Dr. Max Felker-Kantor joined the Department of African American Studies as an Associate Professor in fall 2025. Affiliated with the Department of History and the Department of Educational Policy Studies, Felker-Kantor’s scholarship focuses on policing, race, and urban politics in the United States. His first book, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (2018) examines the evolution of the Los Angeles Police Department from the 1965 Watts uprising through the 1991 Rodney King beating and 1992 Los Angeles uprising, showing how police power expanded and how Black and Latino communities mobilized in response. His second book, DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools (2024), studies the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program and argues that what appeared as school-based drug prevention became an instrument of police power and social control in American public schools.
Felker-Kantor’s current book project, a continuation of his first, examines a scandal involving Los Angeles Police Department anti-gang units in the 1990s. The project interrogates how the LAPD carried out the war on gangs and how those practices targeted undocumented people, refugees, and young people of color. “Part of this scandal revealed,” he said, “these intersections between gang officers and immigration enforcement.” When officers couldn’t identify a criminal charge, “they would just turn them over to INS.”
The book draws on newspapers, city council records, police reports, and oral histories. One of the most significant archives comes from investigative journalist Charles Rappleye, whose papers are housed at the Southern California Library. Rappleye’s files included background research and public records requests from his years reporting on policing in Los Angeles. “I was fortunate to get a window into some of those sources,” Felker-Kantor said. “They told me that no one had really ever looked through those records,” he recalled, “That’s what you would dream of as a historian.” The greatest barrier he identifies is limited access to internal police records. “These state institutions, especially the police, don’t like to have their records out in the public,” he said. Access would revolutionize this work.
Felker-Kantor’s engagement with Los Angeles began in graduate school. A student at The University of Southern California, he focused his studies on African American history and multiracial urban social movements. The broader national conversation was shaped by new writing on mass incarceration: “Michelle Alexander had just published The New Jim Crow,” he shares. Khalil Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America and Heather Thompson’s article, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters” were also informing Felker-Kantor’s questions. He began to ask how the LAPD grew more violent by the early 1990s despite decades of activism.
Felker-Kantor’s work can be situated within a growing field of carceral state history. “Over the last ten years, there’s been a real growth in the field,” he explained. His first book and a study by historian and UW–Madison professor of history Dr. Simon Balto were among the earliest works in a wave of scholarship on policing. Even as the field expands, he notes, the 1990s remain underexplored. “We haven’t really thought through a lot of the 1990s and the war on gangs,” he said. “That’s what I’m working through right now.”
He describes his purpose as examining how racial inequality, policing, and criminal justice took shape over time. His teaching, too, centers on helping students see those patterns. “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes,” he said. “We can see the ways in the present that history can provide us context and lessons about how to think about our present.” He emphasizes that historical interpretation is not fixed. “Historians constantly argue with one another,” he said. “New evidence, new interpretations, new perspectives…we bring all of that with us over time.”
For students interested in exploring similar histories, he points them toward the archives closest to them. “There’s going to be a history of anti-police abuse movements in Madison, in Milwaukee,” he noted. “You don’t have to go to LA or New York.” He urges students to read widely and begin with the questions that move them most deeply. Learning to interpret sources and evaluate competing arguments is essential to understanding both the past and the present. “That’s the work of historians,” he shared. “Figuring out what we think something means based on the evidence we have.”