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

"It was remarkable that Douglas and Reich, white men at the elite levels of the legal rpofession, imagined themselves as outsiders, as vagabonds rebelling against the Establishment." Hate to break it to you, but the reality is the utmost rarity of a white guy in an outsized position of power who doesn't fancy himself such. Whether he has a spine to go with it is another matter entitely.

The fact that the NAACP and ACLU are only just now being mentioned is rather incredible.

[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."

"The lack of remedies reflected the absence of a problem: officers did not go around bothering respectable citizens with searches." Some heavy loadbearing words you have there, using "respectable" and "citizens."

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.)