The car is a primary locus for police-civilian interaction as measured by routine legal intrusion into the lives of vulnerable populations – communities of color, undocumented immigrants, and those experiencing homelessness in particular. It is the car’s ability to transport bodies as well as its legal liminality as a hybrid public-private space that facilitates such coercive and carceral contact. I therefore argue for the increased inclusion of the car and contact made with its operators and occupants within studies of policing by geographers. In this article, I provide a review of how car space and the automobile have been discussed by social scientists more broadly, followed by a call for geographers to take the lead in centering the car in research looking at everyday policing and routinized state control of people occupying and moving through public space.
Al-GhalibSJSalimAYAl-KhalifahSDahlawiRA (2018) Perceptions of women’s driving in Saudi Arabia. Middle East Journal of Positive Psychology4(1): 102–125.
3.
AllenDLawhonMPierceJ (2019) Placing race: On the resonance of place with black geographies. Progress in Human Geography43(6): 1001–1019.
4.
AmsterR (2008) Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing.
5.
ArmentaA (2017) Protect, Serve and Deport: The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
BanhamR (2000 [1971]) Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
8.
BassS (2001) Policing space, policing race: Social control imperatives and police discretionary decisions. Social Justice28(1): 156–176.
9.
BaumgartnerFREppDAShoubK (2018) Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
10.
BeckmannJ (2001) Automobility: A social problem and theoretical concept. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space19(5): 593–607.
11.
BeckettKHerbertS (2009) Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
12.
BlochS (2019a) An autoethnographic account of urban restructuring and neighborhood change in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. Cultural Geographies. DOI: 10.1177/1474474019881997.
13.
BlochS (2019b) Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA’s Graffiti Subculture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
14.
BlochSMartinezD (Forthcoming) Canicide by cop: A geographical analysis of canine killings by police in Los Angeles. Geoforum.
15.
BlochSMeyerD (2019) Implicit revanchism: Gang injunctions and the security politics of white liberalism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space37(6): 1100–1118.
16.
BlomleyN (2007) How to turn a beggar into a bus stop: Law, traffic and the ‘function of the place’. Urban Studies44(9): 1697–1712.
17.
BlomleyN (2010a) The right to pass freely: Circulation, begging, and the bounded self. Social & Legal Studies19(3): 331–350.
18.
BlomleyN (2010b) Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow. London: Routledge.
19.
BlomleyNKClarkGL (1990) Law, theory, and geography. Urban Geography11(5): 433–446.
20.
BöhmSJonesCLandCPatersonM (2006) Introduction: Impossibilities of automobility. The Sociological Review54(1): 3–16.
21.
BoyceGA (2018) Appearing ‘out of place’: Automobility and the everyday policing of threat and suspicion on the US/Canada frontier. Political Geography64: 1–12.
22.
BoyceGALauniusSAguirreAO (2019) Drawing the line: Spatial strategies of community and resistance in post-SB1070 Arizona. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies18(1): 187–216.
23.
BrightBJ (1995) Remappings: Los Angeles low riders. In: BrightBJBakewellE (eds) Looking High and Low: Art and Cultural Identity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
24.
CampbellE (2016) Policing and its spatial imaginaries. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology8: 71–89.
25.
CarpioG (2019) Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
ColemanM (2016). State power in blue. Political Geography51: 76–86.
31.
ColemanMKocherA (2019) Rethinking the ‘gold standard’ of racial profiling: §287(g), secure communities and racially discrepant police power. American Behavioral Scientist63(9): 1185–1220.
32.
ColemanMStuesseA (2016) The disappearing state and the quasi-event of immigration control. Antipode48: 524–543.
33.
ConleyJMcLarenAT (eds) (2016) Car Troubles: Critical Studies of Automobility and Auto-Mobility. London: Routledge.
34.
CookIRWhowellM (2011) Visibility and the policing of public space. Geography Compass5(8): 610–622.
35.
CorreiaDWallT (2018) Police: A Field Guide. London: Verso Books.
36.
CrawfordCE (2018) Spatial Policing: The Influence of Time, Space, and Geography on Law Enforcement Practices. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
37.
CresswellT (2010) Towards a politics of mobility. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space28(1): 17–31.
38.
CresswellT (2016) Black moves: Moments in the history of African-American masculine mobilities. Transfers6(1): 12–25.
39.
CulverG (2018) Death and the car: On (auto) mobility, violence, and injustice. ACME: An International E-journal for Critical Geographies17(1).
40.
DantT (2004) The driver-car. Theory, Culture & Society21(4–5): 61–79.
41.
DelaneyD (2015) Legal geography I: Constitutivities, complexities, and contingencies. Progress in Human Geography39(1): 96–102.
42.
DennisKUrryJ (2016) Post-car mobilities. In: ConleyJMcLarenAT (eds) Car Troubles. Critical Studies of Automobility and Auto-Mobility. London: Routledge.
43.
DericksonKD (2017) Urban geography II: Urban geography in the Age of Ferguson. Progress in Human Geography41(2): 230–244.
44.
DeVerteuilGMayJVon MahsJ (2009) Complexity not collapse: Recasting the geographies of homelessness in a ‘punitive’ age. Progress in Human Geography33(5): 646–666.
45.
DwyerOJJonesIII JP (2000) White socio-spatial epistemology. Social & Cultural Geography1(2): 209–222.
46.
EdensorT (2003) Defamiliarizing the mundane roadscape. Space and Culture6: 151–168.
47.
EdensorT (2004) Automobility and national identity: Representation, geography and driving practice. Theory, Culture & Society21(4/5): 101–120.
48.
Elliott-CooperAHubbardPLeesL (2019) Moving beyond Marcuse: Gentrification, displacement and the violence of un-homing. Progress in Human Geography. DOI: 10.1177/0309132519830511.
49.
EppCRMaynard-MoodySHaider-MarkelDP (2014) Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
50.
EhrkampP (2019) Geographies of migration II: The racial-spatial politics of immigration. Progress in Human Geography43(2): 363–375.
51.
FaganJDaviesG (2000) Street stops and broken windows: Terry, race, and disorder in New York City. Fordham Urban Law Journal28: 457.
FoucaultM (1978) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.
54.
FyfeNR (1991) The police, space and society: The geography of policing. Progress in Human Geography15(3): 249–267.
55.
GilroyP (2001) Driving while black. In: MillerD (ed.) Car Cultures. Oxford: Berg, 81–104.
56.
HagmanO (2006) Morning queues and parking problems. On the broken promises of the automobile. Mobilities1(1): 63–74.
57.
HamiltonARFooteK (2018). Police torture in Chicago: Theorizing violence and social justice in a racialized city. Annals of the American Association of Geographers108: 399–410.
58.
HannamK (2016) Gendered automobilities: Female Pakistani migrants driving in Saudi Arabia. In: RicklyJHannamKMostafanezhadM (eds) Tourism and Leisure Mobilities: Politics, Work, and Play. London: Routledge.
59.
HarrisDA (1996) Driving while black and all other traffic offenses: The Supreme Court and pretextual traffic stops. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology87: 544.
60.
HeideggerM (1971) Building dwelling thinking. In: Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: HarperCollins.
61.
HendersonJ (2006) Secessionist automobility: Racism, anti-urbanism, and the politics of automobility in Atlanta, Georgia. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research30(2): 293–307.
62.
HerbertS (1997) Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
63.
HerbertS (2009) Citizens, Cops, and Power: Recognizing the Limits of Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
JeffersonBJ (2017) Predictable policing: Predictive crime mapping and geographies of policing and race. Annals of the American Association of Geographers108: 1–16.
66.
JeffersonBJ (2018) Policing, data, and power-geometry: Intersections of crime analytics and race during urban restructuring. Urban Geography39: 1247–1264.
67.
JonesR (2012) State encounters. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space30(5): 805–821.
68.
KatoY (2009) Doing consumption and sitting cars: Adolescent bodies in suburban commercial spaces. Children’s Geographies7(1): 51–66.
69.
KaufmanE (2016) Policing mobilities through bio-spatial profiling in New York City. Political Geography55: 72–81.
70.
KobachKW (2007) Attrition through enforcement: A rational approach to illegal immigration. Tulsa Journal of Comparative & International Law15: 155–163.
71.
KrikorianM (2005) Downsizing illegal immigration: A strategy of attrition through enforcement. Backgrounder. Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies. Available at: https://cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/articles/2005/back605.pdf(accessed 11 December 2019).
72.
LaBelleB (2008) Pump up the bass: Rhythm, cars, and auditory scaffolding. The Senses and Society3(2): 187–203.
LathamAMcCormackDP (2004) Moving cities: Rethinking the materialities of urban geographies. Progress in Human Geography28(6): 701–724.
76.
LaurierELorimerHBrownBJonesOJuhlinONobleAPerryMPicaDSormaniPStrebelISwanL (2008). Driving and ‘passengering’: Notes on the ordinary organization of car travel. Mobilities3(1): 1–23.
77.
LawR (1999) Beyond ‘women and transport’: Towards new geographies of gender and daily mobility. Progress in Human Geography23(4): 567–588.
78.
LefebvreH (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
79.
Loukaitou-SiderisAEhrenfeuchtR (2009) Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
80.
LowSSmithN (eds) (2013) The Politics of Public Space. New York: Routledge.
81.
LoydJM (2012) ‘Live, love, and work’: An interview with Luis Fernandez, 2010. In: LoydJMMitchelsonMBurridgeA (eds) Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
82.
LoydJMBondsA (2018) Where do black lives matter? Race, stigma, and place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Sociological Review66(4): 898–918.
83.
MancinaP (2019) Sanitary cities and sanctuary powers. In: JonesR (ed.) Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement. Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 250–263.
84.
ManvilleMShoupD (2005) Parking, people, and cities. Journal of Urban Planning and Development131(4): 233–245.
85.
MassaroTMMilczarek-DesaiS (2018) Constitutional cities: Sanctuary jurisdictions, local voice, and individual liberty. Columbia Human Rights Law Review50: 1–115.
86.
McKittrickK (2006) Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
87.
MeehanAJPonderMC (2002) Race and place: The ecology of racial profiling African American motorists. Justice Quarterly19(3): 399–430.
88.
MerrimanP (2004) Driving places: Marc Augé, non-places and the geographies of England’s M1 motorway. Theory, Culture & Society21(4/5): 145–167.
89.
MerrimanP (2009) Automobility and the geographies of the car. Geography Compass3(2): 586–599.
MintonJClarkJ (2018) Driving segregation: Age, gender and emerging inequalities. In: CurlAMusselwhiteC (eds) Geographies of Transport and Ageing. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 25–50.
92.
MitchellD (1998) Anti-homeless laws and public space: II. Further constitutional issues. Urban Geography19(2): 98–104.
93.
MitchellD (2003) The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford Press.
94.
MitchellD (2005) The SUV model of citizenship: Floating bubbles, buffer zones, and the rise of the ‘purely atomic’ individual. Political Geography24(1): 77–100.
95.
MitchellDHeynenN (2009) The geography of survival and the right to the city: Speculations on surveillance, legal innovation, and the criminalization of intervention. Urban Geography30(6): 611–632.
96.
MoranDTurnerJSchlieheAK (2018) Conceptualizing the carceral in carceral geography. Progress in Human Geography42(5): 666–686.
97.
NeocleousM (2000) The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power. London: Pluto Press.
98.
NicholsonJAShellerM (2016) Race and the politics of mobility: Introduction. Transfers6(1): 4–11.
99.
NoyH (2009) On driving a car and being a family: An autoethnography. In: VanniniP (ed.) Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches. Bern: Peter Lang, 101–113.
100.
PackerJ (2008) Mobility Without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
101.
PiersonESimoiuCOvergoorJCorbett-DaviesSRamachandranVPhillipsCGoelS (2019) A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States. Stanford Computation Policy Lab. Available at: https://5harad.com/papers/100M-stops.pdf(accessed 20 April 2019).
ProudfootJ (2019) The libidinal economy of revanchism: Illicit drugs, harm reduction, and the problem of enjoyment. Progress in Human Geography43(2): 214–234.
104.
QianJ (2018) Geographies of public space: Variegated publicness, variegated epistemologies. Progress in Human Geography. DOI: 10.1177/0309132518817824.
105.
RadilSMDezzaniRJMcAdenLD (2017) Geographies of US police militarization and the role of the 1033 program. The Professional Geographer69(2): 203–213.
106.
RamírezMM (2019) City as borderland: Gentrification and the policing of black and Latinx geographies in Oakland. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
107.
RedshawS (2017) In the Company of Cars: Driving as a Social and Cultural Practice. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
108.
RobinsonT (2019) No right to rest: Police enforcement patterns and quality of life consequences of the criminalization of homelessness. Urban Affairs Review55(1): 41–73.
109.
RohSRobinsonM (2009) A geographic approach to racial profiling: The microanalysis and macroanalysis of racial disparity in traffic stops. Police Quarterly12(2): 137–169.
110.
RossMBKalinowskiJBaroneKFazzalaroJ (2018) Traffic stop data analysis and findings, 2016: State of Rhode Island Comprehensive Police-community Relationship Act of 2015. Institute for Municipal & Regional Policy.
111.
SangerC (1995) Girls and the getaway: Cars, culture, and the predicament of gendered space. University of Pennsylvania Law Review144(2): 705–756.
112.
ScottNA (2013) Like a fish needs a bicycle: Henri Lefebvre and the liberation of transportation. Space and Culture16(3): 397–410.
113.
SeigelM (2018) Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
114.
SeilerC (2006) ‘So that we as a race might have something authentic to travel by’: African American automobility and Cold-War liberalism. American Quarterly58(4): 1091–1117.
115.
SeilerC (2008) Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
116.
SeilerC (2009) Mobilizing race, racializing mobility: Writing race into mobility studies. In: MomGPAPirieRGTissotL (eds) Mobility in History: The State of the Art in the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. Switzerland: Editions Alphil, 229–233.
117.
SeoSA (2019) Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
ShellerMUrryJ (2000) The city and the car. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research24(4): 737–757.
120.
ShellerMUrryJ (2003) Mobile transformations of ‘public ‘and ‘private’ life. Theory, Culture & Society20(3): 107–125.
121.
ShellerMUrryJ (2006) The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A38(2): 207–226.
122.
ShoupD (2017) The High Cost of Free Parking. New York: Routledge.
123.
SmithN (1992) Contours of a spatialized politics: Homeless vehicles and the production of geographical scale. Social Text33: 55–81.
124.
StaeheliLAMitchellD (2007) Locating the public in research and practice. Progress in Human Geography31(6): 792–811.
125.
StoryB (2019) Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
126.
StuesseAColemanM (2014) Automobility, immobility, altermobility: Surviving and resisting the intensification of immigrant policing. City & Society26(1): 51–72.
127.
TakahashiLM (1996) A decade of understanding homelessness in the USA: From characterization to representation. Progress in Human Geography20(3): 291–310.
128.
TatumCM (2011) Lowriders in Chicano Culture: From Low to Slow to Show. Westport: Greenport.
129.
TheodoreN (2011) Policing borders: Unauthorized immigration and the pernicious politics of attrition. Social Justice38(1–2): 90–106.
130.
ThriftN (2004) Driving in the city. Theory, Culture & Society21(4–5): 41–59.
131.
ThriftNFrenchS (2002) The automatic production of space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers27(3): 309–335.
UrryJ (2004) The ‘system’ of automobility. Theory, Culture & Society21(4–5): 25–39.
134.
UrryJ (2006) Inhabiting the car. The Sociological Review54(1): 17–31.
135.
ValverdeM (2005) Taking ‘land use’ seriously: Toward an ontology of municipal law. Law, Text, Culture9: 34–59.
136.
VaughanJ (2006) Attrition through enforcement: A cost-effective strategy to shrink the illegal population. Backgrounder. Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies. Available at: https://cis.org/Report/Attrition-Through-Enforcement(accessed 10 December 2019).
137.
VukovT (2016) Target practice: The algorithmics and biopolitics of race in emerging smart border practices and technologies. Transfers6(1): 80–97.
138.
WalshM (2008) Gendering mobility: Women, work and automobility in the United States. History93(311): 376–395.
139.
WarrenPTomaskovic‐DeveyDSmithW, et al. (2006) Driving while black: Bias processes and racial disparity in police stops. Criminology44(3): 709–738.
140.
Wehman-BrownG (2016) Home is where you park it: Place-making practices of car dwelling in the United States. Space and Culture19(3): 251–259.
141.
WilliamsJBoyceGA (2013) Fear, loathing and the everyday geopolitics of encounter in the Arizona borderlands. Geopolitics18(4): 895–916.
142.
WithrowBL (2007) When Whren won’t work: The effects of a diminished capacity to initiate a pretextual stop on police officer behavior. Police Quarterly10(4): 351–370.
143.
YarwoodR (2007) The geographies of policing. Progress in Human Geography31(4): 447–465.
144.
YarwoodRPaascheT (2015) The relational geographies of policing and security. Geography Compass9: 362–370.
