Max Felker-Kantor is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research explores policing, race, policing, politics, and cities since World War II. He is the author of Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) and DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). His work has been published in the Journal of Urban History, Modern American History, Journal of Civil and Human Rights, Boom California, and the Pacific Historical Review, as well as a range of popular outlets.
Project Description: My project, The Rampart Way: Race, Corruption, and the Origins of Twenty-First Century Policing is the first history of the Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) Rampart corruption scandal and its significance for the development of twenty-first century policing. It focuses on race, politics, and police reform in Los Angeles in the two and a half decades since the 1992 unrest. It follows a group of corrupt anti-gang CRASH officers who engaged in widespread corrupt practices and misconduct in the name of winning the war on gangs. Yet, it goes beyond merely recounting the story of what has come to simply be known as Rampart. Instead, explores the politics of police and criminal justice reform by tracing the fallout of the scandal, which resulted in the adoption of a federal consent decree to oversee police reform in Los Angeles. The implementation of the consent decree in the decade after the scandal created a blueprint for police reform not only in Los Angeles but for the nation. While a historical study, it makes important contributions to contemporary debates about police accountability and reform that emerged following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.