Police cars are a form of PR and the message is always the same -

In February, the Miami Police Department unveiled a redesigned police SUV in honor of Black History Month. The Ford Interceptor featured raised fists, an outline of Africa, red, green and yellow stripes and the message “Miami Police Supports Black History Month.” Miami wasn’t the only department to refashion its police cars. Other police departments in Columbus and Durham have made similar efforts, as have departments in places like Liverpool and Ontario.

Critics quickly voiced frustration that these performative acts sidestep meaningful change, displaying support for the same communities that are over-policed and underprotected. But this critique overlooks how most police reforms function primarily as public relations projects. Major cities devote a remarkable number of staff and proportion of their budget to PR, targeting the general public, policymakers who control their budgets and perceived criminals. While the specific objectives of their PR projects shift with each audience, the overall message has been consistent across the history of U.S. policing: the authority of the police is legitimate, effective and absolute.

Law enforcement technologies are especially useful props for reformers to communicate police authority. In the 2020s, that means a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. on the side of a patrol vehicle in response to accusations of systemic racism that undermine police legitimacy. At other times, police have used their vehicles to communicate other values like efficiency, overwhelming power or responsiveness.

In the 19th century, the police were notoriously corrupt and ineffective. As historian Mark Haller writes, “because they walked their beats with only minimal supervision,” early patrolmen spent much of their time in saloons and barbershops, both connecting them to their neighborhoods and providing ample opportunity for corruption. Around the turn of the century, Progressive reformers — Teddy Roosevelt among the most famous — sought to professionalize departments with new technologies, training and standards.

August Vollmer, the famous “father of modern policing” put his entire Berkeley department in Ford Model Ts in 1913 and contended that motorized patrolmen were an “altogether different type of official” from the “heavy, lumbering, foot patrolmen of the past.” For Vollmer and the countless police reformers he would later influence, police cars were not value-neutral tools, but harbingers of modern — and thus legitimate and authoritative — police departments. That argument was essential for convincing municipalities to spend money on police automobiles and persuading the public that police departments had changed in a fundamental way.

Departments also quickly realized that they could use police vehicles to communicate other messages to the public. While early vehicles had few distinguishing markings, in the 1930s officials began painting their cars some “conspicuous color” arguing that this “greatly increases their moral effect.” A report published for the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 1933 noted that, in one state, citizens thought that the number of officers on patrol “had been doubled … after cars had been painted white.” The idea was that, by evoking a sense that officers were omnipresent, they could deter crime and disorder in urban areas.

Police departments also relied on the speed of their new automobiles to help project power and deter crime. In 1928, the Atlanta Constitution reported the obviously false claim that radio-equipped police cruisers made 400 arrests at an average time of less than 60 seconds each that year. As the media studies scholar Kathleen Battles argues in “Calling All Cars,” police reformers — both police chiefs and academics in burgeoning criminal justice programs — helped shape radio docudramas in this period. They intentionally crafted narratives to communicate the professionalism and superhuman-like responsiveness of the police. Reformers sought to make escape from these technologies seem impossible, communicating a sense of safety to the public and helplessness to would-be criminals.

Police reformers also made use of particular vehicles to advance their messages and entrench police power. In the early 1930s, the Michigan State Police took their Lincoln “built especially to aid in the war on gangsters” on a national tour. Communicating overwhelming force in response to a rise in organized crime during Prohibition, this “giant flying arsenal” had multiple radio systems, sirens, search lights, a Thompson machine gun, tear bombs, hand grenades, multiple rifles, flares and much more. In 1936, the Milwaukee Police Department introduced its “Autofort,” a “HUGE armored patrol van” that was so heavy it blew out its own tires. If the era’s most notorious criminal, Al Capone, could drive around in a bulletproof 1928 Cadillac, the police would build bigger and stronger cars to maintain their authority.

In 1950, Ford began selling police packages, automobiles with features specifically designed for law enforcement. Followed quickly by General Motors, both marketed “lightning responsiveness,” comfort and engines that, as one Chevy advertisement put it, sounded like the “Voice of Authority.” By this point, community members were more likely to encounter an officer behind the wheel than walking a beat, except in the densest urban areas. They also became newly accustomed to “calling the cops” and an expectation that police would respond relatively quickly. Cop cars both symbolized and enabled the responsiveness of police.

In the 1970s, though, something strange happened: police departments suddenly began emphasizing foot patrols and turning against patrol cars, once the hallmark of modern policing.

Renewed calls for expansive changes to policing came in the late 1960s, highlighted by the report from the 1968 Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to explain the Black rebellions taking place during his administration. Those rebellions articulated outrage that the modernization of the police had brought more, not less harm to minority communities. The prescription for a new generation of reformers: fix community relations.

In 1968, one sociologist concluded that “From the front seat of a moving patrol car, street life in a typical Negro ghetto is perceived as an uninterrupted sequence of suspicious scenes.” That was the basic logic underlying George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s 1982 “broken windows theory,” which called for a return to the days when police officers patrolled their beats by foot.

The patrol car, which once represented police modernization and professionalism, now appeared to harm community relations. Of course, police cars didn’t disappear — but reformers now argued that community relations would improve if cops left their cars to walk around and better immerse themselves in the neighborhood.

This reform’s aim was not to change policing, but rather to frame a particular police technology — the patrol car — in a way that explained a past problem and presented a future solution that reasserted police legitimacy. The whole narrative, however, relied on a romanticized vision of what foot patrol looked like before police cars, along with an overly deterministic explanation of how the cars had corrupted an institution with flaws that ran far deeper than any one technology.

This period marked the beginning of mass incarceration as the U.S. prison population rose from 500,000 to about 2,000,000 between 1980 and today. Even with the reformist emphasis on foot patrol, police cars remained a core law enforcement technology. They got a little bit smaller in the 1980s, partly in response to oil prices, but then grew and shifted toward large SUVs as standard equipment ballooned with new computer technologies, riot equipment and emergency response gear.

A standard police vehicle manufactured in the last decade is not just technologically advanced, it is conspicuously designed to flaunt the modern power of the police.

The NYPD’s tentative 2023 design for its patrol cars offers a good example. Featuring a green stripe in reference to the NYPD flag and the department’s historic green patrol cars, in use until the 1970s, the cruisers promise a “new look outside and a more comfortable feel inside — this potential new design for our fleet encompasses input from our members while representing the traditions of the police department.”

But every headline buried the most important change to the patrol cars: a 360-degree camera mounted on each one that could “constantly monitor streets.”

We cannot properly critique the materials and technologies of policing until we understand their relationship to police reform as a form of public relations. Painting police SUVs with King quotes may be tone-deaf and frustrating, but the more important critique is to see these efforts in a long history of police reformers using technologies as props for projecting authority and undermining public criticism.

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