Decades of Denial: Policing’s Past Haunts the Present
The Intercept Briefing
The Intercept
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nationwide protests. Racist discrimination. Militarized police. These were the characteristics used to describe America during the long hot summer of 1967, when riots swept through more than 150 cities. They still describe America today, as the government has responded to protests against racist policing and immigration raids with militarized police forces backed by the Marines and the National Guard.
It all sounds eerily similar to the America of more than half a century ago, when a presidential commission diagnosed the country’s problem: racism, particularly in policing, was causing widespread political unrest.
“When a protest becomes that broad-based — cutting across gender lines and ethnic lines — then I think you have the opportunity to realize this is a true political movement,” says Rick Loessberg, an urban historian and the former planning commissioner for Dallas County, Texas, and the author of “Two Societies: The Rioting of 1967 and the Writing of the Kerner Report.”
“This is not just a group or a segment of the population letting off steam,” says Loessberg, “which was what was one of the explanations that was used in the 1960s. This is something else that's much, much deeper and much more significant.”
This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks with Loessberg about what America learned — and didn’t learn — from our history of racist policing and political unrest.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Interset Briefing. I'm Akala Lacey. |
| 0:07.7 | President Donald Trump announced last month that he would end his deployment of National Guard |
| 0:12.2 | troops to Los Angeles. |
| 0:14.4 | Today, the Pentagon announced that it is withdrawing 2,000 National Guard troops from Los Angeles. |
| 0:19.7 | That deployment is now over. About 4,000 National Guard troops from Los Angeles. That deployment is now over. |
| 0:21.6 | About 4,000 National Guard troops, 700 Marines, were sent to L.A. during protests over immigration rates last month. |
| 0:29.6 | This deployment happened despite objections from city officials and California Governor Gavin Newsom. |
| 0:34.6 | The news came days after a federal judge ordered the administration |
| 0:38.5 | to stop indiscriminate immigration raids in L.A. From masked agents taking people off the |
| 0:44.2 | streets into unmarked vans to men in military fatigues on horseback, stalking through an empty |
| 0:50.2 | Los Angeles park, streets emptied as communities hid in fear of the next raid. |
| 0:55.3 | The images of militarized police and federal agents descending on the public were striking |
| 0:59.7 | and strikingly familiar. |
| 1:02.2 | That's because we've been here before, not just in L.A. but as a country. |
| 1:07.5 | And that's what we're talking about today with historian Rick Lesberg, who has written extensively about America's great wave of unrest in the summer of 1967. |
| 1:17.7 | That's when more than 150 cities across America exploded in racial uprisings. |
| 1:23.9 | Detroit, Newark, and dozens of other communities were convulsed by what became known as the long, hot summer. |
| 1:31.6 | President Lyndon B. Johnson created a commission to figure out what was going on, and the resulting report, the Kerner Report, delivered a devastating conclusion. |
| 1:41.9 | America was, quote, moving toward two societies, one black, one white, |
| 1:48.1 | separate and unequal. This pattern of unrest, followed by national soul searching, isn't new. |
| 1:55.0 | From police beating Selma Civil Rights marchers on Bloody Sunday in 1965, to attacking people protesting police brutality in 2020, |
| 2:03.7 | to shooting striking minors in the back during the Latimer massacre of 1897, |
... |
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