police patrol boat\u201d; shotguns and revolvers intended for emergencies were \u201cissued to regular police for use in normal police duties\u201d; and seven of twelve helicopters approved for civil defense were instead being used for ordinary governmental work.12<\/a><\/sup> Taken together, these cases reveal more than isolated misuse. They expose the complex infrastructure of that silent revolution: a federal pipeline moving surplus property, albeit indirectly, into local police hands well before politicians declared a war on crime<\/a>.<\/p>\n As an urban historian, the year 1968 has been burned into my brain. Historians have largely traced the origins of police militarization back to that year, particularly to President Lyndon B. Johnson\u2019s Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. Passed largely in response to the urban uprisings of the 1960s\u2014Harlem\u2019s among them\u2014the act created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) to funnel federal money and property directly into local police departments for the war on crime. Elizabeth Hinton refers to this intervention as a \u201claw enforcement revolution,\u201d one firmly steered by the federal government. As she convincingly claims, the legislation created \u201ca direct role for the federal government in local police operations\u2026for the first time in American history.\u201d13<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n The scale of that revolution is difficult to overstate. By the 1970s, the LEAA had become the fastest-growing federal agency, distributing billions of dollars through grants and equipment transfers. But its scale was matched by its visibility: this was a revolution written into federal law, debated in Congress, and publicly announced as a fundamentally new relationship between Washington and local police.<\/p>\n If the LEAA marked a de jure revolution in American law enforcement, then civil defense marked a de facto one\u2014an earlier transformation never legislated as crime control at all. This earlier history does not diminish the importance of the LEAA or undermine Hinton\u2019s account of the revolution it produced. Rather, considering the two transformations in tandem\u2014the de jure revolution Congress enacted in 1968 and the de facto revolution civil defense had been quietly building for more than a decade\u2014widens both the chronology and the scope of police militarization and, in turn, our understanding of what Heather Ann Thompson calls the \u201ccriminalization of urban space.\u201d14<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n The war on crime that targeted low-income urban communities of color did not build its federal-to-local pipeline from scratch. It inherited and intensified one first constructed under the shadow of the bomb.<\/p>\n Heather N. Jahrling is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in twentieth-century American urban, technological, and carceral history at Princeton University. Her dissertation, \u201cBeyond the Bullseye,\u201d offers a new framework for understanding the origins of America\u2019s postwar urban crisis: Cold War civil defense. Her research for this post was supported in part by the Gilder Lehrman Scholarly Fellowship in Cold War Studies. You can follow her on Bluesky @heatherjahrling.bsky.social<\/strong><\/p>\n Featured Image (at top): Civil defense helmets were improvised riot gear, preceding the plastic visored helmets that would more fully armor police against bricks, bottles, and other projectiles later in the decade. Source: Shawn W. Walker<\/a>, Police in \u201cRiot Gear\u201d (Civil Defense Helmets) after Riot on 125th Street, Harlem, 1963\u20131964, gelatin silver print, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC, https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/pictures\/item\/2021638451\/<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is the fourth entry in our 10th Annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest, \u201cRevolution.\u201d\u00a0 By Heather N. Jahrling White police in white helmets.\u00a0 Jimmy Breslin spotted them in Harlem in July 1964, as protests over the fatal police shooting of fifteen-year-old James Powell spiraled into six days of fiery disorder: \u201cThe cops were everywhere, four […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7065430,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[2708,17697,1557,14431,17618,14019,53026,5347,3739],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7065429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-america","tag-civil","tag-cold","tag-defense","tag-metropole","tag-turned","tag-unrest","tag-urban","tag-war"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/themetropole.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image.2.jpg\")
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