The symbiotic growth of the automobile industry and law enforcement

The first response of local governments confronting traffic snarls and car accidents was to do what they had always done: pass laws based on their well-established “police power,” a legal concept that referred to a sovereign’s inherent power to regulate for the public’s health, safety, and welfare. In the search for solutions to the death and mayhem wrought by mass-produced cars, officials everywhere grappled with a fundamental puzzle: why did law-abiding citizens disobey traffic laws? “So numerous [were] the…laws regulating traffic,” a police chief asserted in 1936, “that few indeed are the persons who can travel the streets or highways without violating one or many of them every hour of the day.”

Source: www.laphamsquarterly.org