It wasn’t guaranteed that the police would end up monitoring the nation’s roads, or even that they would drive automobiles themselves. Although drivers today take for granted the presence of police cruisers with flashing red and blue lights, Seo shows that this was a contingent historical outcome. In fact, the police cruiser as we know it was not popularized until after World War II. During the early years of the automobile, officers drove unmarked cars, rode bicycles, and sometimes even commandeered citizens’ cars to pursue criminals.
The change from officers walking the beat to squads of police cruisers was not immediate. As in the Robinson case, the judges and public officials who effected this transformation did so to remedy the dangers faced by both traffic cops and motorists on the open road. According to Seo, the racial disparities in the traffic law enforcement regime developed well after police began patrolling the nation’s highways.
Seo argues that these lawmakers did not “intend” to facilitate the “systematic policing of minorities.” Rather, early traffic law enforcement necessitated—for the first time in the nation’s history—that police direct their attention to the so-called “respectable class of citizens who were the automobile’s early adopters.” Before this, police only policed the “margins of society.” Now they policed everyone.
It is certainly true that the colonization of the United States’ roads by the automobile resulted in “mass chaos that threatened everyone’s safety.” But should we take the public safety concerns of early 20th-century police officials and jurists at face value?
There is no doubt that the automobile required police to expand their purview to anyone who might commit a traffic violation; still, the white and well-off drivers of Seo’s “respectable class” never became targets of criminal law enforcement. Moreover, American police controlled the mobility of African Americans, immigrants, and others long before automobility.
Perhaps the automobile did not simply expand policing, as Seo maintains, but also helped consolidate the existing racial imperatives of American policing.
Motor vehicles challenged classical legal thought, which neatly divided the world into private and public spheres. Should the automobile be subject to the protections of private rights, like the home? Or should it be subject to public regulation, like a pedestrian? Judges ultimately decided that cars existed somewhere in between.
At its heart, Policing the Open Road is about what Seo terms the “Automotive Fourth Amendment.” She argues that as judges adapted the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure to cases involving automobiles, they gradually empowered police officers to decide for themselves just where private rights would end and public rights would begin.