Table of Contents for Rules of the Road
Introduction
Automobiles and driving are fundamental components of the US socioeconomic system. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, local, state, and federal authorities consistently made policy and planning decisions that favored private cars among modes of transportation. The rapid spread of automobiles and corresponding changes to the built environment reshaped the social world and precipitated major changes to key institutions, including the criminal justice system. Understanding the modern history, current configuration, and foreseeable future of US criminal justice requires grasping how myriad car-related cultural, economic, political, and geographic factors have dramatically affected the conceptualization, enactment, and enforcement of criminal law.
1.Revolutions per Minute: The Automobile and a National Transformation
Cars' introduction and rapid spread revolutionized transportation. In turn, this sea change in how Americans got from place to place spurred corresponding revolutions across myriad other domains, from patterns of daily life and the nature of the built environment to the law and criminal justice organizations. Highlighting key ways that cars reshaped the nation, including fundamental reconfigurations in law enforcement, this chapter first describes the dramatic impact of cars on American cities, using the proliferation of traffic laws and traffic enforcement as a case study of how policymakers and criminal justice institutions responded to changing technological and social circumstances. Beyond the problems of automobile traffic itself, cars also rapidly became involved in various types of crime. Motor vehicle theft is particularly notable as a novel form of crime arising alongside automobility.
2.Calling All Cars: Police Modernization and Communication
Early twentieth-century modernization and motorization presented new challenges for criminal justice organizations. Police administrator August Vollmer's priorities for reform were the blueprint for remaking police departments in response to automobility and a changed social world. Of the multifarious ways that cars affected law enforcement, one of the most profound was the emergence of traffic duty. The assignment of traffic enforcement to police departments helped those organizations develop into the generalist agencies we recognize today. Cars were also centerpieces of the technological developments that characterized major changes to police departments in this period. Combined with wireless communication using radio technology, patrol cars enabled the rapid response models and systematic policing strategies that characterize contemporary US police departments.
3.Fifths and the Fourth: Prohibition and Searches
Under Prohibition the illicit alcohol business ran through motor vehicles. Prohibition also marked US law enforcement agents' first involvement in a large-scale, systematic practice of searching for contraband. These aspects of Prohibition-related lawbreaking and law enforcement raised unprecedented Fourth Amendment considerations, leading to landmark Supreme Court decisions. In Olmstead v. United States (1928) the Court blessed authorities' use of evidence gathered through warrantless wiretaps in investigating a motorized bootlegging operation. Carroll v. United States (1925), the first vehicle stop case to come before the Supreme Court, addressed whether officers needed warrants to stop and search cars. Carroll established the "automobile exception" to warrant requirements, holding that officers could search a vehicle without a warrant based on an assessment of probable cause. Prohibition helped define the relationship between law enforcement and the citizenry and staked out key standards regarding authorities' access to evidence in a modernized, motorized age.
4.The Automotive Age of Majority: Youth, Driver's Licenses, and Legal Responsibility
Driver licensing is a key example of how governments grant legal authorization and assign legal accountability to individuals. Pushes to require driver licensure foregrounded the danger that unqualified or incompetent motorists posed. As states across the country adopted license requirements, age became a key consideration. States sought to find an appropriate balance between granting teenagers the freedom of driving and limiting younger drivers' dangers to themselves and other road users. These considerations relate to larger discussions about juveniles' appropriate treatment under the law and in the criminal justice system. Debates about who should be granted driver's licenses and with what stipulations constitute a crucial example of how governments grant legal authorization and assign legal accountability; similar debates characterize the emergence and development of a specialized domain of criminal justice tailored to young people's circumstances.
5.City Planning, Suburbanization, and Vehicle Patrol
Cars and the daily commuting they enabled made suburban living newly feasible for millions of Americans. Families of color, though, were systematically excluded from opportunities to buy suburban homes, a key factor in persistent racial disparities in wealth, health, and education. Further, the highways that facilitated suburban lifestyles were often built through neighborhoods of color; this pattern exacerbated residential racial segregation and concentrated disadvantage, with the roads that carried better-off people and their tax dollars into suburban areas simultaneously isolating remaining urban residents. With cars increasingly central to American life, vehicle patrol emerged as the centerpiece of policing. Squad cars' effects on law enforcement led some to call for renewed commitments to the foot patrol of earlier decades. However, the most influential version of these calls—Wilson and Kelling's "Broken Windows" article—led to its own profoundly negative consequences for police-community relations.
6.Discretion and Disparities in Car-Based Criminal Justice
Vehicle patrol officers and 911 operators are pivotal actors in the reactive and proactive sides of contemporary car-based criminal justice. Emergency operators make crucial decisions about whether and to what extent criminal justice agencies will deploy reactive vehicular rapid response, affecting the distribution of both the supportive and punitive aspects of government power. Vehicle patrol, on the other hand, has emerged as the predominant tool of proactive policing in the United States. Accordingly, vehicle stops have emerged as the predominant form of direct interaction between members of the public and criminal justice authorities. These stops are plagued by stark racial inequalities. Together, these facts make law enforcement officers' discretionary decisions about whom to pull over and how to handle vehicle stops a crucial site for understanding the pronounced disparities in different groups' experiences with the criminal justice system.
7.Interstate Crime: Federalism, Highways, and Criminal Justice
Responsibility for criminal justice has conventionally fallen to the states. Over time, however, the federal government has come to play a larger role in domestic law enforcement, prosecution, and punishment. As automobility (and other developments) made state borders less meaningful over time, interjurisdictional crime became more commonplace, paving the way for greater federal involvement in criminal justice. The federal government is uniquely situated to address crimes that involve activities in multiple states, including drug distribution networks and human trafficking. Regarding the latter crime, pivotal early federal interventions came in the form of the Mann Act and its enforcement. More recently, federal authorities have taken new steps to coordinate and implement anti-human-trafficking initiatives. As an offense that relies heavily on automobiles and interstate highways, human trafficking presents a compelling case study of the criminal justice challenges that arise in an extensively motorized society.
8.MADD Prosecutors? Drunk Driving and Prosecutorial Discretion
Today, drunk driving is treated much more seriously under the law than had historically been the case. Moral entrepreneurs were crucial to this change. Organizations such as Remove Intoxicated Drivers and Mothers Against Drunk Driving played pivotal roles in shifting public perceptions of drinking and driving and also saw major successes in changing drunk driving laws and their enforcement. One of the notable consequences of the changed social and legal perspective on drunk driving was the growth of laws and prosecutions pertaining to situations in which intoxicated drivers cause fatalities. These types of cases offer a revealing context for exploring prosecutorial discretion, a hallmark feature of US criminal justice. Prosecutors' broad leeway to decide whom to prosecute and what specific charges to bring manifests in their determinations of what criminal charges are appropriate when impaired drivers cause death.
9.Roadblocks: Collateral Consequences and Driving Privileges
Numerous laws provide for the temporary or permanent restriction of driving privileges for various reasons. Many of these laws constitute examples of collateral consequences: things that happen to people as a result of criminal convictions beyond their official sentences from criminal proceedings. Historically, authorities restricted driving privileges primarily for reasons related to driving, under the logic that public safety concerns justified removing dangerous motorists from the roads. In recent decades, however, there has been a notable shift toward the use of license suspensions as consequences for non-driving-related offenses or for failure to pay fines and fees. These measures reflect government's acknowledgment of driving privileges' value and policymakers' willingness to use their loss as leverage to enforce compliance. In the past several years, though, multiple states have begun to see these policies as counterproductive or self-defeating and have changed their laws to limit license suspensions and facilitate reinstatements.
10.Civil Asset Forfeiture and the Limits of the Criminal Law
Civil asset forfeiture laws permit government to seize and keep property that authorities determine to be in some way connected to crime, even if the property's owner is never convicted of a crime, or even charged with one. Asset forfeiture is closely related to this book's car-window view of criminal justice because forfeiture actions routinely involve automobiles: Contemporary forfeiture actions typically originate with vehicle stops, and cars themselves are frequent forfeiture targets. Civil forfeiture expanded dramatically in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, particularly as a prominent tactic in the war on drugs. In recent years the federal government alone has garnered billions of dollars annually in forfeiture proceeds. Some court rulings have suggested possible limits on governments' use of civil forfeiture. The courts, however, have generally upheld the practice's constitutionality and it remains an important, if controversial, part of current criminal justice practice.
11.Watching the Wheels
Automated traffic enforcement cameras began appearing in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Much of the discourse around automated enforcement reduces to a debate over whether these tools primarily serve their stated purpose of advancing road safety through encouraging safer driving, or instead function primarily as tools for generating revenue for governments and the private companies that install and maintain the systems. Several studies have found that automated enforcement produces significant public safety returns. Other analyses have questioned the devices' public safety benefits. Some proponents have highlighted these systems' potential to reduce racial disparities in vehicle stops. However, others have found that, as implemented, automated enforcement systems themselves tend to disproportionately target motorists in neighborhoods of color. For their part, privacy advocates have contended that automated enforcement systems implicate the Fourth Amendment.
12.Monitoring Mobility
The ability to track people's movements is one of the most powerful tools available to contemporary criminal justice authorities. One can view location tracking as a direct response to the freedom of movement cars permitted, a way for authorities to keep tabs on citizens in an era of automobility. This chapter first addresses the development and implementation of human-worn location tracking devices, before shifting focus to the GPS and cell phone tracking that are especially prominent in our car-dependent social world. Despite recent Supreme Court rulings imposing warrant requirements for authorities to access certain types of location data, other modes of gathering such data continue to raise Fourth Amendment questions. These include bulk purchases of location information from third-party companies and geofence warrants that provide authorities with access to location information about entire groups of people whose cell phones were in particular areas at particular times.
Conclusion: Objects in Mirror Are Closer than They Appear
The year 2020 was eventful for US criminal justice. The ramifications of the murder of George Floyd and the social disruptions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate how key events can change the problems that governments face, bring new attention to long-standing issues, and create the potential for structural reforms. At the same time, the observable outcomes in both cases demonstrate the intractability of certain patterns of social behavior and the enormous difficulty of fundamentally reorganizing deeply entrenched institutional arrangements. The long-term impact of current dynamics in American criminal justice remains to be seen. At this juncture, however, incremental changes to police organizations and practices in specific jurisdictions seem more probable than fundamental reconfigurations of law enforcement and punishment systems.