The country was instead plunged into domestic chaos, and policing encountered perhaps its most formidable challenge—a direct and frontal assault on the legitimacy of the police and indeed the legal and economic systems. The civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements, as well as the emerging youth culture of the 1960s, effectively merged two groups that had previously been socially and politically separated—minorities, particularly Blacks, and urban and suburban middle-class White youth. The convergence of these social and political movements confronted American policing in direct and visible ways (Greene, 2000:307).
Talk of revolution filled the air, as cities burned, and crime rates soared. The Civil Rights Movement and decades of oppression spawned the militant Black Power Movement, which included groups such as the Black Panthers, whose bloody clashes with police heightened tensions on both sides. Race riots erupted summer after summer—in Watts, Newark, Detroit, then in cities nationwide in the spring of 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Meanwhile, protests on college campuses became increasingly violent, as the focus narrowed to the pressing issues of the Vietnam War and the draft. The nightly news was filled with images of students, armed with lists of nonnegotiable demands, taking over university administration buildings as riot police lobbed tear gas into the crowds. History repeated itself; or, as we have observed at the onset of this chapter, the same tactics and mistakes were repeated. For example, the military units were called out to control a student protest at Kent State University, which resulted in the killing of four students by national guardsmen.
The upheaval pitted hawks against doves, Blacks against Whites, students against the establishment, the powerful against the powerless, in an atmosphere of increasing fury on all sides. As representatives of the establishment whose job included maintaining domestic peace, the police often found themselves on one side of the barricades facing any one of a number of widely diverse groups collectively known as the New Left.
The New Left was a loose coalition of groups demanding a variety of social, economic, and political changes, under the overall umbrella phrase "social justice." Their unifying slogan was "Power to the People." The agenda ranged from legalizing marijuana and other drugs to ending the draft, from sexual freedom to equality for people of color and women. Protests covered the spectrum, from nonviolent actions to bombings conducted by small, ultra-radical groups like the Weathermen, who had split from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) over the issue of violence. The underground Weathermen served as a model for other groups, such as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) that made headlines when they kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst.