Hope and Struggle in the Policed City

Honorable Mention, 2025 Joe Trotter First Book Award, given by the Urban History Association Explores how concerns about poverty-induced Black crime cultivated by police, journalists, and city officials sparked a rise in tough-on-crime policing in Philadelphia During the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, Philadelphia’s police department, journalists, and city officials used news media to create and reinforce narratives that criminalized Black people and led to police brutality,