Managing Urban Disorder in the 1960s: The New York City Model

By Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti

Surveying hundreds of urban riots throughout the 1960s, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, commonly known as the Kerner Commission, used strident language to capture how “white racism” underlay the grievances of rioters and called for a commitment to the War on Poverty as a remedy to urban unrest. Yet far less scholarly attention is paid to the commission’s emphasis on counterinsurgency mechanisms—locally-specific, quasi-military strategies for pacifying unrest by politicking and/or force—geared toward managing disorder amid a deepening state of political and economic crisis. An early example of crisis planning in New York City immediately following the recommendations of the Kerner Commission Report demonstrates that at the local level, counterinsurgency relied heavily on the partnership with agents of what is today called the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC), a nexus of private philanthropic organizations constituting a mediating “buffer” between capital and the working class, while channeling social movement energy away from radical change and into piecemeal, pro-market reform.