A Brief History of the Traffic Stop (Or How the Car Created the Police State)

**phill4paul** · 07-27-2016, 07:47 AM

The story of the traffic stop shows the way the automobile fundamentally changed the relationship between the police and the citizenry

The first modern traffic stop of any note occurred in Washington D.C. in 1872. William West, a black policeman, arrested Ulysses S. Grant, the sitting President of the United States, for driving his horse carriage too fast down 13th Street. Officer West had warned the president for racing down the street the day before, and President Grant promised he would drive his carriage slower in future. When West saw the president on the same street the next day, again racing friends, he stopped his carriage and placed him under arrest. West retold the incident in the September 27th, 1908 edition of the Washington Star that ran upon his retirement from the police force, so the quotes, are, shall we say, suspect. But, according to West, and the flowery language of an unnamed Star reporter, here’s what happened:

“I cautioned you yesterday, Mr. President,” answered the policeman, “about fast driving, and you said, sir, that it would not occur again.”

“Did I?” mused Grant, still with a quizzical smile on his features. “Well, I suppose I forgot it, and that I might have been going a little bit too fast this evening: but hang it officer, these animals of mine are thoroughbreds, and there is no holding them.”

“I am very sorry, Mr. President to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation, and I am but a policeman. But duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest,” West replied.

“All right,” cried Grant, “where do you wish me to go with you?”

The policeman said he must go to the station house. At the President’s invitation the policeman took a seat in the vehicle and the war hero questioned him about himself and his antecedents.

Even as police departments slowly started placing officers in vehicles, they were still overwhelmed with traffic duties. According to Norton, by the early 1920s, many cities were recruiting groups of citizens called “traffic vigilantes” to regulate traffic, hand out tickets (a new concept), write down license plate numbers and sometimes even chase down speeders.

The additional workload created by the automobile overwhelmed both the courts and police departments. Police departments expanded. According to U.S. Census records, in 1910 there were 61,000 police in the U.S.; by 1920 the number of officers grew to 82.000. In 1930, there were 130,000. Prohibition prompted much of the expansion, but authorities deemed traffic the bigger problem. As Seo of Iowa Law School said, August Vollmer, Berkeley, California’s first police chief who is considered by many to be the father of modern law enforcement, called traffic “the police problem of today” in 1924. Prohibition gave police reason to search vehicles, and the legislation happened to correspond with the decade in which both the average American home and police departments acquired automobiles. Traffic stops became much more common.

So-called revenue policing was also less common before the mass production of the car (although certainly individual police were more open to bribes before the widespread professionalization of law enforcement beginning in 1920s). With the traffic ticket, every traffic stop turned into a money-making opportunity.

“Every little town with a main road running through it loved [the automobile], because they thought ‘oh we can increase our revenue.'” explained Cotten Seiler, author of Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America. Policing the roads was “always about more than public safety.” Seiler said. “It was about the exercise of the various types of power: local power, racial power and also about making money.”

http://observer.com/2016/07/a-brief-...-police-state/