The conflict theory of law stipulates that strategies of crime control regulate threats to the interests of dominant groups. Aggregate-level research on policing has generally supported this proposition, showing that measures of minority threat are related to legal mechanisms of crime control. Police use of excessive physical force constitutes an extra-legal mechanism of control that has yet to be examined in this theoretical framework. This study extends research in the area theoretically and substantively. Measures of the presence of threatening people (percent black, percent Hispanic [in the Southwest], and majority/minority income inequality) were related positively to average annual civil rights criminal complaints. Study findings support the argument of conflict that police-minority relations symbolize the deeply rooted social divisions separating dominants and minorities. Popular policy proposals to address the problem will likely have little effect because they focus on altering the individual and interpersonal dynamics of police-minority relations while failing to recognize that those dynamics are produced by the underlying structural divisions of interest within society. Notes, table, references, appendix