Law enforcement technologies are especially useful props for reformers to communicate police authority. In the 2020s, that means a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. on the side of a patrol vehicle in response to accusations of systemic racism that undermine police legitimacy. At other times, police have used their vehicles to communicate other values like efficiency, overwhelming power or responsiveness.
In the 19th century, the police were notoriously corrupt and ineffective. As historian Mark Haller writes, “because they walked their beats with only minimal supervision,” early patrolmen spent much of their time in saloons and barbershops, both connecting them to their neighborhoods and providing ample opportunity for corruption. Around the turn of the century, Progressive reformers — Teddy Roosevelt among the most famous — sought to professionalize departments with new technologies, training and standards.
August Vollmer, the famous “father of modern policing” put his entire Berkeley department in Ford Model Ts in 1913 and contended that motorized patrolmen were an “altogether different type of official” from the “heavy, lumbering, foot patrolmen of the past.” For Vollmer and the countless police reformers he would later influence, police cars were not value-neutral tools, but harbingers of modern — and thus legitimate and authoritative — police departments. That argument was essential for convincing municipalities to spend money on police automobiles and persuading the public that police departments had changed in a fundamental way.
Departments also quickly realized that they could use police vehicles to communicate other messages to the public. While early vehicles had few distinguishing markings, in the 1930s officials began painting their cars some “conspicuous color” arguing that this “greatly increases their moral effect.” A report published for the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 1933 noted that, in one state, citizens thought that the number of officers on patrol “had been doubled … after cars had been painted white.” The idea was that, by evoking a sense that officers were omnipresent, they could deter crime and disorder in urban areas.
Police departments also relied on the speed of their new automobiles to help project power and deter crime. In 1928, the Atlanta Constitution reported the obviously false claim that radio-equipped police cruisers made 400 arrests at an average time of less than 60 seconds each that year. As the media studies scholar Kathleen Battles argues in “Calling All Cars,” police reformers — both police chiefs and academics in burgeoning criminal justice programs — helped shape radio docudramas in this period. They intentionally crafted narratives to communicate the professionalism and superhuman-like responsiveness of the police. Reformers sought to make escape from these technologies seem impossible, communicating a sense of safety to the public and helplessness to would-be criminals.