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.

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...

审核人：

• 维持开放道路的治安：汽车如何改变美国的自由作者 Sarah A. Seo
• 彼得·诺顿（生物）

监管开放道路：汽车如何改变美国自由，莎拉 A. 徐。马萨诸塞州剑桥：哈佛大学出版社，2019 年。Pp。352.

这是一个熟悉的悖论：汽车既是个人自由的象征，也是施加无数限制的暴君。但直到最近，美国这一悖论的一个重要方面仍未得到应有的重视。作为私人拥有的车辆，这辆车显然为美国人提供了司机家的移动扩展，正如普通法所规定的那样，“一个人的房子就是他的城堡。” 该原则载于第四修正案，禁止对个人财产进行“不合理的搜查和扣押”。作为其所有者的财产，美国人的汽车大概是安全的，不会受到国家入侵。但正如 Sarah Seo 在Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom 中巧妙地展示的那样，现实更复杂、更有趣，

驾车远非居家的合法延伸，而是成为美国人最受监管的行为，也是他们对国家最脆弱的时刻。Seo 引用档案记录和法庭案件表明，一旦汽车在美国道路上行驶，其内部就与勃列日涅夫苏联的莫斯科公寓一样处于侵入状态。在一个依赖汽车的社会中，在一个围绕拥有汽车的假设重建的国家中，驾驶已成为一种实际必需品，这意味着几乎每个人每天都受到监管。Seo 展示了例行交通停止如何很快成为警察在法官批准下合法侵蚀美国人第四修正案权利的手段。有色人种的驾驶者尤其容易受到伤害。

在这本书的明显有价值的贡献中，读者了解到近几十年来广为人知的暴力警察拦截的几个祖先。由于第四修正案禁止对房屋进行无证搜查，警察部门采取了高度警惕的交通拦截措施。在美国的背景下，这意味着对美国黑人的历史性和持续性过度监管在美国道路上采取了一种侵入性的、有时是暴力的形式。

Seo 将过渡时期追溯到 1920 年代，当时大规模汽车、致命道路和禁酒令加在一起，对警察的需求比以往任何时候都多。道路的危险证明了对驾驶的加强监管和监管，而汽车为走私者提供的机动性使警察有兴趣搜查他们停下的汽车。法院发现了后来被称为第四修正案的“汽车例外”。许多程序要求弥补了这一差距，支持了发展警察专业精神和正当程序权利的进步故事，同时分散了人们对[End Page 614]实质性损害的注意力第四修正案保护。不受逮捕令的必要性的阻碍，根据“酌情警务”规则，警察实际上是根据自己对谁可疑谁不可疑的直觉来保证自己。在实践中，自由裁量警务是歧视性警务。该学说理想地服务于毒品战争的目的，包括所有的过度和不公平。

驾车者的拥护者包括美国公民自由联盟和全国有色人种协进会，书中关于他们的拥护的部分是特别有价值的贡献。然而，与美国汽车协会相比，他们对开放道路的影响微乎其微。尽管 AAA、美国卡车运输协会以及这两个组织的州和地方分支机构都是司机权利的无情拥护者，但他们的努力并未包括在“开放道路治安”中. 虽然当局在阻止驾驶者、质疑他们和搜查他们的汽车方面赢得了法律诉讼，但他们经常失去其他努力，例如严格执行限速。例如，AAA 数十年来一直致力于反对速度陷阱，在其无处不在的路线图上向驾车者披露它们的位置。这种不必要的宣传的压力经常改变当地的做法。就卡车司机而言，他们利用市民的无线电波段相互警告速度陷阱。这种拉锯战也是“监管开放道路”的一部分，有助于解释“汽车如何改变了美国的自由”。

尽管如此，维持开放道路的治安...