Driving while blackと上級国民

先日は1984のBig BrotherをもじってGoogleなどの企業をBig Otherと呼んでいるTIMEのエッセイを取り上げました。

こういうもじりのパロディはBig Brotherのような知識を前提としているので外国人にはハードルが高くなります。同じようなもじりを最近知りました。Driving while blackという言葉です。

（ウィキペディア）

"Driving while black", abbreviated as DWB, is a phrase in American English that refers to the racial profiling of African American drivers. The phrase implies that a motorist might be stopped by a police officer because of a racial bias and not because the driver has violated any traffic law.

"Driving while black" is word play on driving while intoxicated, or DWI, a crime in some US jurisdictions.

ウィキペディアの説明にもあるようにこれは、driving while intoxicatedから発生したもののようです。こういうのは現地での生活経験があるとなんてことのない表現なんですけどね。

（ウィズダム）

driving while intoxicated

｟米｠ 飲酒運転罪(｟略｠ DWI).

YutaはDriving while blackという表現を知らなかったのですが、The Hate U Giveを通して知った問題でもあるので反応してしまいました。

この表現を知ったのは"Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom"という本を紹介してくれていた記事からでした。この著書Sarah A. Seoさんがプロモーションを兼ねてかワシントンポスト紙に寄稿していました。交通違反の取り締まりをめぐる興味深い歴史です。日本でも交通事故を起こしたのに逮捕されない人がいるのは上級国民だからという噂がネットでありましたが、そんな状況が交通違反のチケットを生み出したとか。

Why we can — and must — create a fairer system of traffic enforcement

Its discretionary nature has left it ripe for abuse

By Sarah A. Seo

Sarah A. Seo is an associate professor of law at the University of Iowa College of Law and author of "Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom."

May 15

The history of how we got to this point begins in the early 20th century with the opposite situation: the arrests of the automobile’s early adopters, people with social and economic standing. Though not all were wealthy — by the mid-1920s, a majority of American families owned a car — they were largely white and deemed respectable.

The traffic ticket system actually developed to replace arrests as part of an effort to foster better relationships between these citizens and the police. But it has now transformed into a policy that undermines equality and further erodes poor and minority Americans’ trust in the police.

20世紀初頭当時自動車を所有していたのは上流階級とも言える人たちで、交通違反をしたら即逮捕というのも難しいので、チケットが生まれたとあります。さらにはチケットだけではなく、逮捕するかどうかなどは現場の警察官の判断に委ねられるようになったとか。

The option of issuing a ticket instead of making an arrest helped to pacify an angry driver not accustomed to being stopped by police, let alone getting arrested. Police leaders hoped that tickets, by lowering the stakes of being prosecuted, could defuse confrontations between citizens and the police.

With this priority in mind, officer training manuals recommended that the police exercise discretion when directing traffic. It was up to the individual officer to decide whether to ignore the infraction, give a warning, write a citation or make an arrest. Police consultants advised officers to take the most lenient option or to not attempt enforcement of the law at all for fear of alienating the respectable members of society whose support was crucial for local police departments.

The practice of arresting drivers did not disappear, however. Today, the police’s exercise of discretion targets poor and minority citizens for traffic arrests. As many criminal law scholars have pointed out, in practice, such discretionary policing has enabled discriminatory policing.

著者によれば、当初は社会のお偉方を大目に見るための方策だったのが、今では社会的に弱い立場の人に向けられてしまったということです。。。この本の序章を下記サイトで読むことができます。

How Cars Transformed Policing

Before the mass adoption of the car, most communities barely had a police force and citizens shared responsibility for enforcing laws. Then the car changed everything.

SARAH A. SEO

Excerpted from Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom by Sarah A. Seo, published by Harvard University Press.

Police forces at the time were tiny compared to today, and officers shared the task of enforcing the criminal laws with citizens and private patrol services. Because private citizens also pursued, arrested, and prosecuted those who had injured or wronged them, the common law clearly circumscribed the right to arrest in order to distinguish a lawful seizure of a person from a kidnapping or assault. Legal requirements ensured that arrestees would know the exact reason for the apprehension. When Captain Bates and his wife were driving home that evening, they had no reason to believe, as the court noted, that officers, rather than highway bandits, were after them, firing away.

Recognizable police cars with black and white color blocks would not exist for another two decades, and the first revolving emergency light, the “Beacon Ray,” would not be invented until 1948. If police cars had any markings at all, they were either small signs attached to the front grill or the initials “P.D.” painted on the door—nothing that drivers could easily discern, especially at nighttime. As late as 1934, a consultant recommended that the police department in Dallas, Texas, paint its patrol cars “some unusual color, such as fire department red or bright yellow or perhaps with a fine grade of aluminum paint.” Without “definite identification,” his report warned of precisely what had happened to the Bateses: it was “not inconceivable that a frightened motorist thinking he is to be robbed may attempt to run away from officers, thereby creating a situation embarrassing and undesirable at its best and which may result in a serious accident or even in the officer, through mistaken identity, actually firing on and killing a reputable citizen.”

車社会が到来する前は警察の力もそんなに大きくなく、パトカーもサイレンもついてなく、はっきりわかる色使いでもなかったとか、我々が当たり前に思っている状況はまだ100年も経っていないことは驚きでした。