Nationwide and in New York, line-of-duty deaths have been on the decline since 1970 through Republican and Democratic administrations. Indeed, they've fallen during the Obama years.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/30/nation/la-na-nn-police-deaths-20131230
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/27/16196680-police-deaths-down-23-percent-this-year-across-us
Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice
By Ian F. Haney López
First Harvard University Press, 2004
https://books.google.com/books?id=PHK3XEikm5kC
Racism flourished no doubt partly because Chief [Bill] Parker [of the LAPD] himself was a bigot. Parker routinely sought to parlay white fears of minorities into support for the police department. He usually did so using coded language, for instance by constantly proclaiming that the LAPD was the "thin blue line" between "civilization" and "chaos." But at other times, Parker made his racial meaning abundantly clear. In 1965 Parker warned a television reporter "that by 1970, 45 percent of the metropolitan area
p 138
of Los Angeles will be Negro. If you want any protection for your home and family, you're going to have to get in and support a strong police department. If you don't do that, come 1970, God help you!" (18) Parker also expressed racist views about Mexicans. In 1960, in testimony regarding police-minority relations delivered before a from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Chief Parker offered this revealing appraisal: "The Latin population that came here in great strength were here before us, and presented a great problem because I worked over on the East Side when men had to work in pairs ... and it's because of some of these people being not too far removed from the wild tribes of the inner mountains of Mexico. I don't think you can throw the genes out of the question when you discuss behavior patterns of people."
The SAGE Dictionary of Criminology
edited by Eugene McLaughlin, John Muncie
SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2013
https://books.google.com/books?id=bFrVz_ZsI_UC
p 138
Racial minorities have been criminalized and scapegoated, and white support has been mobilized for 'the thin blue line'. Related to this perspective is the observation that police forces have utilized news media scares to foster an image of a crisis-ridden threatened society in which racial minorities are responsible for an inordinate amount of predatory criminal activity.
Racial Profiling: They Stopped Me Because I'm ------------!
By Michael L. Birzer
CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, Boca Raton, FL, 2013
https://books.google.com/books?id=Wv7RBQAAQBAJ
p 34
Bittner (1996) argued that the modern police officer emerged as the thin diluent line, not against crime, but between Blacks and Whites. He contended that though the police did not create racism, their activities contributed to the magnitude of the gulf between Blacks and Whites. American police reformers of the years of the 20th century felt that it was necessary to overcome attitudes of contempt that middle-class citizens held toward the police. As a result, they had to sell the police to the people. It was during this timeframe that the police increasingly began to represent the values of the middle-class. Thus , there was an ever-growing police culture that they (the police) are the thin blue line, the last bulwark of defense against the forces of crime and disorder. The police role in turn was to separate the lawbreakers from the law abiders.
...
The thin blue line proved to be counterproductive in policing racial minority communities. The thin blue line has perpetuated a warrior-like culture on the part of the police. The police are portrayed as protecting the middle- class from the offending lower class criminal type, which the middleclass has symbolized as those in the lower classes to engage in criminality and more often than not, they happen to be racial minorities. As a result, the thin blue line has been partly responsible for strained relations with many minority communities.
The Politics of Responsibility
By Chad Lavin
The University of Illinois, Urbana and Chicago, 2008
https://books.google.com/books?id=LAsm0WY2EXYC
p 93
The racist episteme that allowed [Rodney] King and [Amadou] Diallo to be seen as potential threats was mobilized through appeal to three norms rooted in the methodological individualism of liberal responsibility. First, we are subject to a xenophobic fear couched in the “thin blue line” argument that less aggressive police enforcement means more crime. This view has been actively promoted by officials seeking to capitalize on public fear and by officers claiming that media scrutiny makes their job more difficult (see Blair 1999; Goldberg 1999; and Wambaugh 2000). Second, we subscribe to a logic of heroism fed by a popular culture that fetishizes the individual and the superhuman. Weaned on movies wherein our representative (be it Arnold Schwarzenegger or some other action hero) single-handedly terminates an entire army of aliens (or robots or Muslims) after enduring multiple gunshot wounds of his own, we have grown willing and able to believe that King was preparing to strike back after receiving his first dozen blows or that Diallo, whose body was momentarily suspended by a barrage of bullets, might have been catching
p 94
his breath to launch a counterassault.
Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing
Joe Domanick
Simon & Schuster, 2016
https://books.google.com/books?id=Hl3cDAAAQBAJ
p 10
[The legendary architect of the modern-day LAPD, William H Parker,] had testified that the [1965 Watts Riots] had been caused by black radical conspirators inflaming the area criminals against the police, while the good Negroes of South Central had stood by aghast.
p 11
Bill Parker [made] the case for his army [militarised police force] on a local television show: "If you want any protection for your home and family, ... you're going to have to support a strong police department. If you don't, God help you."
Los Angeles Police Department Meltdown: The Fall of the Professional-Reform Model of Policing
By James Lasley
CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, New York
https://books.google.com/books?id=OBBYhZHXxHwC
p 5
Central to the administrative foal of PRM was to restructure LAPD into a quasi-military organization.
p 6
According to Parker, on one side of the [Thin Blue Line] was law and order, and on the other side was civil and social anarchy.
The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America: An Encyclopedia
Wilbur R. Miller
SAGE Publications, 2012
https://books.google.com/books?id=vs9wCQAAQBAJ
p 1322
"One person," Parker is reported to have said [about the 1965 Watts Riots], had thrown a rock, and then like monkeys in a zoo, others had started throwing rocks."
Labyrinth: The True Story of City of Lies, the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. and the Implication of the Los Angeles Police Department
Randall Sullivan
Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007
https://books.google.com/books?id=CQlPvwmA4l8C
p 26
Parker...coined the phrase "thin blue line."
Racial sensitivity was not a theme that resonated particularly with Chief Parker.
p 27
The chief was not particularly interested in complaints against white cops who beat black suspects...
Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice
Ian Haney-López
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003
https://books.google.com/books?id=Te15AAAAMAAJ
p 285
In the 1950s and 960s Chief of Police William H Parker described the LAPD as the "thin blue line" that stood between civilization and chaos. No one who heard his words doubted that, to Parker, "civilization meant whites and "chaos" meant the Chicano and black communities of Los Angeles. (Escobar, "Race, Police," p 286
Race and America's Long War
Nikhil Pal Singh
Univ of California Press, 2017
https://books.google.com/books?id=6L8yDwAAQBAJ
Parker ... described the police as "a thin blue line of defense ... that we must depend [on] to defeat the invasion from within." ... Never one to put too fine a point on matters, Parker argued that police power needed to be concentrated in certain parts 9f the city because "certain racial groups ... commit a disproportionate share of the total crime. ... If persons of Mexican, Negro, or Anglo-Saxon ancestry, for some reaon, contribute heavily to other forms of crime, police deployment must take that into account. .., The demand that the police cease to consider race, color, and creed is an unrealistic demand.
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