The 1968 crime act militarized police and redefined black people as disposable threats.

Evidence

The law established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which provided local police departments support in the form of weapons, surveillance, and research about criminality—much of which targeted black communities to prevent crime and riots. The act resulted in the increased militarization of police departments, which had a direct impact on how black communities were policed. A 1969 New Yorker article described the legislation as “a piece of demagoguery devised out of malevolence and enacted in hysteria,” and a harbinger of what was to come. Black people were no longer sources of wealth to be exploited, Baldwin argued. Now they were disposable, and their idleness posed a threat to the Republic. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 527

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s causal arc: how the state redefined black life after the civil rights victories — from exploited labor to disposable menace.