Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2019 and republished in paperback in 2020. It is the winner of the 2019 Benjamin Hooks Institute’s National Book Award, awarded annually to the “book that best furthers understanding of the American Civil Rights Movement and its legacy,” as well as the Union League Club of Chicago’s Outstanding Book on the History of Chicago 2021 Book Award, awarded for the 2019-2020 biennium.

It is available to purchase through your local independent bookseller, directly from the press, or wherever you get your books.

From the book jacket:

In July 1919, an explosive race riot forever changed Chicago. For years, black southerners had been leaving the South as part of the Great Migration. Their arrival in Chicago drew the ire and scorn of many local whites, including members of the city’s political leadership and police department, who generally sympathized with white Chicagoans and viewed black migrants as a problem population. During Chicago’s Red Summer riot, patterns of extraordinary brutality, negligence, and discriminatory policing emerged to shocking effect. Those patterns shifted in subsequent decades, but the overall realities of a racially discriminatory police system persisted.

In this history of Chicago from 1919 to the rise and fall of Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s, Simon Balto narrates the evolution of racially repressive policing in black neighborhoods as well as how black citizen-activists challenged that repression. Balto demonstrates that punitive practices by and inadequate protection from the police were central to black Chicagoans’ lives long before the late-century "wars" on crime and drugs. By exploring the deeper origins of this toxic system, Balto reveals how modern mass incarceration, built upon racialized police practices, emerged as a fully formed machine of profoundly antiblack subjugation.

“[W]ell-written, highly convincing, and richly documented…Highly recommended.”

-Choice Reviews

"The last several years have seen important histories written about the rise of mass incarceration in the United States, but what has been missing are studies that deepen our understanding of American policing. Simon Balto offers a much-needed history of policing in Chicago, clearly articulating the connection between the Chicago Police Department’s record of racism and abuse and its contemporary crisis of police brutality."

-Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of Race for Profit and From BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

"As police violence gains much-needed attention across the nation, this book provides crucial context for the ways in which these issues are not new. Using the War on Crime as 'an endpoint rather than a launching pad,' Balto gives a harrowing, meticulously researched account of the way the roots of policing have been deeply violent and more preoccupied with social control than with safety since the inception of the institution. It is a disturbing history, which makes it all the more urgent. This is an important read for anyone who wants to understand how we arrived at this dispiriting state--and how we might ever possibly escape its grasp."

-Eve L. Ewing, author of Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side

"Simon Balto’s study of twentieth-century black Chicago provides new insights into the historical roots of police abuse in black communities while challenging scholarship that posits the mid-twentieth century as a turning point for deteriorating relationships between the police and black Americans. This beautifully written history is a model of clarity and moral passion."

-Beryl Satter, author of Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America

"A timely and important history, Balto skillfully creates an original interpretation of race and policing as well as the campaigns waged against racism and political repression by the black freedom struggle in twentieth-century Chicago that will be widely read."

-Jordan T. Camp, author of Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State

“A compelling regional case study of the Chicago Police Department’s vexed relationship with the African American community dating back to at least the 1910s and extending through the 1970s.”

-The Journal of African American History

“Balto encourages us to reflect on the fundamental purpose of law enforcement and whether policing can ever be more just and fair to people of color and other marginalized populations, or whether it will always be inherently unjust to society’s most vulnerable members.”

-The Journal of Social History

“Simon Balto has produced a major work of history, forcing us to reimagine the political geography of the carceral state in ways that will be essential for any transformative and more just future.”

-The Metropole (Urban History Association)

“Balto has produced a well-written and well-argued book, demonstrating that the central components of the modern policing apparatus were “already in evidence, in some form or another, on Chicago’s black South and West Sides,” well before the late 1960s and the early 1970s.”

-Reviews in American History

As uprisings against police violence have once again erupted in Chicago and throughout the nation, Balto’s book is an essential hundred-plus year history that demonstrates that there is no reforming CPD—the department must be defunded in the immediate term and made obsolete in the long term….Considering the thoroughly and unceasingly racist and oppressive history of CPD that Occupied Territory lays out, and the continuing failures to “reform” the department, the only way forward is to heed the calls to defund the police and invest in community. “

-South Side Weekly

Occupied Territory is an important addition to carceral state history. The vast majority of incarcerated people are held in state and local jails, so we need more localized histories like Balto’s to fully understand the development of the carceral state. The book demonstrates how political history can be told through the history of policing and crime, and Balto’s discussion of Orlando Wilson is an important case study of the failures of police reform. Occupied Territory also provides a model for how to write about crime as both a political and social construction and as something that impacts people’s lives. Balto takes fears of crime seriously, something that recent carceral state history has not always done. He writes empathetically about black Chicagoans’ desire for police protection, understanding their motivations, even while his sympathies clearly lie with those who proposed more radical solutions.”

-Chicago Review

“Balto…hits every nail on the head and into the plank for good measure.”

-NewCity