Policing the Open Road

Reviewed by: Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom by Sarah A. Seo Peter Norton (bio) Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom By Sarah A. Seo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. 352. Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom By Sarah A. Seo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. 352. It's a familiar paradox: the automobile is both a token of personal freedom and a tyrant that imposes innumerable constraints. But an important aspect of this paradox in the United States has, until recently, failed to get its due. As a privately owned vehicle, the car apparently offered Americans a mobile extension of the driver's home, and as the common law would have it, "a man's house is his castle." Enshrined in the Fourth Amendment, the principle barred "unreasonable searches and seizures" of personal property. As the property of its owner, an American's automobile was presumably secure from state intrusion. But as Sarah Seo skillfully demonstrates in Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom, the reality was more complex, more interesting, and profoundly significant. Driving, far from a legal extension of being at home, became Americans' most policed practice, and their moments of maximum vulnerability to the state. Citing archival records and court cases, Seo shows that once a car was on an American road, its interior was about as exposed to an intrusive state as a Moscow apartment in Brezhnev's USSR. In a car-dependent society, where driving has become a practical necessity in a country rebuilt around a presumption of car ownership, this means that nearly everyone is policed daily. Seo shows how the routine traffic stop soon became the means by which police, with the approval of judges, legally eroded Americans' Fourth Amendment rights. Particularly vulnerable are motorists of color. Among the book's distinctly valuable contributions, readers learn of several of the ancestors of the better-publicized violent police stops of recent decades. Barred by the Fourth Amendment from conducting warrantless searches of homes, police departments resorted to hypervigilant traffic stops. In the American context, this means that the historic and persisting overpolicing of Black Americans takes an invasive and sometimes violent form on American roads. Seo dates the transition to the 1920s, when mass automobility, deadly roads, and Prohibition combined to demand far more of police than ever before. The hazards of the roads justified intensified regulation and policing of driving, while the mobility that automobiles afforded bootleggers gave police an interest in searching the cars they stopped. The courts found what came to be termed the "automobile exception" to the Fourth Amendment. Numerous procedural requirements patched the gap, supporting a progressive story of developing police professionalism and due process rights, while distracting attention from the substantial impairment of [End Page 614] Fourth Amendment protections. Unimpeded by the necessity of warrants, under "discretionary policing" rules, police in effect warranted themselves, guided by their own intuitions of who is suspicious and who is not. In practice, discretionary policing was discriminatory policing. The doctrine ideally served the purposes of the War on Drugs, with all its excesses and inequities. Motorists' advocates included the ACLU and the NAACP, and the segments of the book about their advocacy are particularly valuable contributions. In comparison with the American Automobile Association, however, their influence on the open road was slight. Though the AAA, the American Trucking Associations, and the state and local affiliates of both organizations were relentless advocates of drivers' rights, their efforts are not included in Policing the Open Road. While authorities were winning legal battles to stop motorists, to question them, and to search their cars, they were often losing other efforts, such as strict enforcement of speed limits. For example, AAA campaigned for decades against speed traps, disclosing their location to motorists on its ubiquitous road maps. The pressure of such unwanted publicity often changed local practices. Truckers, for their part, took advantage of citizens' band radio to warn each other of speed traps. Such tugs of war, too, have been part of "policing the open road," and help explain "how cars transformed American freedom." Nevertheless, Policing the Open Road

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