Luke’s Reviews > Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom > Status Update

[I]n 1928, a New York City police commissioner defended aggressive, even unlawful, police tactics on the ground that "any man with a previous record is public property."

Invoking the panopticon, Foucault and all, as a matter of pragmatism is certainly a bold move, and by bold I mean fucked.

In the words of several scholars, "No form of direct government control comes close to these [traffic] stops in sheer numbers, frequency, proportion of the population affected, and in many instances, the degree of coercive intrusion." (What better way of ringing in 2026 than by looking at what you're up against when arguing for public transportation in the US of A.)