Stuart Schrader

Stuart Schrader

@stschrader1 · Twitter ·

ICYMI, here is an excerpt from BLUE POWER in @nplusonemag, discussing how a new type of tough-on-crime Northern Democrat paved the way for police to develop a cohesive political voice. https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/cop-killer-bullets/

MARIO BIAGGI WAS THE MOST decorated member of the New York Police Department when he retired in 1965. Over the course of more than two decades as a cop, he shot and killed multiple suspects, including one who tried, but failed, to carjack him, and he was wounded eleven times, once by a runaway horse that left him with a lifelong limp. In 1968, Biaggi was elected to Congress as a Democrat, flipping a Republican stronghold in the Bronx, and bringing the movement for police power to Capitol Hill. Biaggi was the first of a new breed of tough-on-crime northern Democrat. He spent his political career championing police priorities in Washington, choreographing lobbying efforts, and uplifting the police officer’s perspective at committee hearings. “He was recognized as the guy to go to if you had a concern about law enforcement,” his aide Craig W. Floyd recalled. Biaggis rise went hand-in-hand not just with law and order politics but with a shift in the balance of power within the police profession writ large-away from the respected chiefs, and toward the irascible rank and file and the unions that represented them. Biaggis achievement was to make rank-and-file police more cohesive, effective, and able to get what they wanted in the halls of Congress as never before. His major legislative accomplishments included death benefits for families of slain police officers and the founding of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, but the bill that best encapsulated the growing influence of police in politics was Biaggis ban on armor-piercing bullets. The progenitors of this movement called their political influence Blue Power. The term signified their methods as well as their goal.