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A century of intrusive modern policing. How did we get here? (In our cars.)

Experts say long-term trends like the rise of the auto industry and singular events such as 9/11 intensified police intrusion into everyday life.

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Citizen behavior on the road helped justify more intrusive police behaviors. Is the tide turning?
Jeff Morris

Nearly half of all interaction between police and citizens occurs on the side of a road. 

Traffic stops, whether for motor vehicle violations or for investigative purposes, present perhaps the most extreme and dangerous gap between the potential violation — a skipped inspection or broken traffic light, for instance — and the police power to use force. Such stops can endanger both the citizen and the officer. 

In a country riven by systemic racism, minorities have largely paid the price for the heavy police emphasis on traffic stops. A recent data story by the Burlington (N.C.) Times-News showed that police in 11 adjoining counties and cities pull over Black and minority drivers disproportionately to their numbers in the overwhelmingly white population. Once pulled over, Black motorists got their cars searched more than white drivers. 

Does the side of a highway have to be the place most people have a personal encounter with an armed cop in their lives, if they do? 

More: Police more likely to stop, search a Black driver in Burlington area: Times-News investigation

Police “should be out of the business of random, indiscriminate traffic enforcement,” says retired NYPD officer and New York law professor James McCabe. McCabe’s solution is one of many that span a spectrum of limiting police powers on the road, from focusing police on high-crime areas and leaving traffic violations to civil enforcement, all the way to Fourth Amendment arguments for keeping cops out of people’s personal property — in this case, their cars. 

The expansion of car ownership and the nearly 5 million miles of roads that spread across the country in the last 120 years paved the way, figuratively and literally, for a series of laws and court rulings enacted to maintain order that have infringed on citizens’ privacy rights and led to unnecessary violence, according to Sarah Seo, author of “Policing the Open Road.” 

Along those roads came a growing and increasingly violent drug trade, spurred by drug-prohibition into a profitable underground. 

Police agencies, directed by politicians to fight a campaign first on alcohol, then decades later on drugs, were doing their best to carry out their assignments and reflect the priorities of the country, law enforcement experts say. 

As the risks went up, the militarization of the police began.  

South Carolina police captain Mike Aikens says that 9/11 led to hyper-militarization of civilian forces suddenly on guard for enemies striking at the heart of America. Twenty years later, officers with guns, Tasers, billy clubs and body armor standing in hallways as school resource officers, approaching kids on the street, or pulling over citizens for an expired inspection sticker are common occurrences. 

The situation can lead to violent police response that’s disproportionate to the actions of citizens. 

Lynette Roberts experienced it. Over 30 heavily armed police surrounded her house in Massillon, Ohio, one night, looking for a person whose name was the same as her husband’s. 

Nobody was hurt, but Roberts says she and her children were traumatized. If there had been violence, there’s no guarantee that the police officers would have lost their jobs, or even been punished.  

“Violence is cheap,” says Fred Smith, a professor at Emory University in Georgia, who proposes removing qualified immunity that protects police officers from being charged with violence against citizens. Smith argues that if qualified immunity is rescinded, unwarranted violence will become too expensive for departments to keep doing. 

More: 'Driving While Black': New PBS documentary examines infuriating history of racism in America

Two more controversial proposals could radically tip the scales in the near future. 

“Why do you see the violence (in the war on drugs)? The vast majority of that is drug-prohibition-induced, not drug-use related,” says Jeffrey Miron, who says law enforcement agencies could save nearly $50 billion a year if they simply decriminalized drug use. For over 20 years Miron’s been pointing to economic studies showing that the war on drugs has long been an arms race between police and cartels, with American citizens as collateral damage.  

Participants in underground markets can’t take a customer or employee to court to settle a dispute. So the disputes are settled with violence. Underground markets drive up prices, increase violence and addiction, and prevent people needing help from seeking it, says Miron. 

Free of the need to seek out and prosecute drug crimes, police would then be able to focus on “things we all agree the police should be doing as opposed to these things which exacerbate tensions between the police and the population, and which may facilitate racially charged policing.” 

Then there’s the symbol of American freedom, the automobile.

The technology of the automobile caused drastic changes in police methods to maintain order and to control enforcement of emerging laws. Now emerging automation and remote technology might force police to take their hands off the wheel when it comes to steering personnel and budget to enforce traffic violations, whether they want to or not.

“I mean, technology makes things so much easier,” says McCabe. Self-driving vehicles and license-plate identifying technology that is already taking the place of toll booths on some interstates may combine with other emerging technologies to make roads safer, leaving cops out of it entirely.

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