Police and Safety

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• Coalition Against Police Abuse Collection: documentation and records of this community organization that organized marginalized groups to prevent, expose, and resist abuse by police; includes materials on creating an elected civilian police review board, documentation police brutality cases, records on solidarity efforts with people working on similar issues in the favelas of Brazil, photos, videos, and more.


• Generations Locked Down: a community-created archive that includes correspondence, reports, comic books, oral histories, and more documenting the impacts of incarceration on communities.


• Latino Community Justice Center Records: contains case files documenting complaints regarding misconduct/abuse on the part of police, sheriffÕs department personnel, and on the part of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (I.N.S.). See more info.


• Urban Policy Research Institute Collection: extensive records of a research organization that monitored the activities of national and local law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department, to make them more responsive to society and to expose unlawful surveillance and other abuses of police power.


• 1992 Uprising and 1965 Watts Rebellion Collections: includes clippings, reports, photographs, oral histories, and more documenting the civil unrest that occurred in South Los Angeles in 1992 and 1965.


• L.A. Subject Files: under headings including Crime/Criminal Justice and L.A.P.D.; includes reports, clippings, flyers, and more.


• Police/Prison Posters: posters on prisoners, prisoner rights, and activism related to policing and incarceration; available for exhibits.


• The Fire This Time: Why Los Angeles Burned: examines the causes of the 1992 Uprising (1994)


• State of Emergency: investigates police brutality before and after the incident in which police officers beat Rodney King (1993).


• Twilight: presents performances by Anna Deavere Smith of the experiences of varied residents in Los Angeles, helping us understand how people felt about the 1992 Uprising.

• Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots, by Nancy Abelmann and John Lie (1995)


• City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, by Mike Davis; see especially Chapter 5 "The Hammer and the Rock" on Operation Hammer (1992)


• Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising And The 1960s: by Gerald Horne (1997)
• Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD, by Lou Cannon (1999)


• Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department, by Steve Herbert (1997)


• To Protect and to Serve: The LAPDÕs Century of War in the City of Dreams: by Joe Domanick (2003)


• Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900Ð1945, by Edward Escobar (1999)


• Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams (1993)

See also material from our archives on police and safety.