I’m one of the most car critical people I know. I think they’re dangerous, wasteful, expensive, and their ubiquity makes live far worse for almost everyone. That said, blaming police violence and...
I’m one of the most car critical people I know. I think they’re dangerous, wasteful, expensive, and their ubiquity makes live far worse for almost everyone.
That said, blaming police violence and injustice on cars, even partially, is really missing the mark. Cars are involved in the unjust use of police violence because they’re everywhere, not because they somehow encourage it. A cop doesn’t need someone to be driving a car to profile them or search them.
I agree that we should limit car use as much as possible, but making the argument that if we had less of them, police would behave more fairly towards the public is really off base. They’re totally separate issues and they both need to be addressed directly.
I think one point the article covered well: The need for more police was born of excessive bad behavior of car drivers. Towns needed to increase the sizes of their police forces in kind. What...
I think one point the article covered well: The need for more police was born of excessive bad behavior of car drivers. Towns needed to increase the sizes of their police forces in kind.
What percentage of policework is due to cars in the USA? Between enforcement and other needed measures like diverting traffic and filing reports to insurance companies, I'd wager it's well over 70%.
I imagine some alternate timeline where we went all-in on trains and trams instead of cars. Cars relagated to industrial use cases and the most extreme rural areas. Nobody funding infrastructure for roads because 99% of people can get where they need on foot, tram, or train.
Given how the number of individually-controlled vehicles would be very low, I could see a case for how less police would be needed due to not having everyone in the country propelling 2 ton metal boxes around on a whim.
While this is true to a limited extent, there actually are far weaker legal protections for you getting stopped by a cop on the street vs getting stopped in your car. Obviously in caaes of police...
A cop doesn’t need someone to be driving a car to profile them or search them.
While this is true to a limited extent, there actually are far weaker legal protections for you getting stopped by a cop on the street vs getting stopped in your car. Obviously in caaes of police brutality this often doesn't matter bc the cops don't follow the law anyway, but in terms of having things thrown out in court for being illegal it's worth knowing that when a motor vehicle is involved the cops actually gain a surprising amount of power, legally speaking, that they wouldn't have for a pedestrian.
Another aspect is that, when travelling long distances in the US, drivers come into contact with police departments and jurisdictions that they'd be far less vulnerable to with other modes of...
Another aspect is that, when travelling long distances in the US, drivers come into contact with police departments and jurisdictions that they'd be far less vulnerable to with other modes of transportation. This combined with the very decentralized and poorly regulated system of local police and judiciaries allows the very predatory, quasi-legal behaviours that small towns and drive-through states are notorious for in the US, like intentionally confusing/unnoticeable speed limit changes for revenue generation on through roads, and stopping/searching/seizing/ticketing out-of-state cars for dubious reasons.
From a practical standpoint, local police simply can't harass passengers on planes flying overhead. They could try to harass passengers on trains travelling through their territory, but in additional to the practical difficulties, even if they somehow had jurisdiction, the disruption caused, and the train company likely being more powerful than the local police, would likely cause them to lose jurisdiction, or have their behaviour prohibited. Cars, however, can be easily stopped individually, and drivers harassed without too much concern, especially when they are very unlikely to have any local influence.
For plane travel, since you have to book and identify before the trip, they could just arrest you when you arrive at the airport if you have active warrants. Similar issues for trying to transport...
For plane travel, since you have to book and identify before the trip, they could just arrest you when you arrive at the airport if you have active warrants. Similar issues for trying to transport drugs by air.
I’d think the people most at risk choose to drive because it’s the most private and undercover method.
But that only applies to police in jurisdictions at the departing or arriving destination. If I’m on a road trip from New York to California, I pass through so many smaller jurisdictions where...
But that only applies to police in jurisdictions at the departing or arriving destination. If I’m on a road trip from New York to California, I pass through so many smaller jurisdictions where twisted incentives or just bored cops with ill-intent could find a dubious reason to pull me over and cause a fuss.
If I fly, I can get a direct flight with zero stopovers, and even if the flight is diverted due to weather or something, there’s basically zero chance police will decide to just hassle people in the airport or on the plane. The opportunity just isn’t there the same as it is for cars.
I admit I’m making a boogeyman to paint a picture here, but I hope it’s just a bit illustrative to show that there’s such a significant difference between driving and flying.
Lower car use would at least result in a whole lot less of certain things like drunk/drug driving. Dangerous car chases would also be less common. Usually how it seems to go is the police detect...
Lower car use would at least result in a whole lot less of certain things like drunk/drug driving. Dangerous car chases would also be less common. Usually how it seems to go is the police detect an expired registration or something so they go to issue the fine but the driver is on meth and is a wanted criminal, so they floor it to get away before crashing in to a wall or sometimes other people.
While the police might still go to stop someone walking on the street, it would be much much safer to the general public.
Jack McCordick For over a century, the automobile has served as an icon of American prosperity and individual liberty. But for a large portion of drivers, the car opens into worlds of unfreedom:...
Jack McCordick
For over a century, the automobile has served as an icon of American prosperity and individual liberty. But for a large portion of drivers, the car opens into worlds of unfreedom: into the gaping maw of America’s courts, jails, and prisons on the one hand and into the arms of predatory creditors on the other.
"It could have gone all wrong for us”
On a hot Sunday morning in Frisco, Texas, this July, an out-of-state family was traveling to a youth basketball tournament outside of Dallas when they were pulled over and held at gunpoint. A local cop had incorrectly run their license plate number, suspected them of driving a stolen car, and initiated a “high-risk” traffic stop. On subsequently released body-cam footage of the stop, the driver, who is Black, can be heard pleading with an officer as her sixth grade son is put in handcuffs. “Please don’t let them do that to my baby,” she says. “This is very traumatizing. Why is my baby in cuffs?” “I’m a basketball coach,” her husband pleads as his son can be heard crying in the background. “Don’t do this to my son. Please.” As the group of officers realizes their mistake and tries to explain what went wrong—“This is the normal way we pull people out of a stolen car,” one lamely clarifies—the father replies: “It could have gone all wrong for us.”
"potential offenders and sources of revenue"
A new generation of Black-led protest began in Ferguson, Missouri, when police officer Darren Wilson stopped Michael Brown because he was in violation of a municipal jaywalking ordinance, almost exclusively wielded against Black pedestrians. The Justice Department report that followed showed that the cash-strapped municipal government was balancing its books by imposing fines and fees on its Black residents through traffic stops, treating them “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.”
humiliating ritual of domination and submission
Cars, once America’s most important industrial commodity, are now, for so many, a vehicle of debt-driven extraction. They are also the setting of the most common interaction between citizens and police—one that plays out on streets and highways more than 20 million times annually, often as a humiliating ritual of domination and submission. How did this happen?
“The story of modern American criminal justice is also in large part a story of the car,”
“The story of modern American criminal justice is also in large part a story of the car,” sociologist Spencer Headworth announces in his new book, Rules of the Road. That story begins in the early twentieth century, when the rise of the automobile wreaked havoc in American cities.
Newspaper accounts of automobile deaths consistently emphasized the grisly fact that more U.S. citizens were killed by cars on American streets during the years of World War I than by German bayonets and munitions on the battlefields of Western Europe.
Journalists and cartoonists compared the car to a technological Moloch, greedily receiving child sacrifices, fueling what Livingston and Ross describe as a period of “urban warfare over the right of way between plebeian pedestrians and gentry behind the wheel.”
At first, most cities meekly attempted to rely on the informal social norms that had governed foot and horse traffic on the country’s streets during the previous century. “MOTORISTS ATTENTION! YOU ARE ON YOUR HONOR. FRESNO COUNTY HAS NO SPEED COPS. DRIVE SO THEY WILL NOT BE NEEDED,” pleaded a 1915 road sign.
That approach proved short-lived. As mangled bodies piled up, cities empowered police to manage traffic, a development that would, Headworth writes, “fundamentally shape US policing and police departments.” From 1910 to 1930, as the number of registered passenger cars increased over thirty-fivefold, the number of police officers more than doubled.
Fresno found that motorists took the county’s honor-system billboards to mean that “road races were in order.” Seeing no other option, the city hired a traffic cop and put the signs up for sale.
August Vollmer, later dubbed “the Father of Modern Policing.” As police chief in Berkeley, California, Vollmer established mobile bicycle patrols in 1906. By 1914, every Berkeley cop had a Ford Model T patrol car, making Vollmer’s newly professionalized corps the very first completely mobile police force in the United States. This development, the sociologist Julian Go has written, allowed cops to “swarm to outbreaks of disorder or troublesome neighborhoods, raid criminal headquarters, and swiftly control crowds and strikes.”
Vollmer, who worked overseas at the turn of the century, crushing local resistance in the Philippine-American War, “put into effect some of the methods he used in chasing river pirates … and bushwhackers in the steaming wild jungles” of Manila. ”One of the first actions he took as police chief was to have his mobile force raid Berkeley’s Chinese-owned opium and gambling dens, whose “yellow hatchet” guards he likened to Filipino insurgents.
All the while, the automobile industry and allied pressure groups waged a fierce campaign to give drivers unrivaled precedence on the roads. Roads, which once conveyed horses, carts, and people on foot, were to become the exclusive territory of motor vehicles.
Automakers even coined the term “jaywalker”—to describe a low-class country rube unaware of the right way to navigate city streets—and in some places criminalized walking into the street. Though familiar now, the notion of jaywalking was controversial at the time: In 1915, The New York Times excoriated the NYPD commissioner’s use of the term as “highly opprobrious” and “truly shocking.”
Vollmer’s hope that the average traffic cop would display “the wisdom of Solomon, the courage of David, the strength of Sampson, the patience of Job, the leadership of Moses, the kindness of the Good Samaritan, the faith of Mary, the diplomacy of Lincoln, and the tolerance of Confucius” was laughably naïve, even at the time. In one notable case in Arizona in 1918, the state Supreme Court censured a sheriff who shot an innocent driver at a traffic stop for actions “more suggestive of a holdup by highwaymen than an arrest by peace officers.”
In 1970s, As an era of postwar prosperity unraveled and unemployment spiked, Black workers were among those most sharply affected by job losses. At the same time, cities and states embarked on a prison-building boom. By the 1970s, driving was a necessity in most parts of the country, at least if you wanted to access employment, health care, food, and education. And increasingly that meant inevitable contact with the police, who were armed with access to drivers’ records via shiny new squad-car computers and who made pretextual stops a core element of day-to-day policing.
Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, municipalities around the country began filling budgetary shortfalls by extracting cash through fines and fees at every moment of a person’s involvement with the criminal legal system, from arrest to pretrial detention, to sentencing, to incarceration, to probation.
Fines and fees
A 2019 study found that 15 percent of North Carolina’s licensed adult drivers had active license suspensions for failure to appear in court or pay fines, with Black and Latino drivers vastly overrepresented.
Municipalities that derive a higher portion of their budgets from fines and fees have bigger Black populations and more police shootings, according to research from the Fines and Fees Justice Center. Before Philando Castile was shot and killed during a 2016 traffic stop in Minneapolis, he had been pulled over by police at least 49 times over a 13-year period, the vast majority for minor problems. He racked up over $6,000 in fines, and had his license revoked again and again, mostly for failure to pay a fine, show up to a court hearing, or provide proof of insurance. None of his interactions with police was for drunk driving or any other felony offense; the final stop was for a broken taillight.
A similarly horrifying paper trail preceded the 2015 death of Sandra Bland, who was found dead in a Houston jail cell three days after a traffic stop precipitated by her failure to signal a lane change. Bland had graduated from college into the Great Recession and took a low-paid job; her long commute took her through a gauntlet of municipalities that, like Ferguson, funded themselves via taxation at gunpoint on the open roads. In the years that followed, she accumulated a welter of traffic fines, padded by exorbitant surcharges; further DUI and marijuana possession arrests severely limited her employment options. As historian Sarah Seo notes in her 2019 book Policing the Open Road, “the automobile appeared in nearly every significant setback in Bland’s life.”
“Even more than housing,” Livingston and Ross write, “the acquisition and use of cars engenders multiple kinds of debt service.”
Add to these dangers the fact that cars—a necessity in most parts of the country—are expensive and that taking out an auto loan can lead to a variety of financial perils. Auto debt nearly doubled in the decade following the Great Recession and recently reached a record high of $1.56 trillion—slightly below the total sum owed in student loans, which received significantly greater attention in the media and public policy.
Earlier this year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the New York attorney general sued one of the country’s largest subprime auto lenders, alleging that it pushed predatory loans on “millions of financially vulnerable consumers.” The car-buying experience, the suit claims, turned “into a nightmare” for the lender’s debtors, who “face unaffordable monthly payments, vehicle repossessions, and debt collection lawsuits.”
Many drivers have to borrow, not just to purchase their cars but also to pay for “repairs, licensing, maintenance,” and insurance, as well as “traffic violations, court fines and fees,” and even “medical costs in the case of accidents.” There are flourishing markets in credit for wheels, tires, rims, transmissions, and car batteries. These loans generate a “rolling feast of revenue for creditors in each of these sectors, with the full force of the courts to back up the extraction of profit.” Unsurprisingly, subprime loans are disproportionately targeted at poor and minority drivers and are a prime example of what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, in the context of homeownership, has called “predatory inclusion.”
Courts, the report found, have issued arrest warrants for unpaid debts for “car repairs, towing services, auto loans, unpaid car rental fees, fuel expenses,” and claims owed to auto insurance companies. “Everyone’s in debt,” a formerly incarcerated man tells Livingston and Ross. “It’s the American way.”
Reparations
At a bare minimum, they argue, we should remove cops from traffic duty. In cases where traffic violations genuinely threaten public safety, fines should be graded according to the driver’s income.
Additionally, usury caps on auto loans need to be strictly enforced, and the backdoor loopholes to debtors’ prisons should be closed. But that’s just the start.
To build a world where cars are not a gateway to “detention, surveillance, and financial entrapment,” Livingston and Ross call for debt amnesties and restitution of forfeited property as “reparations” for the harm caused by car-based carceral extraction.
It’s an expansive vision, to be sure, but one commensurate with the scale of the physical and financial harm inflicted on Black and poor drivers and pedestrians over the past century.
I’m one of the most car critical people I know. I think they’re dangerous, wasteful, expensive, and their ubiquity makes live far worse for almost everyone.
That said, blaming police violence and injustice on cars, even partially, is really missing the mark. Cars are involved in the unjust use of police violence because they’re everywhere, not because they somehow encourage it. A cop doesn’t need someone to be driving a car to profile them or search them.
I agree that we should limit car use as much as possible, but making the argument that if we had less of them, police would behave more fairly towards the public is really off base. They’re totally separate issues and they both need to be addressed directly.
I think one point the article covered well: The need for more police was born of excessive bad behavior of car drivers. Towns needed to increase the sizes of their police forces in kind.
What percentage of policework is due to cars in the USA? Between enforcement and other needed measures like diverting traffic and filing reports to insurance companies, I'd wager it's well over 70%.
I imagine some alternate timeline where we went all-in on trains and trams instead of cars. Cars relagated to industrial use cases and the most extreme rural areas. Nobody funding infrastructure for roads because 99% of people can get where they need on foot, tram, or train.
Given how the number of individually-controlled vehicles would be very low, I could see a case for how less police would be needed due to not having everyone in the country propelling 2 ton metal boxes around on a whim.
While this is true to a limited extent, there actually are far weaker legal protections for you getting stopped by a cop on the street vs getting stopped in your car. Obviously in caaes of police brutality this often doesn't matter bc the cops don't follow the law anyway, but in terms of having things thrown out in court for being illegal it's worth knowing that when a motor vehicle is involved the cops actually gain a surprising amount of power, legally speaking, that they wouldn't have for a pedestrian.
Another aspect is that, when travelling long distances in the US, drivers come into contact with police departments and jurisdictions that they'd be far less vulnerable to with other modes of transportation. This combined with the very decentralized and poorly regulated system of local police and judiciaries allows the very predatory, quasi-legal behaviours that small towns and drive-through states are notorious for in the US, like intentionally confusing/unnoticeable speed limit changes for revenue generation on through roads, and stopping/searching/seizing/ticketing out-of-state cars for dubious reasons.
From a practical standpoint, local police simply can't harass passengers on planes flying overhead. They could try to harass passengers on trains travelling through their territory, but in additional to the practical difficulties, even if they somehow had jurisdiction, the disruption caused, and the train company likely being more powerful than the local police, would likely cause them to lose jurisdiction, or have their behaviour prohibited. Cars, however, can be easily stopped individually, and drivers harassed without too much concern, especially when they are very unlikely to have any local influence.
For plane travel, since you have to book and identify before the trip, they could just arrest you when you arrive at the airport if you have active warrants. Similar issues for trying to transport drugs by air.
I’d think the people most at risk choose to drive because it’s the most private and undercover method.
But that only applies to police in jurisdictions at the departing or arriving destination. If I’m on a road trip from New York to California, I pass through so many smaller jurisdictions where twisted incentives or just bored cops with ill-intent could find a dubious reason to pull me over and cause a fuss.
If I fly, I can get a direct flight with zero stopovers, and even if the flight is diverted due to weather or something, there’s basically zero chance police will decide to just hassle people in the airport or on the plane. The opportunity just isn’t there the same as it is for cars.
I admit I’m making a boogeyman to paint a picture here, but I hope it’s just a bit illustrative to show that there’s such a significant difference between driving and flying.
Lower car use would at least result in a whole lot less of certain things like drunk/drug driving. Dangerous car chases would also be less common. Usually how it seems to go is the police detect an expired registration or something so they go to issue the fine but the driver is on meth and is a wanted criminal, so they floor it to get away before crashing in to a wall or sometimes other people.
While the police might still go to stop someone walking on the street, it would be much much safer to the general public.
Jack McCordick
For over a century, the automobile has served as an icon of American prosperity and individual liberty. But for a large portion of drivers, the car opens into worlds of unfreedom: into the gaping maw of America’s courts, jails, and prisons on the one hand and into the arms of predatory creditors on the other.
"It could have gone all wrong for us”
"potential offenders and sources of revenue"
humiliating ritual of domination and submission
“The story of modern American criminal justice is also in large part a story of the car,”
Fines and fees
“Even more than housing,” Livingston and Ross write, “the acquisition and use of cars engenders multiple kinds of debt service.”
Reparations