The Enemy Within

Abstract

Reductions to social service and urban aid budgets by the Reagan administration, economic crises, and growing conservatism among middle-class white voters reshaped political possibilities during the 1980s. Reductions in urban aid left only punitive solutions available to local policymakers facing drug crime and gang violence. The Bradley administration, as this chapter demonstrates, hoped to maintain its multiracial coalition and attract international capital by waging a militarized war on drugs as a war on gangs. The combined drug-gang war rationalized social and economic inequality and constructed black and Latino/a youth as criminal, thereby legitimating police militarization, disciplinary exclusion, criminalization, and removal of youth of color from the streets.