Every academic researcher hopes their work will have a modern relevance. But for Simon Balto, relevance has been a double-edged sword.
The assistant professor of history studies white mobs and the history of violent and racially repressive policing in the United States—topics that have been grabbing headlines for much of the last decade.
“It’s nice to feel that the work that I do can help people make sense of what is currently happening,” says Balto, who was born in Milwaukee but was adopted and raised near La Crosse and earned both his undergraduate and graduate degrees at UW-Madison. “But these things are heavy to sit with day in and day out.”
Balto’s research brush strokes reveal a picture of our troubled history. The book he’s working on now (his second), charts the history of white mob violence in the United States, from the Reconstruction era to the 1960s—although there are contemporary echoes in the Unite the Right demonstration in Charlottesville in 2017 and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“White violence has been so central to so many key episodes and key processes in American history,” notes Balto. “It has been sort of surreal to watch so much of the things that I’m trying to grapple with in the book play out in real time.” Something that struck him about the January 6 attack is just how many police officers flew in from around the country to be part of the mob.
Balto found his research inspiration for his first book while living in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago in 2007.
“One of the things that I noticed is just how much policing looks different from one context to the next,” says Balto. “The police presence surrounding a spectacularly wealthy campus like Northwestern University looks different than it does in a working-class, multiracial neighborhood like Rogers Park.”
Balto had always been interested in the life of Fred Hampton, the leader of the Illinois Black Panthers, who was killed by the FBI and Chicago police in 1969. Hampton’s pointed criticisms of racially driven policing struck a chord with him, particularly as the United States was emerging as the global leader in incarcerating its own citizens. Balto decided he wanted to understand why.
In the Chicago History Museum, perusing a roll of microfilm containing meeting minutes of the leadership of the Chicago Police Force from the early 1960s, Balto uncovered evidence of “arrest quotas.”
“They’re just talking about how, in neighborhoods of particular interest—by which they invariably mean low-income, Black and Brown communities—officer efficiency would be gauged by the number of stops and arrests that they were making,” says Balto. “It’s all right there out in the open.”
Balto says his research has helped him unlearn some of the narratives we’re taught about how people are kept safe in the United States—that the police are always the good guys, and that everyone benefits equally from their protection.
Ultimately, Balto hopes his research can help drive people toward critical conversations on what safety should look like.
“It’s really animated by this question: What are we doing when it comes to protecting people and keeping people safe in a way that doesn’t reinforce inequalities and unjust hierarchies?” Balto says.
