Policing the Open Road
How Cars Transformed American Freedom
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4154913 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Volker Janssen (0000-0002-8882-2353, California State University, Fullerton, Fullerton, California, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 107 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 511-512 |
| Publication date | 2020-09-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaaa207 |
| OpenAlex | W3088261956 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 10 |
In the past twenty-five years, scholarship on the history of punishment and the emergence of mass incarceration has grown significantly. Even so, our understanding of the historical development of police powers and the significance of Americans’ first encounter with criminal justice—the police—has largely lagged behind, no doubt because of the difficulties entailed in accessing highly decentralized and restricted official sources. Among the few histories of policing, Risa Goluboff's Vagrant Nation (2016) revealed the arbitrary powers police derived from old vagrancy laws and the constitutional challenges that discredited the concept of vagrancy in the 1960s. Now, Policing the Open Road tells us the complementary story of how law enforcement officers in the United States came to expand their reach and authority in the twentieth century through the policing of automobile traffic. Sarah A. Seo argues that, the allure of cars as expressions and means of freedom and individual liberty notwithstanding, the mass production of automobiles almost immediately brought forth the imperative to regulate the motoring public. Although forms of private property, cars moved on public roads where drivers encountered and broke countless traffic regulations and posed significant threats to the safety and welfare of others. In traffic, police no longer dealt with just those on the margins of society but with “everyman.” The challenge was how to “fashion laws that allowed the investigation of potential criminal suspects without harassing law-abiding citizens” (p. 15). Progressives pushed the professionalization of police to ready officers for their encounters with the “law-abiding” public breaking traffic rules. The prohibition laws of the 1920s against trafficking liquor forced American jurisprudence to articulate the boundary between the “right to arrest and the right to drive” (p. 4). The Fourth Amendment protection against warrantless search and seizure became the subject of intense litigation throughout the twentieth century. Unable to articulate a substantive protection against police power, the courts deferred to the discretion and “reasonable” judgement of patrol officers. By the end of the 1960s, protection against warrantless search and seizure had given way to officers’ right to stop and frisk. Legal historians need to wrestle with Seo's reinterpretation of the Warren Court's decisions in Mapp v. Ohio (1961) as the legitimation of discriminatory police practices under the guise of reasonable suspicion
Criminal justice · Criminology · Deadly force · Enforcement · Law enforcement · Mass incarceration · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Vagrancy · American History and Culture · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Criminal Law and Evidence · Law
| Citations per year | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |