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How the car industry drove the growth of police and ‘discretionary’ policing

The history of America's cars on the open road encompasses the peril of police enforcement and the need for it.

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A 1911 advertisement described the Brush Runabout as a car for “Everyman” and helpfully listed who was included in that category: the physician, the merchant, the salesman, the farmer, the commuter. Everyman was essentially a more concise way of referring to the respectable, law-abiding white citizen. 

But behind the wheel, Everyman exhibited neither respectable nor law-abiding behavior.  

The “drawing-room gentleman” turned into a “road hog” who “with a smile steals the right of way,” observed one police chief. Widespread rule breaking caused accidents, claiming tens of thousands of lives. The National Safety Council reported that between 1913 and 1932, deaths from car accidents increased 500 percent, while the death rate for all other accidents decreased 42 percent. 

Every driver violating traffic laws at will led to more and more traffic laws, and every town and city needed a lot more traffic cops. Paltry municipal coffers had previously limited the size of police forces. But towns discovered, as the Los Angeles Police Department did in 1920, that “revenue derived by the city from the traffic division has made it practically self-supporting.”  

For the first time, Everyman was subject to policing.  

The slow but steady democratization of the road, with women and non-whites claiming the same privilege to drive as Everyman, did not democratize human behavior. 

And the people who had previously been shielded from policing because of their race and class didn’t like to be policed, either. Their indignation against law enforcement undermined the rule of law on the road, police claimed. 

Because of the challenges of dealing with Everyman, police were authorized and trained to use discretion. When legal scholars today study discretionary authority, they tend to write about its negative uses, that is, how discretion enables discrimination. But in the early years of the traffic problem, exercising discretion also had a positive meaning. It meant showing leniency. Traffic officers were instructed to give a warning instead of a ticket, or a ticket instead of making an arrest, even if the law required it. 

Above all, Everyman wanted to be treated respectfully. A grand jury report from Los Angeles County in 1932 addressed numerous complaints about the police’s “lack of courtesy” and urged the department to be “courteous in their dealings with the citizens.” 

In fact, “courtesy,” or its variant “courteous,” became a recurring theme that was closely associated with police professionalism. The Law Enforcement Code of Ethics, established in 1957, states that officers should “enforce the law courteously.” In some places, this was the rule, as in the San Francisco Police Department’s Rules and Regulations, which mandated officers to act “in a courteous manner.” 

Courtesy probably would not have become so important if the police continued to police only the poor, the immigrants, and racial minorities. Courtesy became an essential aspect of police professionalism because middle-class white drivers, who were the automobile’s early adopters, had to be policed. 

Of course, discretion has negative uses as well. The L.A. County grand jury report clarified that its recommendations to be more courteous did not apply to “dangerous and known criminals,” and that the police well knew who they were. 

But in the real world, it was not just criminal behavior that informed the exercise of discretion. It was also race. 

The phrase “driving while Black” did not become common until the end of the 20th century, but driving while Black existed ever since Black Americans started driving in significant numbers, around the late 1930s. It is telling that one of the first letters to the NAACP complaining about traffic police coincided with the first issue of The Green Book, a travel guidebook for Black road trippers.

A year later in 1937, the NAACP reported that a New Jersey State trooper had stopped a car driven by a Black teenager by shooting at the tires and then shot the teenager in the face. After spending a month in the hospital, the victim was charged with resisting an officer and reckless driving. 

More: Driving While Black: Black families teach their children what to do if stopped by police

This history highlights the challenge of addressing race discrimination on the road. So long as public safety remains a pressing issue—so long as “everybody” continues to violate traffic laws — local governments will continue to rely on discretionary law enforcement.  

We need laws that enable positive exercises of discretion while curbing its negative exercises. Crafting such laws is so difficult that courts have deemed the task near impossible. But it is surely more possible than expecting everyone to always obey traffic laws. 

Sarah A. Seo is a professor at Columbia Law School and author of “Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom.”

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