“Law and order” is a dogwhistle that means “oppress minorities”
“I do not believe we have to choose between law and order and racial justice in America,” Biden said in a speech this week. “We can have both.”
At the apex of the civil rights movement, … “Law and order” was “a strategy for reaching suburban voters without having to say the ugly part [talking about race] out loud,” says Leah Wright-Rigueur, a political historian and public policy professor at Harvard University. Source
“Law and order” might sound simple, a 1968 TIME cover story on the campaign pointed out, but to some it was “a shorthand message promising repression of the black community”—and to that community, it was “a bleak warning that worse times may be coming.”